"Then they are not formally affianced?" she suggested.
"_Mon Dieu!_ no. I clearly indicated that there were other things to be thought of at the present time. A very arduous task lies before him, but he is equal to it, I am certain. My conviction as to that grows as one knows him better."
"But you are not prepared to allow the young people to force you to take a leap in the dark," suggested Madame de Chantonnay. "And that poor Juliette must consume her soul in patience; but she is sensible, as you justly say. Yes, my dear Marquis, she is charming."
They were thus engaged in facile talk when Albert de Chantonnay emerged from the long window of his study, a room opening on to a moss-grown terrace, where this plotter walked to and fro like another Richelieu and brooded over nation-shaking schemes.
He carried a letter in his hand and wore an air of genuine perturbment.
But even in his agitation he looked carefully round before he spoke.
"Here," he said to the Marquis and his fond mother, who watched him with complacency--"here I have a letter from Dormer Colville. It is necessarily couched in very cautious language. He probably knows, as I know, that any letter addressed to me is liable to be opened. I have reason to believe that some of my letters have not only been opened, but that copies of them are actually in the possession of that man--the head of that which is called the Government."
He turned and looked darkly into a neighbouring clump of rhododendrons, as if Louis Napoleon were perhaps lurking there. But he was nevertheless quite right in his suspicions, which were verified twenty years later, along with much duplicity which none had suspected.
"Nevertheless," he went on, "I know what Colville seeks to convey to us, and is now hurrying away from Paris to confirm to us by word of mouth.
The bank of John Turner in the Rue Lafayette has failed, and with it goes all the fortune of Madame St. Pierre Lawrence."
Both his hearers exclaimed aloud, and Madame de Chantonnay showed signs of a desire to swoon; but as no one took any notice, she changed her mind.
"It is a ruse to gain time," explained Albert, brushing the thin end of his moustache upward with a gesture of resolution. "Just as the other was a ruse to gain time. It is at present a race between two resolute parties. The party which is ready first and declares itself will be the victor. For to-day our poor France is in the gutter: she is in the hands of the canaille, and the canaille will accept the first who places himself upon an elevation and scatters gold. What care they--King or Emperor, Emperor or King! It is the same to them so long as they have a change of some sort and see, or think they see, gain to themselves to be s.n.a.t.c.hed from it."
From which it will be seen that Albert de Chantonnay knew his countrymen.
"But," protested Madame de Chantonnay, who had a Frenchwoman"s inimitable quickness to grasp a situation--the Government could scarcely cause a bank to fail--such an old-established bank as Turner"s, which has existed since the day of Louis XIV--in order to gain time."
"An unscrupulous Government can do anything in France," replied the lady"s son. "Their existence depends upon delay, and they are aware of it. They would ruin France rather than forego their own aggrandis.e.m.e.nt.
And this is part of their scheme. They seek to delay us at all costs. To kidnap de Bourbon was the first move. It failed. This is their second move. What must be our counter-move?"
He clasped his hands behind his willowy back and paced slowly backward and forward. By a gesture, Madame de Chantonnay bade the Marquis keep silence while she drew his attention to the att.i.tude of her son. When he paused and fingered his whisker she gasped excitedly.
"I have it," said Albert, with an upward glance of inspiration.
"Yes, my son?"
"The Beauvoir estate," replied Albert, "left to me by my uncle. It is worth three hundred thousand francs. That is enough for the moment. That must be our counter-move."
Madame de Chantonnay protested volubly. For if Frenchmen are ready to sacrifice, or, at all events, to risk all for a sentiment--and history says nothing to the contrary--Frenchwomen are eminently practical and far-sighted.
Madame had a hundred reasons why the Beauvoir estate should not be sold.
Many of them contradicted each other. She was not what may be called a close reasoner, but she was roughly effective. Many a general has won a victory not by the accuracy, but by the volume of his fire.
"What will become of France," she cried to Albert"s retreating back as he walked to and fro, "if none of the old families has a son to bless itself with? And Heaven knows that there are few enough remaining now. Besides, you will want to marry some day, and what will your bride say when you have no money? There are no _dots_ growing in the hedgerows now. Not that I am a stickler for a _dot_. Give me heart, I always say, and keep the money yourself. And some day you will find a loving heart, but no _dot_.
And there is a tragedy at once--ready made. Is it not so, my old friend?"
She turned to the Marquis de Gemosac for confirmation of this forecast.
"It is a danger, Madame," was the reply. "It is a danger which it would be well to foresee."
They had discussed a hundred times the possibility of a romantic marriage between their two houses. Juliette and Albert--the two last representatives of an old n.o.bility long-famed in the annals of the west--might well fall in love with each other. It would be charming, Madame thought; but, alas! Albert would be wise to look for a _dot_.
The Marquis paused. Again he temporised. For he could not all in an instant decide which side of this question to take. He looked at Albert, frail, romantic; an ideal representative of that old n.o.bility of France which was never practical, and elected to go to the guillotine rather than seek to cultivate that modern virtue.
"At the same time, Madame, it is well to remember that a loan offered now may reasonably be expected to bring such a return in the future as will provide _dots_ for the de Chantonnays to the end of time."
