‘We are Parisians, but we are Croats before all. Sometimes you are pleased to insist very strongly that we are Croats, and nothing else. If we are so, the Emperor is our sovereign.’
‘It is disputed in Croatia, which has never been too loyal!’
‘Croatia be——,’ said Friederich Othmar, with difficulty restraining the oath because Yseulte was seated within hearing; and he returned to his old arguments, which were all brought to bear upon the fact that at the approach of winter Othmar owed it as a duty to society and to himself to throw open the doors of that vast hotel on the Boulevard S. Germain, which had always seemed to him the most hateful embodiment of the wealth, the unscrupulousness, and the past history of his race.
The hotel had been purchased from the Duc de Coigny during the White Terror by Marc Othmar for a nominal price; and under the reign of Louis Philippe, Stefan Othmar, deeming it neither grand nor luxurious enough, had had it changed and redecorated in the worst taste of the epoch, and, in the early days of the Second Empire, had farther enlarged and overloaded it, until to his son it was as a very nightmare of gilding, marble, and allegorical painting, a Cretan labyrinth of enormous and uninhabitable chambers, fit for such motley crowds as cram the Elysée in the days of Grevy.
It was one of the show-houses of Paris, and had, indeed, many real treasures of art amidst its overloaded luxury, but Othmar hated it in its entirety, from its porte-cochère, where the arms which the heralds had found for Marc Othmar had replaced the shield and crown of the Ducs de Coigny, to the immense library, which did not contain a single volume that he cared to open; an ‘upholsterer’s library,’ with all its books, from Tacitus to Henri Martin, clad in the same livery of vellum and tooled gold.
‘Absolutely necessary to sustain your position in the world!’ repeated Othmar when his uncle had left him. ‘That is always the incantation with which the fetish of the world obtains its sacrifices. Translated into common language, he means that as I have a great deal of money, other people expect me to spend much of it upon them. I do not see the obligation, at least not socially.’
‘Do you desire the life of Paris?’ he added abruptly to Yseulte, who hesitated, coloured slightly, and said with timidity:
‘I should prefer S. Pharamond.’
‘S. Pharamond is yours,’ said Othmar with some embarrassment, knowing why every rood of that sunny and flowering shore seemed to him nauseous with sickening memories. ‘S. Pharamond is yours, my dear; but I scarcely think that we can pass this winter there. There are tedious duties from which we cannot escape; to entertain in Paris is one of them.’
An older woman would have perceived that he contradicted himself, but Yseulte was blinded to such anomalies by her adoration of him; an adoration as intense as it was meek, dumb, and most humble.