She remained much graver and simpler than her contemporaries were; she cared for none of the noisy amusements of modern fashion; the world of pleasure seemed to her, on the whole, a little vulgar, a little tiresome, astonishingly monotonous, even in its feverish search for the untried and the startling. But at the same time she could not escape from its demands, and their effects upon her, and the counsels of Friederich Othmar incessantly reminded her that she could best serve the honour of the name she bore by making Europe admire and praise her. It was a counsel which contained the seeds of danger; but he read her character aright.
‘Voilà une qui ne cascadera jamais,’ said the Baron to himself in his tongue of the Boulevards. He was infinitely proud of, and delighted with her; he gave her the most magnificent presents, bought her the rarest of jewels. He accompanied her constantly in her drives and to the opera, and even in the visits which she paid.
‘It is Baron Fritz whom Othmar’s marriage has reformed!’ said a pretty woman, who had long considered the silver-haired financier as her own especial prey. He took a paternal pleasure in the admiration which the rare patrician graces of the girl awoke in that tout Paris which he had long considered the lawgiver of the universe.
‘If you had been Marie Antoinette, there might have been no revolution,’ he said jestingly to her. ‘You would never have flirted with Ferson, nor would you have played at shepherdessing, or worn a mask in the Palais Royal.’
‘I think I should only have thought of France,’ she answered.
‘Which would not have prevented you from going to the guillotine, I dare say,’ said the Baron. ‘Nations are the concentrated distillation of the ingratitude of men. There is only one thing which one can always count on with absolute certainty, and that is, the general and individual thanklessness.’
Nothing was further from his thoughts than to cloud over the trust, confidence, and faith of her innocent optimism. He spoke as he thought and felt, and as a long experience of mankind had taught him to do, without reflecting that he dropped the bitterness of gall into a fair and limpid spring, which had seen nothing above its waters save the white lily-cups and the blue heavens.
‘She will be robbed right and left endlessly if she be not taught a little mistrust,’ he said to Othmar himself, who replied:
‘Let her be robbed of everything rather than of her illusions. This is the only loss from which we never recover.’
‘What an absurd idea!’ thought the Baron, who had never cherished any illusions at all, and had found life exceedingly entertaining and enjoyable without them.