“That Spanish woman––tah! As Mademoiselle d’Industrie I do not see why she should claim precedence. The blonde Spaniard is no more beautiful than the brown American.”
“For all that, Louis Napoleon has placed her among the elect,” remarked the Countess Helene, with a mischievous glance towards the Marquise, each understanding that the mention of the Second Empire was like a call to war, in that salon.
“Louis!” and the dowager shrugged her shoulder, and made a gesture of contempt. “That accident! What is he that any one should be exalted by his favor? Mademoiselle de Montijo was––for the matter of that––his superior! Her family had place and power; her paternity was undisputed; but this Louis––tah! There was but one Bonaparte; that subaltern from Corsica; that meteor. He was, with all his faults, a worker, a thinker, an original. He would have swept into the sea the envious islanders across the channel to whom this Bonaparte truckled––this man called Bonaparte, who was no Bonaparte at all––a vulture instead of an eagle!”
So exclaimed the dowager, who carried in her memory the picture of the streets of Paris when neither women nor children were spared by the bullets and sabres of his slaughterers––the hyena to whom the clergy so bowed down that not a mass for the dead patriots could be secured in Paris, from either priest or archbishop, and the Republicans piled in the streets by hundreds!
Mrs. McVeigh turned in some dismay to the Countess Helene. The people of the Western world, the women in particular, knew little of the bitter spirit permeating the politics of France. The United States had very knotty problems of her own to discuss in 1859.
“Tah!” continued the dowager, “I startle you! Well, well––it profits nothing to recite these ills. Many a man, and woman, too, has been put to death for saying less;––and the exile of my son to remember––yes; all that! He was Republican––I a Legitimist; I of the old, he of the new. Republics are good in theory; France might have given it a longer trial but for this trickster politician, who is called Emperor––by the grace of God!”
“Do they add ‘Defender of the Faith’ as our cautious English neighbors persist in doing?” asked the girlish Marquise with a smile. “Your country, Madame McVeigh, has no such cant in its constitution. You have reason to be proud of the great men, the wise, far-seeing men, who framed those laws.”
Mrs. McVeigh smiled and sighed in self-pity.
“How frivolous American women will appear to you, Madame! Few of us ever read the constitution of our country. I confess I only know the first line:––‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary,’ but what they thought necessary to do is very vague in my mind.”