"Not that anything I have drunk or eaten mars my capacity for cool reflection and close argument.... When I and one or two others are laid by, men will only peck and sip. There will only be chatter about eating and drinking.... Grosser Gott! What things I used to do in that line when I was young!"
And he tossed off the contents of the tumbler, and mouthed at it, and set it down upon the little tray she held and dismissed her with a nod of thanks.
But Madame Charles carried away with her an idea of him as he had been in those old days, huge, loud, voracious, powerful, tempestuously jovial or ironically grim. She crowned the domed head with thick waving locks of brown hair, lightened the shaggy brows, and gave the blue eyes back their youthful fire; smoothed the deep lines from the florid face, restored his long heavy limbs their shapeliness, and reduced the girth of his waist. And it was impossible to despise the finished picture, because the man was so much a man.
Day by day, while the War went on, and Paris lay raging and spitting fire within her impregnable, impassable girdle of human flesh and steel and iron—to this house where he sat solid and square at his table in his bedroom-study, reading over documents vomited by the great dispatch-boxes, or letters and papers captured with balloon-posts, or driving the pen with that tireless hand of his over sheets to be conned by Monarchs and rulers of States—came the Crown Prince of Prussia, handsome and débonnaire, or the dry, withered gentleman who bore the great name of von Moltke, or the War Minister von Roon, or M. Thiers, or the Saxon Minister von Friesen, or the Grand Dukes of Weimar or Baden, or the Duke of Coburg, or the Representatives of Austria-Hungary and Bavaria, or the English Ambassador, who had recently come upon a Mission to Versailles. Night after night, other and stranger footsteps crossed the threshold. Sometimes blindfolded officers in stained and weatherbeaten French uniforms had been led upstairs to that mysterious room where he sat, weaving his huge web of diplomacy, or manipulating with deft, capable touches the threads that moved both men and Kings.
Everyone came to this house on the quiet by-street of Versailles, that had become the throbbing center of the world.... From the greatest to the smallest, from the worthiest to the vilest. Now, last of all came—Adelaide de Bayard.
And with her came the question: How much he suspected. There had been one or two moments when Juliette had been temporarily thrown off her guard. Could one really deceive him, who was so subtle, watchful, observant?... Past master in cunning, ripe in diplomacy....
She heard his heavy footstep on the staircase as she held her bosom and listened. Madame Potier had finished his bedroom, and taken her broom and dustpan to the next. Madame de Bayard had been shown into the smaller interviewing-room, where the Brussels carpet had been paced into threadbare alleys by the feet of men who were topped by aching responsibilities—where the Crown Prince of Prussia smoked his big painted pipe of Latakia as he chatted with the Chancellor—where M. Thiers sat through long ordeals of torture in the little wicker arm-chair.
Would the mother of Juliette de Bayard sit in that chair? Her daughter knew how superbly she would rise and sweep her reverence to the Minister. How smoothly she would pour forth some false and specious tale....
The Minister strode in upon Madame, carrying his cap and riding-whip. His heavy countenance had the healthier flush of exercise, his great spurred boots were plastered with clayey mud. He had but just returned from an early ride with Count Hatzfeldt, taken at this hour "To escape," as he had explained to that elegant functionary, "the detestable clattering and knocking of that female Kobold, whose day it is to sweep my room."
"Why let her sweep?" Hatzfeldt had asked, and his principal had answered: