Madame Potier slept in the next. One could hear her making beds on the first-floor beneath one. Judging by the sounds, she was sweeping the Chancellor's sleeping-room. Knock-knock! went her busy broom every instant, against the furniture or the wainscot. Flip-flap! That was the duster, being shaken out of the window. When the Minister was unwell, and kept his room, Madame did not sweep, but merely dusted and made the bed. And he lay on the sofa, pulled near the fire and lengthened with a settee, or worked with his back to the window, at a table in the middle of the room. There were two great black leather dispatch-boxes on the table, and a great many maps of France, covered with marginal annotations; and the brass-handled mahogany bureau near the washstand-alcove was piled high with boxes of long, strong Bremen cigars. And by the bed was the night-table, with the framed photographs of his daughter and Countess Bismarck, his traveling candlestick, a supply of hard wax candles in a box, matches; a volume of Treitschke's "Heidelberg Lectures," with several little good books, in cloth bindings, "Daily Readings for Members of the Society of Moravian Brethren," and "Pearls from the Deep of Scripture," as well as a bottle of patent medicine and a box of pills, both of which nostrums were renewed constantly, and neither of which seemed to do him any good.
For he coughed and hawked and spat bile continually. Rarely was he silent before two o 'clock in the morning, and then it might be that one ceased to hear him, because one had succeeded in wooing sleep for oneself. Something ailed him. Those who knew him best gave no name to his ailment. Others whispered of catarrh of the stomach. Yet others were oracular upon the subject of dyspepsia of the acute kind.
Whatever the indisposition, it was fostered by the indiscriminate generosity of his admirers, who continually forwarded from all parts of the German Fatherland huge consignments of delicacies solid and fluid for the delectation of their Chancellor.
Choice wines, rare cigars and fine tobacco, liqueurs and old corn-brandies, cold punch in barrels, beer of Berlin and Leipzig, and the brunette drink beloved of Bavarians. Smoked Pomeranian goose-breasts, cakes, sausages of every variety, fresh salmon and sturgeon, pickled tunny, herrings and caviar, game of all kinds, smoked hams of bear, deer, mutton, and pig. Magdeburg sauerkraut and Leipzig pastry, preserves and fruit, fresh and candied, gorged the capacious storerooms and cellars of the Tessier mansion, which would have been found inadequate to accommodate all these mountains of good things, had not each Privy Councilor, Secretary and decipherer of the Chancellor's perambulating Foreign Office possessed a capacity for gorging only inferior to the Chief's.
In truth, this great Minister, so pitiless in his mockery of the idiosyncrasies and weaknesses of others, habitually overate himself; showing as little mercy toward his stomach as the staff of the Berlin Chancellery displayed toward the gorged and replete leather dispatch-bags that came to him by every post. He was horribly greedy, and drank a great deal, and his stomach-aches, like himself, were on the colossal scale. More than once Madame Charles had ministered to their assuagement with infusions of carbonate of soda and peppermint.
"One should check the appetite when one suffers thus from overindulgence," she had once said to him, stirring her dreadful infusion with an ivory measuring-spoon.
"The French climate does not suit me...." he had answered her. "In Germany I can eat a great deal more than I do here. Not that I eat much really, because my dinner is my only meal."
"But, just Heaven! Monseigneur! what a meal!" she had screamed at him in horror. And the room had resounded to his giant's Ha, ha, ha!
"Without a head and stomach of iron," he told her, "such as we Bismarcks inherit from our ancestors, and Göttingen has helped to render more tough, it would have been impossible in my young days to get on in the Diplomatic Service. We drank the weaker men under the table, then lifted them up, propped them between chairs, and made them sign their names to all sorts of concessions which they would not have dreamed of making otherwise.... To this day I can toss down the strongest wines of the Palatinate like water with my dinner. Champagne I need, and the bigger glasses I get it in the more it agrees with me.... Port, such as the English sip with dessert, I prefer as a breakfast-wine. Corn-brandy, such as our Old Nordhausen, is indispensable for the oiling of my machinery; and I derive benefit from rum, taken after the Russian fashion, with my eight or nine cups of after-dinner tea."
He added, sipping Madame Charles's fiercely-smelling nostrum: