He held his great glass to the now drunken servant to be filled up.
"Prosit!" he said, and lifted the capacious vessel high, and tossed off the wine and dashed the costly goblet into the fireplace, where it exploded in crystal fragments and sparkling dust. Had they tried, his satellites could not have followed his example. Their leaden arms could only lift the wine to their dribbly lips. They drank—and one by one each toper collapsed and buckled as though the solid oak floor had given way under his boneless feet. Hatzfeldt sank prone across a chair. Bismarck-Böhlen had rolled under the table some moments previously, where, judging by the ominous nature of the sounds that asserted his presence, Madame Tessier's Brussels carpet was suffering for his excess. Similar noises, stertorous snores were reëchoed from other quarters as the Minister surveyed his fallen warriors:
"Men cannot drink in these days!" he commented, and left the room.
LXXV
He threw on his cap and his great white cavalry cloak lined with Russian sables and passed out by the front door into the still white night. The snowstorm was over, the fall had lessened to the merest sprinkle. The bitter northerly wind no longer drove the blizzards screaming before it, each tree stood immovable under its burden, the overloaded evergreen bushes lay flat upon the ground. And the moon sailed high, drifting away eastward. Through the tatters of the frost-fog shone the great blazing jewels of the stars.
Twelve o'clock struck near and far, and from the great Cathedral of the Place St. Louis, as from every bell-graced tower and steeple in Versailles, rang the Christmas carillon. Many voices broke upon the piercing, windless quiet. Many footsteps were passing through the snowy streets. Catholics were going to their Midnight Mass and Communion to be celebrated by permission of the Prussian Minister. He pictured the crowds that would flock to the great churches of Paris—how Notre Dame would be packed to the doors, and Ste. Marguerite, also the great Church of the Carmelites, and the ancient church of the Augustine Fathers in the Place des Victoires....
He imagined the flower-decked High Altars in the churches and chapels of Versailles thronged about with war-weary, famine-bitten refugees and residents. German Catholics would mingle with them—the conqueror and the conquered kneeling side by side. Wounded soldiers of both nations would help each other to limp to the Communion rail; the atmosphere of the hushed, crowded sanctuaries would throb and vibrate with prayer....
For what boon would all these suppliants entreat High Heaven most fervently? Pacing in and out of the snowy garden alleys, his giant shadow passing over the moveless tree shadows, he asked himself the question. There was but one reply:
For Peace.... They would pray to GOD for Peace ... that Bismarck was not going to give them yet a while. Under the icicles that had formed on his great mustache he laughed. And a Satanic pride swelled within him as he told himself that this was his crowning hour of life.