CHAPTER X.

“THE MOON.”

The narrative of Jeanne Auvache, which continues yet through three volumes, may here be dropped, and what else took place may be gleaned from the “Memoirs” of Monsieur Goncourt Leflô (Prefect of the Seine), and from the “Notes” of Saïd Pasha (Chargé d’Affaires), together with jottings and gossips of other witnesses.

In that place which used, I think, to be called “La Plage,” but is now the Club des Décavés, a crowd one afternoon sat surveying the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. (The Décavés is far up at the top of the Avenue by the Arc de Triomphe, from which point the throngs of bicyclists who have toiled up the incline of the Champs Elysées put their legs up, give themselves to God, and by Him are taken gaily down the long-drawn-out incline to the Bois, like boats in the river of carriages which rolls droning down.) It was an afternoon in June, and everyone who knows his “capital of the universe” at all knows that sight, whose mood, in its large-minded worldliness, is rather to be recalled than to be described.

The Décavés itself, with people coming, going, sitting, sipping, gossiping, was a scene of no little vivacity; and to a new-comer, as he stepped up, one of a group of three said eagerly, “You have heard, Leflô?”

“Well, naturally, one has heard,” answered Monsieur Leflô, the Prefect, as he sat, “inasmuch as one cannot dodge the omnipresent, and all Paris is talking of it.”

“But what an indiscretion!” cried Monsieur Isabeau Thiéry.

“A public embrace at the Foreign Office, my friends!” added the Abbé Sauriau, his plump palms spread a little.

“But, then, everything is possible at the Foreign Office,” remarked the Prefect of the Seine: “above all, dizziness of the head.”

“This, however, my friends,” now said the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet, “is an incident, not of the Third Republic, but of the Second Empire! Transfer the scene to the Bal Morel, and the lady might have been Païva, as the male Plon-Plon,” whereat Isabeau Thiéry shook backward his lion’s mane of hair with, “It may be an incident of the Third Empire, which we see beginning—unless by chance a patriot or two still exists in France.” (“He was”—to quote from the “Notes” of Saïd Pasha—“one of the tribe of poet-politicians—the Hugos, Lamartines, Châteaubriands—and though neither his poetry, nor even his politics, was at all equal to theirs, Thiéry, as we know, took himself awfully seriously, excelling them all, since not in head, at any rate in hair, in his spread of hatrim and La Vallière cravat, whose crimson hue proved him “of the Left.”)

“But was it Lepsius who did this?” now said the Abbé Sauriau, his tumbler of byrrh brought half-way up to his broad mouth: “Lepsius, the Nazarene, reeling beneath the mead of Venus! This Puritan, whose existence is presumed to be made up of a race with the sun, to whom a speck of dust appears a heap of leprosy, and the loss of a minute the loss of a province?... This Lepsius, indeed, is a myth he has contrived by chance to create in men’s minds a Lepsius-Phantasm, as there is a ‘Napoleonic Legend’; but oh, if he had but a real existence! Who in that case, my friends, could fail to revere this furious reaper of the tickings of the clock, who lives with one eye on a second-hand, and with the other, I am told, on a pyramid of thrones? Do you know the story that is told of what he replied to Proudhon _ainé_, who at that time was one of the Quæstors of the Chamber, when Proudhon _ainé_ said to him, ‘To-morrow, monsieur, it shall be done’? The answer of Lepsius—as they say—was, ‘Monsieur, believe me, to-day is each man’s last, last chance, for it will be doubly impossible for him to effect to-morrow just that which he may effect to-day, since to-morrow it will be all an altered world, he an altered man in it.’... Is it _he_, my friends, whom we find engaging in an amour so touched with giddiness that it may not wait for privacy?”

“A propos of ‘the clock,’” remarked the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet, his little hand all aflash with diamonds in the sunshine, “Freycinet _fils_ is said to have remarked this afternoon at Tortoni’s that then at least, during the kiss, Monsieur Lepsius lost reckoning of the clock, seeing that his eyes were tight closed! And it is now being said round about the Palais-Bourbon of Cardinal Pontmartin, who has declared that the kiss lasted a minute and eight seconds by the clock, ‘How could the Prelate have seen the clock, when those holy eyes of his must have been poring upon Paradise revealed before them!’—a _mot_ at which the titter and grin of the beau set his (!) teeth atremble with a rather ghastly glitter on his gums.

“But as to the lady——” Isabeau Thiéry began to say at the same moment that the old gossip exclaimed, “Here comes Saïd Pasha, one of the keenest listeners and best observers in Paris”—and a brown man with a firm lip, perfectly turned out, came up to the table, the duke observing to him, “Monsieur, one is conscious from the very blush of your boots that you bring with you much that is new.”