Madame was about to make a spirited reply; she might even have suggested that the Beauvoir estate would be better apportioned to Albert"s wife than to Juliette as the wife of another, but Albert himself stopped in front of them and swept away all argument by a pa.s.sionate gesture of his small, white hand.
"It is concluded," he said. "I sell the Beauvoir estate! Have not the Chantonnays proved a hundred times that they are equal to any sacrifice for the sake of France?"
CHAPTER x.x.xV
A SQUARE MAN
All through the summer of 1851--a year to be marked for all time in the minds of historians, not in red, but in black letters--the war of politics tossed France hither and thither.
There were, at this time, five parties contending for mastery. Should one of these appear for the moment to be about to make itself secure in power, the other four would at once unite to tear the common adversary from his unstable position. Of these parties, only two were of real cohesion: the Legitimists and the Bonapartists. The Socialists, the Moderate Republicans, and the Orleanists were too closely allied in the past to be friendly in the present. Socialists are noisy, but rarely clever. A man who in France describes himself as Moderate must not expect to be popular for any length of time. The Orleanists were only just out of office. It was scarcely a year since Louis Philippe had died in exile at Claremont--only three years since he signed his abdication and hurried across to Newhaven. It was not the turn of the Orleanists.
There is no quarrel so deadly as a family quarrel; no fall so sudden as that of a house divided against itself. All through the spring and summer of 1851 France exhibited herself in the eyes of the world a laughing-stock to her enemies, a thing of pity to those who loved that great country.
The Republic of 1848 was already a house divided against itself.
Its President, Louis Bonaparte, had been elected for four years. He was, as the law then stood, not eligible again until after the lapse of another four years. His party tried to abrogate this law, and failed. "No matter," they said, "we shall elect him again, and President he shall be, despite the law."
This was only one of a hundred such clouds, no bigger than a man"s hand, arising at this time on the political horizon. For France was beginning to wander down that primrose path where a law is only a law so long as it is convenient.
There was one man, Louis Bonaparte, who kept his head when others lost that invaluable adjunct; who pushed on doggedly to a set purpose; whose task was hard even in France, and would have been impossible in any other country. For it is only in France that ridicule does not kill. And twice within the last fifteen years--once at Strasbourg, once at Boulogne--he had made the world hold its sides at the mention of his name, greeting with the laughter which is imbittered by scorn, a failure d.a.m.ned by ridicule.
It has been said that Louis Bonaparte never gave serious thought to the Legitimist party. He had inherited, it would seem, that invaluable knowledge of men by which his uncle had risen to the greatest throne of modern times. He knew that a party is never for a moment equal to a Man.
And the Legitimists had no man. They had only the Comte de Chambord.
At Frohsdorff they still clung to their hopes, with that old-world belief in the ultimate revival of a dead regime which was eminently characteristic. And at Frohsdorff there died, in the October of this year, the d.u.c.h.ess of Angouleme, Marie Therese Charlotte, daughter of Marie Antoinette, who had despised her two uncles, Louis XVIII and Charles X, for the concessions they had made--who was more Royalist than the King. She was the last of her generation, the last of her family, and with her died a part of the greatness of France, almost all the dignity of royalty, and the last master-mind of the Bourbon race.
If, as Albert de Chantonny stated, the failure of Turner"s bank was nothing but a ruse to gain time, it had the desired effect. For a s.p.a.ce, nothing could be undertaken, and the Marquis de Gemosac and his friends were hindered from continuing the work they had so successfully begun.
All through the summer Loo Barebone remained in France, at Gemosac as much as anywhere. The Marquis de Gemosac himself went to Frohsdorff.
"If she had been ten years younger," he said, on his return, "I could have persuaded her to receive you. She has money. All the influence is hers. It is she who has had the last word in all our affairs since the death of the Due de Berri. But she is old--she is broken. I think she is dying, my friend."
It was the time of the vintage again. Barebone remembered the last vintage, and his journey through those provinces that supply all the world with wine, with Dormer Colville for a companion. Since then he had journeyed alone. He had made a hundred new friends, had been welcomed in a hundred historic houses. Wherever he had pa.s.sed, he had left enthusiasm behind him--and he knew it.
He had grown accustomed to his own power, and yet its renewed evidence was a surprise to him every day. There was something unreal in it. There is always something unreal in fame, and great men know in their own hearts that they are not great. It is only the world that thinks them so.
When they are alone--in a room by themselves--they feel for a moment their own smallness. But the door opens, and in an instant they arise and play their part mechanically.
This had come to be Barebone"s daily task. It was so easy to make his way in this world, which threw its doors open to him, greeted him with outstretched hands, and only asked him to charm them by being himself. He had not even to make an effort to appear to be that which he was not. He had only to be himself, and they were satisfied.
Part of his role was Juliette de Gemosac. He found it quite easy to make love to her; and she, it seemed, desired nothing better. Nothing definite had been said by the Marquis de Gemosac. They were not formally affianced. They were not forbidden to see each other. But the irregularity of these proceedings lent a certain spice of surrept.i.tiousness to their intercourse which was not without its charm.