"The mother is a trollop of the very first water. She took the girl to the Prefecture—why did she contrive an interview? She sends her up alone—she declares that she has never since seen her.... Pfui!... The affair, in my nostrils, fairly stinks of vulgar intrigue. Have no more to do with it—though the unlucky girl is no doubt to be pitied.... I will speak to His Excellency, Count Bismarck, who has agents in Rethel."
And he steamed across the marble vestibule of the great hall of the Palais de Justice, crossed the Place des Tribunaux, and vanished into the Prefecture, over whose entrance hung the Hohenzollern banner and the Prussian standard, that was very soon to show a stripe of red beside the black and white....
For the hitherto recalcitrant States of Baden and Hesse had joined the Bund. The King of Saxony had signed,—Würtemburg would sign the treaty of Federation shortly. There were prospects of a definite settlement with the King of Bavaria. The ambition of the Man of Iron was shortly to be realized.... Bismarck was to rule a German Emperor!
You might have seen him, upon this bland November morning that had succeeded a night of shrieking northerly gusts and driving pelts of sleety rain, walking with the Count Hatzfeldt in the garden of the Tessier mansion in the Rue de Provence. The house immediately opposite had now been converted into a guard post. Sentries in the uniforms of the Green Jaegers were on duty at the gates. Over the principal entrance hung the black and white Prussian standard.
The sky was deep blue, with argosies of white clouds sailing toward the northeast. The leaves that yet remained upon the elms and poplars shone in the sunshine like newly minted gold. Those that the gale had stripped lay in wet drifts upon the grass and gravel, though the three oak trees on the pleasance yet retained their suits of crisping russet brown.
To the right, at the rear of the house, a young man servant was sweeping away the leaves that adhered to the narrow terrace of steps running round three sides of the building. The swish of his birch broom punctuated the sentences of the newspaper article being read by Hatzfeldt to his Chief.
It was the continuation of the article in the Berliner Zeitung that had roused the ire of the Warlock a little while before.
"Unanimously," it concluded, "and in the interests of Humanity, we demand that this measure be taken at once. We reprehend in the sternest terms, not only those military commanders who are in favor of procrastination. We cry in the ears of the Chancellor-and-Minister-President, Count Bismarck himself, who is credited with being the main factor in this policy of delay: Mene, mene, tekel upharsin!—'Thou art weighed in the balance, and found to want!'"
Said the Man of Iron to Hatzfeldt:
"Did I not know that my wife regards women who enter the lists of journalism as unsexed, and outcasts beyond the hope of redemption, I should be inclined to believe she had written this." He added: "I have often been accused of inhumanity, but to be reproached for an excess of tenderness is something quite new to me. How shall we reassure these excitable gentlemen? Buschlein"—he referred to his Press article-writer, the rotund author of the famous "Recollections"—"Buschlein shall write that he has authority from Count Bismarck to state that his universally credited predilections for slaughter have not been blunted by recent experiences, and that he much approves of the bombardment idea, but that he has no control over those high military functionaries who command His Majesty's investing forces, and is not accustomed to be consulted by them."