“But, Monsieur le Duc, they were not polished by myself,” replied Saïd Pasha innocently—a reply which raised a smile! since everybody knew that the duke, in the course of a very varied career, had had need to be his own menial.

“In any case, you can enlighten us as to the identity of the lady who is on the tapis in connection with a certain individual,” said Isabeau Thiéry to Saïd Pasha, who at that time was generally supposed to be in quite the inner _côterie_ of the Palais-Lepsius; but in the same instant that the staid and cautious _chargé d’affaires_ was asking what lady was meant, the duc was saying, “Here, too, comes Monsieur the Englishman,” and one Mr. E. Reader Meade, an attaché at the Faubourg St. Honoré, walked up—a man who, because of his bulk, and of that mass of face on which was written “phlegm” and “judgment,” was often in the Paris of that day nicknamed “the Englishman.” As he approached, the aged gossip, holding up his eye-glass before a dilapidated eye, made the observation, “But do I read aright in Monsieur Meade’s air that he is unaware of anything having happened?”

“Very possibly, Monsieur le Duc,” replied the Englishman, sitting down, “since I only arrived from London an hour ago”—at which confession of benightedness, in a moment the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet was at Meade’s ear, leaning over, tittering forth the story with no little vivacity—Soirée last night at the Quai d’Orsay—all the Faubourg St. Honoré there, much of the Faubourg St. Germain itself, not to mention a Chausée d’Antin mob—in the grand _salon_ the _quadrille d’honneur_ had already begun, the Prince of Wales the partner of Madame la Ministre—out in the vestibule, moving in, a crowd—in its midst the young Lepsius and his usual retinue—also a lady, supposed to be English, who at any rate was under the chaperonage of the English Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard; this lady and a certain individual gradually work together through the throng, by accident, say some, by design or blind desire, say others—do not, however, seem to see each other—move on with the crowd, shoulder to shoulder, without speech or look—till for some reason two of the electric jets chance to go dark, leaving the vestibule in partial gloom, whereupon that pale dark face of a certain individual turns toward the lady’s pale fair face—the lady’s pale face turns somewhat toward his—and, according to Cardinal Pontmartin, who was quite near the pair, their wide and wild eyes stare awhile at each other with a stare of scare, of even the extreme of terror, as in apprehension of some impending crash and catastrophe—until now the lips of Lepsius pounce upon the lady’s—nor does the good girl turn hers away, gives herself gallantly up to the vertigo and whirl of it, smiling though white, her eyes closed, his eyes closed—the crowd looking on in an amazement so profound, that Cardinal Pontmartin had since declared that his hair could not but have stood on end, if he had had any, as beyond all question would the hair of the good Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, if it had been real.”

“And we who imagined that Society under the Third Empire was destined to be as earnest and _bourgeoise_ as was that under the Citizen Monarchy,” remarked Isabeau Thiéry with sarcasm when the old duke had concluded the story, to which Mr. E. Reader Meade replied with a smile, “But what can be more ‘_bourgeois_’ than kissing, monsieur, or more ‘earnest’ than such a kiss?”

“Such a kiss,” the Abbé Sauriau said, “is a proof, my friends, of nothing save of Lepsius’ disdain of mankind, since he certainly weighed the thirty or so pairs of eyes which observed that kiss as lightly as lovers on a stile weigh the eyes of kine which watch them. Do you know the story that is told of his answer to Marshal Macintosh, à propos of the Marshal’s remark that a foreigner, even after a hundred years, is never regarded and behugged by the French as a Frenchman? Lepsius replied, ‘It may be nice to be loved, monsieur, but what is nicer far is to be disliked, to behold yourself surrounded by people thirsting like Tantalus to hurt you, and to behold them powerless, because of your towering superiority.’ So you see, my friends: Napoleon regarded men mainly as pawns in his game; Monsieur Lepsius, in his more _savant_ mood, regards them as gorillas in his garden of zoology”—and now the abbé’s eyes shot out beneath his bush of eyebrow a beam of bile, bush that burned, yet was not consumed, while Isabeau Thiéry’s eyes, quick as tinder, caught fire also, for company.

