“Let them wait!” he said, with a dull flash of ill-humor, in answer to the expostulations of Persigny. “Who are they, that they should not be kept waiting? Whom have we? A damnable rabble of bankers, stockbrokers, judges, generals, senators, Representatives and their wives and mistresses.... You know very well that what the English would call the ‘best people’ are those who do not come....”
Which was true. The private secretaries of the aged Duchesse de Veillecour, of the Faubourg St. Honoré, and of the venerable Marquis de l’Autretemps, being invariably instructed to return M. Bonaparte’s card of invitation, with the intimation that their respective employers had not the honor of knowing the gentleman who had sent it,—or with no intimation at all....
“Let them wait!” he said again. “Am I not waiting? For this message from Walewski—for this ultimatum of my Lord Walmerston—for this establishment of the submarine electric telegraph between England and France. That gutta-percha covered wire stretching between the cave under the South Foreland at Dover and the cliff station at Cape Grisnez is the jugular vein of my whole system of policy. Had it not broken twice, should I not have prepared Paris with my proclamations—should I not have struck the blow?”
He stuck out his chin as he rolled his head upon the cushioned back of his armchair and stared at the painted ceiling, and went on in his droning voice:
“That is, if I had had money—sufficient funds at my disposal. That a man like me should want money at such a moment proves that the Devil is a fool.”
St. Arnaud turned his long emaciated body and sagacious grayhound-face towards the speaker. The sofa creaked beneath his weight, and one of his gold spurs, catching in the costly brocade cover, tore it with a little ugly, sickening sound. He said, stroking the dyed tuft upon his chin with a gaunt pale hand glittering with rings of price:
“Monseigneur, pray do the personage you mention better justice. He really has served you better than you think!”
He had. The steam-packet Goliath of Dover, towing the ancient cable-hulk Blazer, the latter rolling fearfully, with a direfully seasick crew, and a hold containing but a few hundred yards or so of the twenty-seven miles of cable which had been smoothly paid out over the Channel sea-floor, had dropped her anchors off Cape Grisnez an hour before sunset; and the end of the wire-bound rope on which so much depended having been landed at the village of Sangatte, distant some three miles or so from Calais, communication had been established with the operators in the cave under the South Foreland lighthouse at Dover. And a gun had been fired from the Castle; and telegrams announcing the fact had been sent by the Chief Magistrate of Dover to the Queen and the Prince Consort, the Duke of Wellington, the King of Prussia, and a few other important personages. And the Mayor had then despatched a message of congratulation to the French Prince-President, which was being transmitted to Paris by means of Ampère’s coil and needle, and the under-ground wire that followed the track of the Great Northern Railway Line.
But meanwhile a courier from the Embassy of France in Belgrave Square, London, chilled and hoarse from rapid traveling in the wintry weather, had arrived with the letter from Walewski. And when the neat white hands for which it was destined had snatched the envelope from the sumptuous golden salver upon which it was respectfully presented by the President’s second aide-de-camp, its contents proved discouraging, to say the least.
Count Walewski had pleaded his relative’s cause with eloquence. The enclosure would prove with what result.