This same little Minister always arrived dressed in the most beautifully embroidered robes imaginable. I have never considered the yellow race outwardly beautiful, but I grant one point of beauty to the Chinese soul, since this same little man told me that the Chinese always wore embroidered on their garments a flower of the season. A pretty idea, and I congratulate them on having retained the custom; it seems to belong to another age.
Among the Russians who attended assiduously at the Mondays of our Ambassadress was Princess X... She would never have discovered gunpowder, and her husband even less; but he at least was only to be seen when he dined there, and then he took his departure very early, to go no doubt to more amusing resorts. She, dark, tall and stout in proportion, immensely amused the men by her heavy stupidity, which caused her to say the silliest things. One evening, speaking in a mincing voice, and assuming the air ingenu which she particularly affected, she asked them in a foolish way what it meant to say to some one: “Vous êtes une tourte.” The little circle began to laugh and wink at each other. She particularly addressed herself at the moment to a certain tall, young secretary of the Embassy, M. de C..., who confessed, laughing a trifle nervously, though really delighted, the unflattering suggestion concealed in this word—stupid—for no one doubted that she herself had been thus described; and she was rather sensitive, the dear Princess. He sauntered along gracefully to tell me what had passed, and we chuckled mischievously about it.
This evening, like all others, came at length to an end. Towards midnight every one dispersed like a long and elegant chaplet on the wide red-carpeted steps of the Embassy grand staircase.
At the foot of the last flight C..., all muffled up in his thick fur coat, his face half concealed behind his high turned-up collar, his eyes almost buried under his fur cap, found himself face to face with our Princess, still displaying her shoulders, which were always exposed to the fullest advantage.
“What are you carrying, C...? What a bundle!” she said in her loud drawling voice, displaying her pretty teeth and at the same time pointing to a voluminous parcel which the bearer was trying in vain to hide from the general gaze; and, so saying, she wriggled her back caressingly.
“C’est la tourte, c’est la tourte,” he said with a feeble smile, and casting a significant glance at us as he disappeared.
In her subsequent conversations she never again referred to “tourtes.”
That evening, in the privacy of her sanctum, she must have reflected that there were really too many “tourtes” in this world.
I had a feeling of well-being when from the great salons of the French Embassy, and from beneath their gilded panelling, I threw a glance from the great bay windows with double panes on the Quai Français and on that wide and beautiful Neva, so calm, so silent under its double mantle of snow and ice.
The soft warm temperature and the pretty rosy light, the cold whiteness down below formed the most delicious contrast.