For it was his nature, may God pardon him! to be false and specious, ungrateful and an oath-breaker. He must always repay great services with great wrongs. Thus in the red year 1870, England, who in '54 had poured out blood and treasure lavishly to aid him, receiving this plain proof of treachery, stood sorrowfully back and saw him rush upon his fate. Sick and desperate, madly hurling his magnificent Army hither and thither upon the arena, a Generalissimo out-generaled before the War was a week old.
He had made France his mistress and his slave, and now her fetters were to be hacked apart by the merciless sword of the invader. Through losses, privations, and humiliations; through an ordeal of suffering unparalleled in the world's history; through an orgy of vice and an era of infidelity; through fresh oceans of blood shed from the veins of her bravest; she was to pass before she found herself and GOD again.
Meanwhile, North, East, South and West, prevailed a great swarming scurry of military preparation, the tunes of the "Wacht am Rhein" and "Heil dir im Siegeskranz" clashing with "Partant pour la Syrie" and the "Marseillaise"; and the solemn strains of masses rising up together with Lutheran litanies, as two great nations strove to convince Divine Omnipotence that Codlin deserved to whip, and not Short.
Strange! that Christian men, who frankly confess themselves to be sinners, worms, and dust-grains before the supreme Majesty of the Creator, should be so prone to offer Him advice.
XXX
The lovely lady whose lace parasol P. C. Breagh had picked up at the bottom of the Prussian Chancellor's staircase was driven, by the tipsy-faced Jehu of a debilitated hack-cab, to a semi-fashionable hotel situated in a graveled courtyard facing toward the Linden. The bureau-manager looked out of his glass-case as she swept her rustling draperies over the dusty Brussels carpets of the vestibule, and muttered to the pale-faced ledger-clerk at his side:
"A representative from the firm of Müller and Stettig, Charlotten-Strasse, has called three times to see the lady in Suite 35. With a jewelry account for payment, promised and deferred."
The clerk assented with a nod of the double-barreled order, and reaching an envelope from a numbered pigeon-hole offered it for the inspection of his superior.
"Baroness von Valverden," sniffed the bureau-manager, and in his turn reached a squat red Almanach de Gotha from the top of a pile of ledgers, and ruffled the leaves with an industrious thumb.