Saïd Pasha, however, with a frown, was saying, “Oh, pardon, Monsieur l’Abbé!... This anecdote of the reply of Monsieur Lepsius to Marshal Macintosh is, indeed, known; but I need hardly remark that to repeat is not quite to prove, and, in fact, the words are so unlike the individual to whom they are attributed, that I have even ventured to assert that they were never uttered by Monsieur Lepsius, the mood of whose converse is usually much more taciturn. As to Monsieur l’Abbé’s mention of gorillas, I think I have the honour to know that Monsieur Lepsius is far too exact an intellect to regard mankind precisely in that light, but rather, let us say, as sons of Hannaman, the ape-god of the Brahmins; and as to the alleged kiss at the Quai d’Orsay, of which, by the way, everyone in Paris is spreading about a different account, I am able to state that its occurrence, if it occurred, was the result of no world-disdain, but simply of one of those magnetic gales that deflect even the needle of the compass. After all, as was said in a certain Orléaniste _salon_ not thirty minutes since, ‘it takes two to make a kiss,’ and since the lady is not accused of world-disdain, I do not see why the male.”

At this Monsieur Leflô—a little quick personality, whose hairs grew like a wig of bristles—ogled Isabeau Thiéry with, “We are all aware that the utiliser of the moon has a champion wherever Saïd Pasha is present!”

“But, Monsieur le Prefect,” said Saïd Pasha, sudden and quick in quarrel, “am I charged with partisanship for aught but the simple truth?”

“No, monsieur,” replied the Prefect dryly, “even though it is a matter of common talk that Saïd Pasha once shed tears of admiration at the sight of a certain individual racing with camels from a sand-storm near Khartoum, and from that moment became a hero-worshipper. So it is said—I was not there. In any case, I beg leave to question the ‘magnetic gale’ by which you explain this embrace, since I believe that the reason of it is quite a different one than people conceive.”

At this Saïd Pasha’s brow bowed low, with the reply, “We know that Monsieur Leflô is a prefect who is a Fouché and a Réal in one.”

“Oh, as for that,” Leflô answered in his off-hand way, “it requires no spy of the Rue de Jerusalem to recognise the truth that this kiss was no result of vertigo, but of a political purpose.”

“That is only the truth,” added the old Due de Rey-Drouilhet, “since it is certain that a certain individual ‘knows his Paris’—more perfectly knows it than Napoleon the First, as perfectly perhaps as Napoleon the Third; and knowing that your Parisian, as Victor Hugo has observed, must for ever be grinning the teeth, either in a laugh or in a snarl, the arch-gamester never permits himself to forget that there must be no flagging in the game, since in Paris to be out of sight is to be out of mind, and so seeks continually to _épater les gens_, keeping himself alive in the public eye by breaking ever anew upon it in a new attitude and costume, and invariably with an _éclat_ whose radiance blinds. No, this gentleman is hardly one of those who like to shine in the dark! If for once in his life he tears his lips from the telephone to apply them to those of a lady, he takes care that there shall be as many eye-witnesses to the event as when some months ago he used to assume the rôle of Haroun al Raschid by appearing in an incognito of rags in the thieves’ kitchens of the Quartier Mouffetard, where he engaged in a knife-fight with a Spaniard, and in a cangiar-fight with two Moors who had attacked him. For here, my friends, we meet with the scenic skill of a Bonaparte in combination with the ambitious mania of a Thiers, Bismarck’s steel, that art-genius for _Welt-politik_ of a Cæsar Borgia, and——”

“All possibly true,” interrupted the Abbé Sauriau, “but the thing that this very young man lacks is a certain humanity and nativeness to the world: for a man above the world he may be, since they say so, but one discerns that, with all his worldliness, he is hardly a man of the world. How perfect, how Parisian even, his manners when he likes; but one gleans that they have been but recently acquired, and girt on externally for a purpose, as Cato learned Greek at eighty. He lacks a _je ne sais quoi_ which no one lacks. If he laughs, one feels that he has said to himself, ‘Just here I will do a laugh, in order to produce such or such an impression upon this brute-mind.’ All men, indeed, are actors: but Lepsius is an actor who acts acting, like the players in _Hamlet_, and I am not certain whether he is to be considered the best of the world’s actors, or the worst: for ‘the brute-mind’ is frequently not so brute as not to perceive that his art lacks the art to conceal its art, owing to the fact that he shares in the mistake made by each superior mind in deeming the difference between himself and other beings deeper than it really is. Hence, for all his brains, a certain _gaucherie_ in his being, a grimace, a guffaw, in relation to the world, to which he is innately a stranger. How very alien to our humanity, for example, the commercial use which he has proposed of the bodies of the dead, a use which he pretends would solve the world-problem of poverty. On that afternoon, too, when the Moon Company Bill was being introduced, and he in the Centre began to scratch his head with one finger in the manner of Cæsar—a signal to his creature Huguenin on the extreme left to scream, ‘Cæsar! Cæsar!’ in a bogus tone of indignation—the intention, as everybody knows, was that the whole Chamber should take up the roar and reverberate it through France; but not one soul took it up! The trick was immediately seen through by each French child...!”

