Money! If one would be elected as Representative for the Department of the Seine, and the three other Departments that were to prove so many steps to the armchair upon the platform behind the tribune of the Assembly—money, money! If one would by bribery and corruption raise that same armchair to the height of an Imperial throne—money, money, money! Golden mortar, without which the house that Jack builds must topple at the first puff of wind, and resolve itself into a mere heap of jumbled brickbats. Money, money, money, money! And the little Corporal, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, had scarcely been poorer than his nephew was to-day.
The uncle was not over-scrupulous, less so the nephew. His end of self-glorification justified every shameful means.
For him the harlot emptied her stocking, the wealthy saloon-keeper and ex-procuress poured out her tainted gold. To be mistress-in-chief to an Emperor, to flaunt a title in the face of prim Respectability, that was what Kate Harvey sought, and had, when his sun had risen. But the other women, lured on to bankruptcy and ruin by his dull magnetic glance and skillfully-cast bait of promises, saw hovering before their dazzled eyes—receding ever farther into the sandy desert of Unattainability—the bridal carriage of gold lacquer and mother o’ pearl, surmounted by the Imperial Eagle. The carved and gilded Matrimonial Chair upon the crimson bee-spangled daïs and the Crown of Josephine....
So, with the flutter of a fan in a jeweled hand, a few brief sentences interchanged, the glance of a pair of brilliant eyes and the dull, questioning look of a pair of fishy ones, at the dark, vivid face and lithe, erect figure standing in the doorway, Dunoisse was bought and sold.
If he had only known, when a little later he was presented to the Prince by Colonel de Roux.... But there was no expression in the vacuous eyes that blinked at him, hardly a shade of meaning in the flat toneless voice that said:
“I am happy in the knowledge, Bonsieur, that a young officer, the gifted son of a noble father, who is gapable of acting upon his own resbonsibility in a moment of national emergency, has been exonerated from undeserved plame—has met with gomblete rehabilidation at the hands of his suberiors and chiefs. Did I possess the influence once wielded by my klorious ungle, you would be regombensed as you teserve.”
For after this fashion did he misuse the French language: struggling as gamely as any German Professor to keep the g’s from turning out the c’s, the b’s from usurping the places of the p’s ... beset with consonantal difficulties to the ending of his life....
He bowed to the young man of high prospects and great possessions, and solemnly extended the gloved finger-tips of the small effeminate hand. Could it have been, despite his tactful negation of all influence, the hand that had shielded Dunoisse? Was it the hand that shortly afterwards obtained his promotion? One may suspect as much.