Two such men, these agents, capacious vessels of clay, into which the Marshal’s gold was continually ladled....
Köhler styled himself an Attorney and Commissioner of Oaths of Prague. One felt sure wherever his offices were, that the business of the money-lenders flowed across the threshold. You saw him as a small, pale, scrupulously-attired, flaxen-haired man, with sharp, shallow brown eyes. Three or four bristling yellow hairs at the outer angles of the upper lip served him as a mustache—one thought of a white rat when one looked at him. Von Steyregg was a vast, pachydermatous personality, whose body was up-borne on short legs, shaped like balusters, and clad in the tightest of checked pantaloons. His venerable black frock-coat had grown green through long service—the copper of the buttons peeped through the frayed cloth. His swag-belly rolled under an immense nankeen waistcoat—over the voluminous folds of a soiled muslin cravat depended his triple row of saddlebag chins, his moist, sagging mouth betokened a love of good cheer, the hue of his nose—an organ of the squashed-strawberry type one so seldom meets with at this era—testified to its owner’s appreciation of potent liquors. Huge shapeless ears, pale purple-and-brown speckled, jutted like jug-handles from his high-peaked head, whose bald and shiny summit rose, lonely as an Alp, from a forest of flaming red hair. His little gray eyes were latticed with red veins. From one of them distilled a perpetual tear, destined to become a haunting bugbear to his employer’s son.
Von Steyregg, who swore in a dozen languages with equal facility and incorrectness, claimed to be a Magyar of noble family. His dog’s eared visiting card dubbed him Baron. On occasions of ceremony, an extraordinary star in tarnished metal, suspended from a soiled watered-silk ribbon of red, green, and an indistinguishable shade, which may once have been white, dignified his vast expanse of snuff-stained shirt-front. Though its owner declared this ornament to be the Order of St. Emmerich, bestowed by that saintly Prince upon a paternal ancestor, the reader may suspect it to have been originally a stage-property. Steyregg having failed in theatrical management at Vienna, Pesth, and elsewhere; and being, when full of wine—and it took an immense quantity of that liquor to fill him—prodigal of reminiscences of the coulisses, pungent and racy; related with the Rabelaisian garniture of nods, winks, leers, and oaths of the most picturesque and highly-flavored kind.
Both men invariably addressed Dunoisse as “Highness” or “Your Serene Highness.” They maintained a scrupulous parade of deference and respect in their dealings with their victim—they retreated backwards from his presence—to Madame de Roux they almost prostrated themselves—kotowing profoundly as the Ministers of the Fifteenth Louis, before the dainty jeweled shoe-buckles of the Pompadour....
Of the mad tarantula-dance through which this precious pair of showmen presently jerked their puppet,—of the kennel of obloquy and shame through which they dragged him with his companion,—the writer, confessing to some degree of parental tenderness for the hero of the story, designs to tell as briefly as may be.
According to Köhler and von Steyregg, the Regent Luitpold, having obtained from the King of Bavaria permission, confirmed by the approval of the Bund, to secularize several wealthy monasteries within the principality of Widinitz, was in worse odor with his Catholic subjects than ever before. Not only had several large communities of religious been reduced to penury and rendered homeless; but certain influential farmers, tenants of these, had been ejected from their homesteads, and divers peasants, having espoused the cause of the monks with less worldly wisdom than goodwill, had been turned out of their cottages, or had them pulled down over their heads. Disaffection was spreading, discontent prevailed. The iron was hot, said von Steyregg and Köhler, for the striking of a blow in the interests of the son of Princess Marie-Bathilde.
You may imagine how eloquently the Marshal’s agents dwelt upon the enormities of Luitpold; you can conceive how they advanced their plan, and pressed its various points upon the passive victim. Wreaths of verbal blossoms covered up its spotted ugliness. Was it not a beautiful and edifying notion, asked von Steyregg, that the Heir-aspirant to the feudal throne of Widinitz should take part in the great annual festival of mid-August, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin—at which season the Lutheran Regent—loathing the smell of incense and the chanting of Litanies as another personage is reputed to abominate holy water—yet not daring to provoke his Catholic liegemen to the point of open rebellion by prohibiting the procession—invariably absented himself from his capital, or shut himself up in the Schloss. The suggestion of so open a bid for popularity Dunoisse at first scouted. But the whole plan had a spice of adventure that charmed and excited Madame.... Paris would be intolerable in August—a delicious month to travel in. Henriette had never seen Bavaria—she longed to breathe the air of its romantic pine-forests, and gaze upon its sunset-flushed snow-peaks. For two pins she would make one of the expedition, she vowed.
And Dunoisse, being keenly aware that, although no suppers would be given at the Elysée during the red-hot months of autumn, there would be fêtes at the Tuileries and at St. Cloud, and shooting parties at Compiègne and Fontainebleau, was extremely willing to gratify the desire of his fair friend....
Indeed, when von Steyregg and Köhler hinted that the Marshal would not welcome the addition of a petticoat to the party, the Colonel manifested for the first time in their experience, energy and decision.