“Yes, last August,” said Mr. E. Reader Meade, gazing away at all the throng and flutter of the scene, “last August, when the individual in question had not yet been two months a factor in politics; but nine biggish months of world-knowledge, of archive-searching, of worming in the Big Book,[B] have since gone by——”

[B] National Debt Ledger.

“My friends,” answered the Abbé Sauriau, still with his Jesuit blandness, though his bush burned, “I have quite recently been in personal contact with the individual in question, and still I say that I receive from him, as previously, the impression of a being destitute of humour.... He does not please; he cannot speak to you: for though his memory which, I admit, is no bad one, should render him the best of _causeurs_, his uneasy feeling that idle speaking is a crime renders him the worst.... Oh, I am not demolishing any idol! Why, my friends, should I? You have lately listened to that charge brought against me in the Chamber by Maître Tombarel, the charge of intellectual egoism and envy. I cannot, it appears, be envious of a Rockefeller or a Mogul, but I go green with envy, it appears, on hearing a great epigram that I did not myself think of making. Well, I deny it.... If to my little books my contemporaries have too amiably granted the name of ‘great,’ does that impede my conceiving the possibility of some brain brighter, greater, being made by Nature? Or, can _no_ mind really conceive, and frankly admit to itself, a mind of better fibre than itself? I—don’t know; or rather! _my_ mind could and would, I am most sure, if—the occasion arose. Thus I can speak, I hope, of the individual in question without spleen; indeed, I have even been touched with a feeling of compassion for this poor boy, so joylessly toiling, all lone and lorn, fatherless, a stone thrown from Utopia—for who could picture him in the rôle of a son? And did he not once say to Freycinet _père_, ‘Monsieur the Président of the Senate,’ said he, ‘I never had a parent.’ Never, at any rate, a brother being, a friend probably, climbing his mountain-way without quite knowing why or whither, but willy-nilly climbing.... Oh, my friends, it is not through jealousy, but for pity, that men should be busying themselves in bottling up the buzzing of this bee.”

To words so bold no one answered anything, till Isabeau Thiéry observed, “From the bee honey, though, as aroma from the rose, though the former _has_ its sting, as the latter its thorn.”

“Ah, monsieur,” answered the Abbé Sauriau, knowing on which nerve to work upon Thiéry, “Brutuses, I fear, are even rarer than Cæsars!” whereat, instantly, Isabeau Thiéry, with a new enthusiasm, was crying, “Still, Monsieur l’Abbé, Brutuses—exist!”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Reader Meade, with a twinkling eye on Thiéry, “but could a patriot be the Brutus of a Cæsar, whose first work would be a frontier reconstructed ‘as in 1814’?”—words which had the effect of making Thiéry glance gladly at the Englishman with the exclamation, “That, too, is a truth, monsieur!” (“His, Thiéry’s, soul,” says Saïd Pasha, in his _Paris Notes_, “was like meadows over which sweep shadows that fleetly succeed each other. He had no self, this man, but only a set of stock concepts, borrowed emotions—provided only that they were pure, enthusiastic, and high-souled. Hence he was _the very serf_ of certain catchwords! If one breathed ‘Brutus’ nothing could keep the poet-politician from leaping to his feet to butcher Lepsius, if one but breathed ‘as in 1814,’ Thiéry was secretly ready to press Lepsius to his breast.”)

“But,” demands the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet now, smuggling a cachou into his mouth, “where is the guarantee of the promise ‘as in 1814’? Certainly, fancy pictures to us in that workshop of the Palais-Lepsius the models of many a mechanism which will whiff into wind the barricades of the next 18th Brumaire or 2nd of December, to say nothing of the _corps d’armée_ of the Fatherland and the navies of Albion. And, indeed, they exist, these legions of ingenious steels! For it was but yesterday that Colonel Doumic, whom Barras, of Public Works, and I met at Bignon’s, was dropping hints of another wonderful thing, a ‘steerable bullet,’ he said, which, it appears, is to be both a bullet and a boat, being made with a hole somewhere in its steel to hold a man, who will steer it.... It appears, my friends, that the keel of this contrivance will merely skim along the sea’s surface, being upheld by the rebound of a gun or something exploding downward, I forget how many times a minute; and the boat so upheld will be swept forward rocketwise by another succession of explosions, like a motor-car; so that this thing will safely visit vessel after vessel at bullet’s rate, with fatal results to all a navy within some minutes. Doumic should know, being one of the elect with the individual in question: for is it not Doumic who already is choosing the regiments to be quartered upon Paris, in order to send them back to the provinces imbued, one after the other, with this new-imperial dream? But as for me, who am hardly still a youth, I little believe in dreams that are unrealised; I have witnessed many, many things, and heard many words: I have heard Cora Pearl hum the _Kyrie_, and I have beheld Alfred de Musset sober. Hence to me the individual in question is mainly a _directeur de spectacle forain_—a famous one, it is true. His palaces that are like the blasphemous gardens built to reproduce Paradise by that king of Irim whom the gods struck blind for arrogance—then the revels—his Moon-proposal—then his riding of his _Chérie_ to victory at Longchamp—his Exhibition-proposal—then this kiss—each seems to belong to a series of scenic——”

