“On your sufferance only, and so long as you shall please to be indulgent,” said the Baron. “There are rights of nature; power to the powerful is the law. If he shall think to cross your destiny—well, you have heard of the brazen and the earthen pot.”
“Do you call me pot? You are ungallant, Baron,” laughed the Princess.
“Before we are done with your glory, I shall have called you by many different titles,” he replied.
The girl flushed with pleasure. “But Frédéric is still the Prince, monsieur le flatteur,” she said. “You do not propose a revolution?—you of all men?”
“Dear madam, when it is already made!” he cried. “The Prince reigns indeed in the almanac; but my Princess reigns and rules.” And he looked at her with a fond admiration that made the heart of Seraphina swell. Looking on her huge slave, she drank the intoxicating joys of power. Meanwhile he continued, with that sort of massive archness that so ill became him, “She has but one fault; there is but one danger in the great career that I foresee for her. May I name it? may I be so irreverent? It is in herself—her heart is soft.”
“Her courage is faint, Baron,” said the Princess. “Suppose we have judged ill, suppose we were defeated?”
“Defeated, madam?” returned the Baron, with a touch of ill-humour. “Is the dog defeated by the hare? Our troops are all cantoned along the frontier; in five hours the vanguard of five thousand bayonets shall be hammering on the gates of Brandenau; and in all Gerolstein there are not fifteen hundred men who can manœuvre. It is as simple as a sum. There can be no resistance.”
“It is no great exploit,” she said. “Is that what you call glory? It is like beating a child.”
“The courage, madam, is diplomatic,” he replied. “We take a grave step; we fix the eyes of Europe, for the first time, on Grünewald; and in the negotiations of the next three months, mark me, we stand or fall. It is there, madam, that I shall have to depend upon your counsels,” he added, almost gloomily. “If I had not seen you at work, if I did not know the fertility of your mind, I own I should tremble for the consequence. But It is in this field that men must recognise their inability. All the great negotiators, when they have not been women, have had women at their elbows. Madame de Pompadour was ill served; she had not found her Gondremark; but what a mighty politician! Catherine de’ Medici, too, what justice of sight, what readiness of means, what elasticity against defeat! But alas! madam, her Featherheads were her own children; and she had that one touch of vulgarity, that one trait of the good-wife, that she suffered family ties and affections to confine her liberty.”