'In those days, Barbe Bleue or Gilles de Retz were the nearest neighbours of Romaris,' he said, with a smile. 'Yet if feudalism could be sure of such châtelaines as the Countess von Szalras, I would wish it back to-morrow.'
'That is very prettily put for a Socialist. But you cannot be a Socialist. You are received at Frohsdorf. Bretons are always royal; they are born with the cultus of God and the King.'
He laughed a little, not quite easily.
'Paris is a witch's caldron, in which all cultes are melted down, and evaporate in a steam of disillusion and mockery; into the caldron we have long flung, alas! cross and crown, actual and allegoric. I am not a Breton; I am that idle creation of modern life, a boulevardier.'
'But do you never visit Romaris?'
'Why should I? There is nothing but a few sea-tormented oaks, endless sands, endless marshes, and a dark dirty village jammed among rocks, and reeking with the smell of the oil and the fish.'
'Then I would go and make the village clean and the marshes healthy, were I you. There must be something of interest in any people who remain natural in their ways and dwell beside a sea, Is Romaris not prosperous?'
'Prosperous! God and man have forgotten it ever since the world began, I should say. It is on a bay, so treacherous that it is called the Pool of Death. The landes separate it by leagues from any town. All it has to live on is the fishing. It is dull as a grave, harried by every storm, unutterably horrible.'
'Well, I would not forsake its horrors were I a son of Romaris,' she said softly; then, as she perceived that some association made the name and memory of the old Armorican village painful to him, she blew the whistle she always used, and at the summons the eldest pupil of the school, a handsome boy of fourteen, came out and stood bareheaded before her.
'Hansl, ask the teachers to grant you all an hour's frolic, that you may amuse this gentleman,' she said to him. 'And, Hansl, take care that you do your best, all of you, in dancing, wrestling, and singing, and above all with the zither, for the honour of the empire.'