“_Was_ the kiss scenic?” asked Mr. E. Reader Meade semi-privately of Saïd Pasha, upon which Saïd Pasha undid his cross-looking lip to answer, “No, monsieur. I state only a fact when I declare that for over four months I have foreknown some such collapse of the intellectual tension of the individual in question—a collapse owing, I say again, to a magnetic gale and to nothing else. Nor was this thing at all sought by Monsieur Lepsius. He is not, we are aware, by nature a Petrarch or Ortis; he is by nature an athlete, an engineer, a financier, a juggler, a sage—what you will, save a gallant; and as others flee the pest, so he has fled this infirmity of his. All which, by the way, I can state on the authority of a man already known, I think, to Monsieur Meade, to Monsieur l’Abbé Sauriau, and to Monsieur le Duc de Rey-Drouilhet, one Shan Healy, who is known to have followed Monsieur Lepsius from England to Ceylon, to Japan, and other regions, some couple of years ago: and from this man’s statement one is afraid that the blame for what has taken place must be laid upon the lady. In fact, although Monsieur Lepsius certainly knew the young girl before his departure from Europe, and knew on his return that she was then in France with her aunt, the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard, he appears to have given himself no sort of pains to greet her again; nor was it until some four months after his star had well risen over the horizon, that the eyes of the two individuals in question encountered one another on the Palais-Lepsius roof, during the morning hours of that ball that followed upon the passing of the Moon Bill. We remember the sight, messieurs: a morning all stars, the Champs Elysées all one swarm of carriage-lights from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, the Palais-Lepsius looking like one of the buildings of Chilminar or Balbec which the genii are believed to have wished into being, and everyone to be met there, save Monsieur Lepsius himself. Monsieur Lepsius, it appears, had gone to sleep during the rout at his usual hour, but at the hour of three had roused himself to go up to his observatory, no one but his servant being with him; and up there he was, his gaze glued to his tube, a busy-body in the concerns of other worlds, when the lady, as ladies seem to conceive it their duty to do, smartly recalled him to this one. ‘Oh! pardon,’ says she, and with what object, or by what right, she had got herself up thither is not known, though she was not the only one of the guests who, beguiled by the desire of the eye, were roaming _ad lib._ through the rooms of the building that night. At all events, as her lips part to pronounce her ‘pardon,’ the other individual in question darts his glance round from the glass to her, crouches there aghast some eight seconds, gazing, dumb-struck, and—vanishes. Monsieur Healy declares that his heart all but ceased to beat, believing as he did that his master, who had darted out of a casement, had cast his body headlong down! Well, three several times since then have the two individuals——”

But now, before the anecdotist could further go, a sound arose and grew, not loud, but universal over the grounds of the Club, the Avenue, l’Etoile—a rumour in whose droning the word “Lepsius” was to be heard, as a troop of Zouaves and Turcos, riding all in their bright robes, broke into the ocean-current of carriages that rolled through the Avenue. Up from the Elysées they came, making down for the Bois de Boulogne; and up soon after them trotted another crowd of troopers—Moors, Hindoos—voluminous in their vestments of various hues, carrying javelins (jereeds), with streamers, on large chargers which caracoled; and, close behind these, three carriages with gentlemen-ushers, household gentlemen; and up behind these outriders; grooms costumed in green and gold; pigmies in jockey-caps, from which hung fringes of gold; and up behind all a phaeton hauled by Orloff horses that haughtily pawed the air, to fling far their front-hoofs, trotting. In this sat Lepsius. He was in mufti, but clearly no “mere _pékin_,” the insignia of the Grand Cordon of the Legion showing his connection with the Army; and by his side sat a girl who looked American, on her lap a scribbling-book, and flying in her fingers a pencil. He, as he drove up, bowed repeatedly a little to the buzz that droned about his ear, but without ever once glancing upward, his lips never ceasing to move and murmur to the girl whose fingers flew. And away to the wood swept the wind of it.

