"Soirée to-night? Excellent! I will order all my boys to kiss Madame's hand. It will put her into good humour, and she will the more readily allow you to attend to business."
"And, Majesty," said Bülow, hopefully, "the Princess Maria is counting on having the honour of Your Majesty's presence."
"I will send the insignia of dell' Annunciata instead."
"I beg Your Majesty, don't. Maria might not remember that Charles XII. sent his boots to preside at the Swedish Council of State."
As before remarked, it is one of Bülow's tricks always to have on the tip of his tongue some historic bon mot suitable to the occasion.
There was an outburst of rough laughter. "He did, did he? And yet they called him the Madman of the North. Next time Herr Bebel has a congress, I will send the Reds a pair of my riding breeches, and no new ones either. But revenons à Bohlen. Devil of a chap! Made Bertha his goods, his chattel, his stuff, his field, his barn, his horse, his ox, his ass, his everything! That's the way! Make them eat out of your hand, Prince!"
Bülow was a Prince since the 6th of June, and the War Lord never tired of calling him by the title of his own creation. He had just borrowed boldly from the Bard, and the theft being apparently undiscovered by his literary Chancellor, Wilhelm felt justified in relaxing his imperious mien some more.
"Can't you prescribe a dose of sleeping sickness for that fool Liebert? His shouting about 'our war' to obtain supreme sea power is co-responsible for the Entente Cordiale. Of course I like to strike terror into the hearts of the enemy, but in his Navy League speech Liebert went too far. If he keeps it up, I shall put him on half-pay. Tell him so." (The War Lord referred to General von Liebert, ex-Governor of German East Africa, who had made a speech threatening Great Britain and France.)
And more talk of that kind. The more gossipy, the better for Bülow, as there had been no time to digest the Echo de Paris article and to enter into its discussion before he had fully made up his mind what to say about the reported Anglo-Franco-Russo-Japanese Alliance. His comments might lead to serious dissension with Majesty, for Wilhelm was sure to fasten on to some supposed negligible point in the Chancellor's argument to distort the whole tenor of his interpretation.
Tit for tat. Only when Bülow was the victim, there was no prearrangement like in the case of the repudiations of the Joseph Chamberlain and the London Daily Telegraph interviews.