“Protestant? Oh, no. I am a freethinker; a follower of Strauss rather than of Dr. Cumming.”
“How your Highness has relieved my mind! Only a freethinker—but that is nothing. I feared that possibly your Highness might have suffered a perversion to some of the many schisms.” He bowed and hurried off into the town, while taking the arm of Baron Imberty I said, “Introduce me to M. Blanc.”
“Your Highness wishes that M. Blanc should be presented to your Highness, but there are three hundred and ten or three hundred and twenty gentlemen who take precedence of M. Blanc. Nevertheless, your Highness has only to command.”
“Well, then, touch my arm as we pass him in the crowd, and I will speak to him informally.”
My ideas of etiquette would have horrified Madame von Biegeleben, the lady-in-waiting to my poor mother; still, I was improving already, as may be seen.
As we left the station building a little man in black, who when he is twenty years older will be as like M. Thiers in person as he already is in tact, in power of talk, and in the combination of a total absence of fixed opinions with a decided manner, made a low bow, accompanied with the shrewdest smile that I had seen.
“That,” I said, halting before him, “is M. Blanc. I am glad to have so early an opportunity of commencing an acquaintance, which I hope to improve.”
“Your Serene Highness does me too much honour.”
Thus I passed the man who played Haussmann to my Emperor, but who had the additional advantage which the costly baron of demolishing memory certainly did not possess, of being a magnificent source of revenue to my state.
Mounting the really fine horse that they had sent me down, and escorted by the sixteen mounted carbineers (who do police duty on foot in ordinary times at Monte Carlo and in the town), I rode off at a sharp trot by the winding road.