Everyone then turned anew to sip his _aperitif_, and the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet was anew observing that turn-outs so perfect had not conquered the eye since “the early sixties,” when a man with white hair that curled upward at his nape came up to the table of our anecdotists to inquire whether the Comte de Courcy had been with them, or had been noticed about the club. “I had to meet the count here,” he explained; and something humble, bowed down and sad in his air touched their compunction. During the moving-by of the cavalry troop he had been semi-secretly eyeing the sight through trees some distance from the street; then had come out to seek the count, and now was about to fare farther, when all at once the count himself was there with a raised hat, and at once, grasping the old man’s hand, he began to present “Dr. Lepsius” to the rest.

“‘Lepsius’?” Isabeau Thiéry breathed the word.

“_Need_ I explain,” said Monsieur le Comte, taking a chair, all business, all smiles, with dimples in the chart of his large face, “that there may be many men of that name?—_not_ necessarily related by ties of family? which ties, in any case, can never possess much weight in the matter of politics. So that if by chance we here are all a harmony, politically speaking——”

The count’s eye ran prying with an underlook about the table from face to face, whereat Mr. E. Reader Meade glanced at Saïd Pasha, Saïd Pasha glanced at Mr. Meade, and they two got up to bow themselves out of the business, while the others, with glances at one another, silently smiled.

Then Monsieur le Comte de Courcy, fingering a crucifix of gold that from of old lay smooth from his fingering under his shirt-frills, said to the others, “Gentlemen, it is not without a purpose that I present to you now (rather than more formally at our meeting this evening in Monseigneur Piscari’s house) our actuated by precisely the same motives as ourselves, nay, if possible, by motives still nobler, concerned not with France alone, but of world-wide anxiety. He brings with him something which, as I believe that it will prove of even extreme interest to you, I wished to lay before the Abbé Sauriau, our excellent secretary, previous to our meeting at Monseigneur Piscari’s this evening, in order——”

“Gentlemen,” suddenly rising, said Dr. Lepsius in a low tone, “I think that perhaps if I took a stroll while you talk the matter over, that might be more in order. I will be back to answer any question that may occur to you,” whereat hats were anew raised, the doctor went away, Monsieur de Courcy’s underlook peered about to see that nobody was too near, and now he drew with care from out a pocket-book a bit of paper, rather brown and brittle, that had passed through flame. He laid it on the table: and quickly, like a congress of eagles, the intriguers’ heads were together over it, the old duke skipping like a youth closer round to it, and that lax skin of the Abbé Sauriau’s brow, which above was narrow, broad below, twitching short-sightedly over the browned words, while his bush burned. Only the Count de Courcy leaned back, fingering his secret crucifix, musing through his cigarette fumes upon the clouds, humorously dimpled. (“He was ever healthy and happy-hearted when in office-harness,” says Saïd Pasha of him, “with a no small degree of rush and magnetism when revelling in the thick of affairs; one of your true _gens de bureau_; an intellect essentially narrow, bigot, bourgeois, as ‘devout’ as he was profoundly irreligious; but iron; and the busier the blither.”)

And presently when Isabeau Thiéry, demanded whence the paper came, “This script,” replied the Comte de Courcy, “is a portion of a private letter written from Paris some seven months ago to a certain English nobleman who is a Directeur Publique—say a ‘Permanent Under-Secretary’—of Her Britannic Majesty’s Government. By what succession of good chances the fragment has got itself into the hands of our friend, Dr. Lepsius, will no doubt be described by him to-night at Monseigneur Piscari’s.”

“But can we be sure who wrote it?” Isabeau Thiéry said, “when it lacks a signature?” to which the count stopped his humming to reply, “Would a signature add to our certainty, monsieur, when the individual whom you have in your mind is said to write a hundred hands a day, as it suits his purpose? But surely the internal evidence furnishes us with a certainty which is ample.”

“Oh, ample,” said Monsieur Leflô, glancing up.

“Well, he is a showman,” sighed the old gossip, rising with satisfied old eyes from the script, while his eye-glass dropped.

“But he is mad,” added the Abbé Sauriau.

