Perhaps he fancied that he detected a faint, supercilious sneer upon the face of de Morny. For he turned upon the Count, and said, narrowing his eyelids, and smiling in a menacing way:
“You, my brother, take this assertion as a piece of boasting. Well, I am content that you should regard it so. Members of Christ’s family held in contempt His powers of prophecy. Nevertheless, Jerusalem fell, and the Temple was leveled with the dust.”
“By my faith!” said de Morny, shrugging his thin wide shoulders. “A parallel that!”
“A parallel, as you say,” returned Monseigneur, who had made the astonishing comparison with the coolest effrontery. “Now, if you will give me pen, ink, and paper, I will write the answer to this letter from Belgrave Square.”
They supplied him with these things, and he wrote, in his pointed spidery hand, stooping over the desk of an inlaid ivory escritoire—a dainty thing whose drawers and pigeon-holes had contained the political correspondence of Queen Marie Antoinette and the love-letters of amorous Josephine:
“Tell my Lord that I carry out my programme. Upon the morning of the second of December, at a quarter-past six punctually, I strike the decisive blow.”
He signed the sheet with his initials, folded and slipped it in an envelope, and motioned to de Morny to prepare the wax to receive his signet. While the red drops were falling on the paper, like gouts of thick blood, he said, with his smile:
“It may be that this second of December will prove to be my eighteenth Brumaire.”
And when Persigny inquired to which of the official messengers the letter should be entrusted for conveyance to London, he replied:
“To none of them. An aide-de-camp will attract less notice. And he must be a mere junior, an unimportant person whom nobody will be likely to follow or molest.”