'What am I to understand from all this?' asked Berthier, wiping his eyes.
'Understand!' echoed Madame Deschwanden; 'there, again, you exhibit a density of perception perfectly shocking. Allow me to ask you seriously, monsieur, are you a German, or a Swiss? Have you one drop of the tar they call blood crawling through your veins; for if so I give you up, I abandon you, I turn my back on you.'
'Be content,' said Berthier sulkily, 'I am French.'
'And your blood is brandy, volatile, combustible, intoxicating. So be it. I am on your side. Place the matter in my hands, and it is done. I guarantee a surrender in one month.'
'In a month.'
'In a month and a day. Take out your watch, note the time. In one month, one day, and one hour to a minute. See there!' She rapped her fan against her hand triumphantly, and surveyed the Intendant with an air of patronage. 'Never attempt what you don't understand. My faith! you might as well meddle in my millinery affairs as in an affair of the heart, unless you have skill, and that is a gift of nature; it is not every one who is an adept in the science of intrigue. Mon Dieu! I should think not. It requires a delicacy of perception, a fineness of touch, in short, a sensibility which is born with one. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, a poet is not to be manufactured or made as Nicholas chips and chops his saints. My faith! I should hope not. A successful intriguer is so perfectly constituted that I believe he is the most successful of the works of creation. You could not make a triumph of a cap, try as hard as you might, you would botch it. Mon Dieu! Some lovely construction which consumed me with care and enthusiasm, if you put your clumsy hand to it, would be wrecked. So with an affair of the heart. You cannot do it; you are not equal to it; you were not born to it with that delicacy of perception, that subtlety in feeling, that tenderness in touch, in fine, that sensibility which——'
'Will you come to the point?' said the Intendant, angrily.
'Will I come to the point?' echoed madame. 'Look at him, asking such a question. Behold him, ye gods, and stare. Did you ever see such a man? But one has his gift in this way, and another in that. I have no doubt you are the best of sheriffs, but you are absolutely a neophyte in the art of love-making. Ah—bah! no one could make anything of you. I do not say in ordinary matters of business, in cutting off heads, or breaking on the wheel, or consigning to the Bastille, or marching soldiers here, and ordering gendarmes there, in all that, I grant you; but affairs of the heart are quite different from affairs of state and of commerce. You want, to be successful in them, a delicacy of perception——'
'Enough of that,' said Berthier. 'Come, madame. My time is precious.'