“That is the definition of God,” remarked Isabeau Thiéry: “a showman who is mad”—a remark which caused the Comte de Courcy to laugh, though with one hand he was at the crucifix, while with the other he was taking up to replace in its nook the bit of paper, which had on it, still to be read through the burn, the typewritten words, “World ... redistribution which I shall choose ... two worlds ... nevertheless, England ... world’s total capital ... Bank of Dresd ... S. America _plus_ Africa the first, Asia _plus_ Russia the second, the rest of Europe _plus_ North America the ... Russia, too, to be included in Manchuria ... the Caspian ... from the Caspian to the Bosphorus ... France first, then, by means of France, the world.... The ocean of blood which will flow, but that, of course ... Quebec to be the capital of the world, and the seat of my ... Moon ... has been too stupid ... shape of the ape’s brain ... nevertheless, moonlight will ... like the eggs of the ostrich, which she hatches, not by sitting on them, but by just gazing at them, so I may.... If the moon had been of some beautiful hue, and of a brighter light, and a reliable light, men ... would naturally have used the day-time for slumber.... Even birds and brutes, I assume, will soon learn to prefer the mood of the beautiful night-time of my ... it is for _you_, therefore ... when the Exhibition ... come to Paris at ... discreet fash ... afterwards ... my friend and....”

“Well, it is a great and a gallant brain, after all,” cried Isabeau Thiéry with a flush, when Monsieur le Comte had put away his pocket-book with the script in it.

“A great and a gallant brain,” mused the Minister of the Interior, who, fingering his imperial, was smiling at the sky; “though not a Christian, not a Catholic, not a French brain.”

“Tush! the brain of a precocious, pert youth,” observed the Abbé Sauriau, with a burning bush, “whom it is the duty of us all to remove out of harm’s way without more delay.”

“Though that will not be done without difficulty, mind you!” Monsieur Leflô remarked with a little grimace, planting his fore finger-tip against his hard nut: “but in the event of a citation of the individual before the Sixth Correctional Tribunal, with a view to obtaining a decree of banishment against him for instigating civil strife, I should say that this document would be of use.”

“The Sixth Correctional Tribunal,” mused the count, smiling; “I thought, however, that that idea had by this time been abandoned by us all, if only for the reason that the trial could not possibly be completed before the Exhibition, during which, as we assume, the _coup d’état_ that we dread is to take place? Personally I cannot help thinking that a court-trial of uncertain termination is no longer pertinent to the situation, especially as we have been so happy as to win the sanction of the Church (in the persons of Monsieur l’Abbé and of Monseigneur) to move urgent and more certain ways of averting this danger to the world.”

The Abbé Sauriau, who had a habit of ever eyeing his right shoe and red sock, which shook up continually (the leg being crossed), struck smartly with his gloves, remarking, “A stronghold close to the coast, with grim bastions and the gloomiest of oubliettes! twelve or fifteen years of that is what the youth wants——” and he struck back his spread of hair that broadened lankly out down over the ears, the Count de Courcy repeating with approval in his musing manner, “Twelve to fifteen years of that, twelve to fifteen years——” and going suddenly grim-red, he giggled gleefully to himself.

“Monsieur l’Abbé is right,” the old Duc de Rey-Drouilhet said: “fifteen years of a bastille’s oubliette is known to induce in a youth a definite diffidence as to using his lips in public, either in speaking or in kissing,” at which speech Monsieur de Courcy, who was drinking menthe, grew crimson, gripping his glass so grimly that it cracked, the green fluid streaming from the table to the abbé’s sock.

“If it can be done ...” muttered Monsieur Leflô; “_if_ it can be done....”

“Why, Monsieur le Prefect,” said the abbé, “was it not a Frenchman who said that ‘cannot’ is a _bête de mot_?”

“That is a truth, too, monsieur!” cried Isabeau Thiéry, “and provided it prove necessary....”

But now a trooper, as troopers do everywhere pursue every Ministre de l’Intérieur, came to the table with a document for the Count de Courcy, who, making his excuses, raised himself to hasten away; but some yards off stopped to beckon to the Abbé Sauriau, who rolled after him with his big stick and soft hat, and together they two walked toward the minister’s carriage, the abbé’s top-heavy bulk, all thickness of shoulder without any throat, shambling short below the minister’s mass; and the minister said to him, “Twelve to fifteen years of a bastille by the coast, you say: and, certainly, such things have often enough been effected by private effort for public purposes. But I do not blind myself to the fact that it would be beyond the Law, and—in fact—I have to consult you now on a matter of—conduct. I am now about to go through a singular interview, and I—address myself, Monsieur l’Abbé, to the ecclesiastic in you. You understand me, I think. We are all first of all Catholics and good Christians, are we not? and afterwards men-of-state. A singular interview—with a woman, who, on the strength of having been in the same yacht, the same house, as myself some three years since, has lately—thrice—addressed herself to me by letter. A lady’s maid she—_was_; and as such knew the individual whom we have been discussing: for this individual whom we habitually associate only with the future has also, it appears, a past—aye, and a shameful past, too—I say a baleful and abominable past—which merits to be punished, which it is righteous to punish. Think of it, Monsieur l’Abbé! as a mere boy—oh, really, my blood boils to speak of these turpitudes!—he not only betrayed this poor soul, but afterwards robbed her of all, all, her paltry savings; was chased through the thoroughfares of London for petty theft....”

