“Your highness,” he said, not bending the knee before his sovereign as custom demanded, but only slightly pressing her hand to his lips—“your highness, I have redeemed my word and fulfilled my promise. I promised to liberate you from Biron and make you regent, and I have kept my word. Now, madame, it is for you to fulfil your pledge! You solemnly promised that when I should succeed in making you regent, you would immediately and unconditionally grant me whatever I might demand. Well, now, you are regent, and I come to proffer my request!”
“It will make me happy, field-marshal, to discharge a small part of my obligations toward you, by yielding to your demand. Ask quickly, that I may the sooner give!” said Anna Leopoldowna, with an engaging smile.
“Make me the generalissimo of your forces!” responded Munnich in an almost commanding tone.
A cloud gathered over the smiling features of the regent.
“Why must you ask precisely this—this one only favor which it is no longer in my power to bestow?” she sadly said. “There are so many offices, so many influential positions—ah, I could prove my gratitude to you in so many ways! Ask for money, treasures, landed estates—all these it is in my power to give. Why must you demand precisely that which is no longer mine!”
Munnich stared at her with widely opened eyes, trembling lips, and pallid cheeks. His head swam, and he thought he could not have rightly heard.
“I hope this is only a misunderstanding!” he stammered. “I must have heard wrong; it cannot be your intention to refuse me.”
“Would to God it were yet in my power to gratify you!” sighed the regent. “But I cannot give what is no longer mine! Why came you not a few hours earlier, field-marshal? then it would have been yet possible to comply with your request. But now it is too late!”
“You have, then, appointed another generalissimo?” shrieked Munnich, quivering with rage.
“Yes,” said Anna, smiling; “and see, there comes my generalissimo!”