“This dapper imp, in his eternal bottle-green and silver, will be the ruin of me,” Orléans observed. But he had already drawn a paper from the top drawer: and he filled it in, and signed it, and he pushed it across the red-topped writing-table, toward Florian.
“I thank you, monseigneur, for this favor,” said Florian, then, “and I long to repay it by making you King of France. Let us drink to Philippe the Seventh!”
“No,” said Orleans,—“let us drink if you will, but i have no thirst for kingship. I play with the idea, of course. To be a king sounds well, and I once thought—But it would give me no more than I already have of endless nuisances to endure. As matters stand, I can make shift with the discomforts of being a great personage, because I know that I can, whenever I like, lay aside my greatness. I can at will become again a private person, and I can find a host of fools eager to fill my place. But from the throne there is no exit save into the vaults of St. Denis. So I procrastinate, I play with the idea of putting the boy out of the way, but I do nothing definite until to-morrow.”
“There are many adages that speak harshly of procrastination,” said Florian, as he poured and, with his back to Orléans, flavored the wine which was set ready. “Logic is a fine thing, monseigneur: and logic informs me that no man is sure of living until to-morrow.”
“But it is no fun being a great personage,” Orléans lamented, as he took the tall, darkly glowing glass. “I have had my bellyful of it: and I find greatness rather thin fare. I am master of France, indeed I may with some show of reason claim to be master of Europe. I used to think it would be pleasant to rule kingdoms; but you may take my word for it, Florian, the game is not worth the candle. There are times,” said Orléans, as lazily he sipped the wine which Florian had just seasoned, “there are times when I wish I were dead and done with it all.”
“That, your highness, will come soon enough.”
“Yes, but do you judge what I have to contend with.” Orléans launched into a bewailing of his political difficulties. Florian kept a polite pose of attention, without exactly listening to these complaints about Parliament’s obstinacy, about Alberoni’s and Villeroy’s plottings in their exile, about the sly underminings of Fréjus, about what the legitimated princes were planning now, about Bourbon, about Noailles, about the pig-headedness of the English Pretender, about the empty Treasury—Of these things Philippe was talking, in a jumble of words without apparent end or meaning. But Florian thought of a circumstance unrelated to any of these matters, with a sort of awed amusement.
“All this to make a maniac of me,” the minister went on, “and with what to balance it? Anything I choose to ask for, of course. But then, Florian, what the deuce is there in life for one to ask for at forty-nine? I was once a joyous glutton: now I have to be careful of my digestion. I used to stay drunk for weeks: now one night of virtually puritanic debauchery leaves me a wreck to be patched up by physicians who can talk about nothing but apoplexy. Women no longer rouse any curiosity. I know so well what their bodies are like that an investigation is tautology: and half the time I go to bed with no inclination to do anything but sleep. Not even my daughters, magnificent women that you might think them—”
“I know,” said Florian, with a reminiscent smile.
“—Not even they are able to amuse me any more. No, my friend, I candidly voice my opinion that there is nothing in life which possession does not discover to be inadequate: we are cursed with a tyrannous need for what life does not afford: and we strive for various prizes, saying ‘Happiness is there,’ when in point of fact it is nowhere. They who fail in their endeavors have still in them the animus of desire: but the man who attains his will cohabits with an assassin, for, having it, he perceives that he does not want it; and desire is dead in him, and the man too is dead. No, Florian, be advised by me; and do you avoid greatness as you should—and by every seeming do not,—the devil!”