“The young Lepsius?”

“Yes, Monsieur l’Abbé—your hero.”

“Whose hero?”

“Is it not being stated on the boulevards by Léon Bergerac in particular, who is always the best informed man in Paris, that you are bitten by an infatuation which is half an idolatry of admiration, and half a hatred, and wholly a hankering, that hardly permits you to talk of aught but of one being?”

“_I?_” breathed the Abbé Sauriau, standing still to stare, revealed a moment to himself; then with rage, “oh, he lies, he lies: Léon Bergerac is known to be my enemy!”

“Well, well, no doubt,” muttered the minister “... but as to this woman, whose name is Auvache——”

“Not the Jeanne Auvache who threw vitriol at the individual in question at Dover on the 11th of November, threw it wide, and was imprisoned for five months?” queried Monsieur l’Abbé.

“It _may_,” said the minister, “be the same; in fact—it is a possibility; though the name is not an uncommon one, Monsieur l’Abbé—Auvache—men, women enough of that name, you will say. But I may tell you one thing: this woman has been spied by a clerk in her lodgings throwing vials of water at a nail’s head .... It is her hobby, it seems, having arranged rows of vials on the floor, to eject water at a run from them upon a nail in the wall; a drill of the eye, wrist, fingers, that goes on regularly in the loneliness of that garret every day; she will also practise herself in rushing with a knife to stab a bull’s-eye on the wall—_why_, no one can say.”

The Abbé Sauriau pondered it for some moments, and presently observed, “She must be an imbecile.”

“That is what I have said to myself, Monsieur l’Abbé,” replied the minister; “why else should the woman, in wishing to obtain an _entrée_ into the _valetaille_ Lepsius, address herself to _me_? unless by some chance she is aware that I know one Nundcumar, a functionary in the Palais-Lepsius.... This Nundcumar has risen, Monsieur l’Abbé. Eight years ago he was a lean scarecrow down on his luck about Paris and London, pretending to be a doctor of medicine, but possessing even less knowledge of medicine than the present Prefect of Police possesses of the police. Then he became a cook, and it was thus that I again came across him at Egmond, the Brittany château of the Comtesse de Pichegru-Picard. Then he remigrated to his native Agra, and was there met and admired by the individual whom we now have in our minds—so Nundcumar avers, though this person, who never ceases to speak, certainly never yet produced a word which by chance was an accuracy. At all events, I am still in touch with the man, and could easily induce him—to-day even—to introduce that ill-used and lunatic woman into the _valetaille_ Lepsius, provided I do not definitely find in my interview with her presently that she has any purpose in view other than the search for work.”

Monsieur l’Abbé pondered it a little. Then, “Let it be so, then,” he suddenly replied, as they now arrived at the count’s brougham; “but though your interview will no doubt prove over-brief to permit of any deep probing into the woman’s motives and so on, you will very likely find the time to impress upon her that the practice, or drill, with the _knife_, at least, is quite offensive, while——”

“You have known how to say what I was only able to think, Monsieur l’Abbé.... Au revoir, then.” And the Count de Courcy drove away.

The abbé then turned to go back to the table of the gossips; but now a little girl who was gambolling among the trees, tumbling down before his feet and beginning to scream, immediately he had her garnered in his arms, hugging her to his bosom, his lips on her head, with whimperings of love (“for,” says a Note of Saïd Pasha, “he had a most fond father’s heart, if especially for children, hardly less for all the world, whenever he was not merciless with envy of some other mind”); and he toyed before the child’s eyes one of his few coins, saying, “But look, then, all this is for thee—all, all,” and he pointed at the receding brougham, leering, breathing, “Look! that is the brougham of Monsieur the Minister of the Interior—but look! a man whose ‘blood boils to speak of these turpitudes’ since he has need to condone his deeds to his own shabby-genteel conscience”—and he clasped the little girl’s fingers upon the franc, placed her on the ground, and now hurried back to the table where by now Dr. Lepsius was again sitting with the gossips.