There are no people so tolerant of folly as the Parisians. It walks abroad in the streets of the great city with such unblushing self-satisfaction—such a brazen sense of its own superiority—that any Englishman must long to import a hundred London street boys, with their sense of ridicule and fearless tongue. At all times the world has possessed an army of geniuses whose greatness consists of faith and not of works—of faith in themselves which takes the outward form of weird clothing, long hair, and a literary or artistic pose. Paris streets were so full of such in 1870 that all thoughtful men could scarce fail to recognise a nation in its decadence.
"The asses preponderate in the streets," said John Turner to me. "You may hear their bray in every café, and France is going to the devil."
And indeed the voices raised in the drinking dens were those of the fool and the knave.
I busied myself with looking into the money affairs of my poor patron, and found them in great disorder. All the ready cash had fallen into the hands of Miste. Some of the estates, as, indeed, I already knew, yielded little or nothing. The commerce of France was naturally paralysed by the declaration of war, and no one wanted a vast old house in the Faubourg St. Germain—a hotbed of Legitimism where no good Buonapartist cared to own a friend or show his face.
I disguised nothing from Madame de Clericy, whom indeed it was hard to deceive.
"Then," she said, "there is no money."
We were in my study, where I was seated at the table, while Madame moved from table to mantelpiece with a woman's keen sight for the blemishes to be found in a bachelor's apartment.
"For the moment you are in need of ready money—that is all. If the war is brought to a speedy termination, all will be set right."
"And if the war is not brought to a speedy termination—you are a second-rate optimist, mon ami—what then?"
"Then I shall have to find some expedient."