"By the way," said my guardian, "how are you off for money?"

We were driving back from the station, having seen the newly married couple off on their honeymoon.

"Oh, pretty well," I replied. "Why do you ask?"

He did not seem to hear my reply, but sat gazing out of the carriage-window at the streets we were passing through, and the people, gazing at them contemplatively and from Olympian heights, after the fashion of a god gazing upon beetles.

When we reached the Place VendÔme, he drew me into the library.

"I have been on the point of speaking to you several times lately about money," said he. "Not about personal expenses, but about the bulk of your fortune. It is invested in French securities. Clement, our lawyer, has the number and names of them. They are all good securities, paying good dividends; they are the securities in which I myself have invested my money. Well, I am selling out——"

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

"Selling out—realising. I am collecting my money, marshalling my francs, and marching them out of France into England. I propose to do the same with yours."

"But," said I, "is that safe, to have all our money in a foreign country? Suppose that there should be war?"

The Vicomte laughed.

"You have said the words. Suppose there should be war? France would be smashed like a ball of glass—ouf. Do you think I am blind? At the Tuileries, at the Quai d'Orsay, they speak of M. le Vicomte de Chatellan as a very nice man, perhaps, but out of date—out of date; at the War Minister's it is the same—out of date. Meanwhile, I know the machine. I have counted the batteries of artillery and the regiments of the line on paper, and I have counted them in the field, and contrasted the difference. Not that I care a halfpenny for the things in themselves, but they are the protectors of my money; and as such I look after them. I have reviewed the personality of the people at the Tuileries—not that I care a halfpenny for their psychological details, but they are the stewards of my money; and I examine their physiognomies and their lives to see if they are worthy of trust. I look at society—not that I care a halfpenny for the morals of society, but because the health of society is essential to the health of the State. Now, what do I see? I speak not from any moral standpoint, but just as a man speaks who is anxious about the safety of his money. What do I see? Widespread corruption; peculators hiding peculators—from the man who hides the rotten army contract at the Ministry of War to the man who hides the rottenness of the fodder in the barrack-stable. Widespread corruption; Ministers the servants of vice, each duller than Jocrisse; marshals as wooden and as useless as their bÂtons; skeleton regiments, batteries without cannon, cannon without horses; no esprit; an army of gamins with cigarette-stained fingers and guns in their hands."

The old gentleman, who for seventeen years or so had been in a state of chronic irritation with the Second Empire and its makers, paused in his peregrinations up and down the room, and snapped his fingers. I sat listening in astonishment, for to me, who only saw the varnish and the glitter, France seemed triumphant amongst the nations as the Athena of the Parthenon amongst statues; and the French Army, from the Cent Gardes at the Tuileries to the drummer-boy of the last line regiment, the ne plus ultra of efficacy, splendour, and strength.

He went on:

"Tell me: when you see a house in disorder, bills unpaid, the servants liars and rogues, inefficient and useless, dust swept under the beds, and nothing clean about the place except perhaps the windows and the door-handle: whom do you accuse but the master and the mistress? A nation is a house, and France is a nation. I say no more. I have been a guest at the Tuileries; and it is not for me, who have partaken of their hospitality, to speak against the rulers of France. But I will not allow them to play ducks and drakes with my money. In short, my friend, in my opinion my money is no longer safe in France, and I am going to move it to a place of safety. I have been uneasy for some time, but of late I am not uneasy—I am frightened. I smell disaster."

He did.

Now, in October, 1869, from evidence in my possession, the fate of France was already definitely fixed. Bismarck had decided on war. He had not the slightest enmity toward France, nothing but contempt for her and for the wretched marionettes playing at Royalty in the Tuileries. He was assisting at the birth of the great German Empire, that giant who in a short twelve months was to leap living and armed from the womb of Time. The destruction of France was the surgical operation necessary for the birth—that was all. In October, 1869, the last rivets of the giant's armour were being welded.

My guardian knew nothing of this; yet that extraordinary man had already scented the coming ruin, guessing from the corruption around him the birds of prey beyond the frontier.

"Thank you!" said he, when I had given him permission to deal with my fortunes as his judgment dictated. "And now you have just time to dress for dinner. Remember, you are to accompany me to-night to the ball at the Marquis d'Harmonville's."

I went off to my own rooms not overjoyed. Society functions never appealed to me, and balls were my detestation, for then my lameness was brought into evidence. Condemned not to dance, it was bitter to see other young people enjoying themselves, and to have to stand by and watch them, pretending to oneself not to care. My lameness, though I have dwelt little upon it, was the bane of my life. I fancied that everyone noticed it, and either pitied me or ridiculed me. It was a bitter thing, tainting all my early manhood; it made me avoid young people, and people of the opposite sex. I have seen girls looking at me, and have put their regard down to ridicule or pity—fool that I was!

Joubert put out my evening clothes. Joubert of late had grown more testy than ever, and more domineering. He spent his life in incessant warfare with Beril, the factotum of my guardian; and the extra acidity that he could not vent on Beril he served up to me. But it was the business of Eloise and Franzius (that lot, as he called them) which he had now, to use a vulgar expression, in his nose.

"Not those boots," said I, as he took a pair of patent-leather boots from their resting-place. "Dancing shoes!"

"Dancing shoes!" said Joubert, putting the boots back. "Ah, yes; I forgot that monsieur was a dancer."

"You forgot no such thing, for you know very well I do not dance, but one does not go to a ball in patent-leather boots. You like to fling my lameness in my face. You are turning into vinegar these times. I will pension you, and send you off to the country to live, if M. le Vicomte does not do what he has threatened to do."

"And what may that be?" asked the old fellow, with the impudent air of a naughty child.

"He says he'll put you and Beril in a sack and drop you in the Seine, if he has any more trouble with the pair of you—always fighting like a couple of old cats."

"Old, indeed!" replied Joubert. "Ma foi! it well becomes a young man like the Vicomte to think of age! And did I make you lame? More likely it was a curse from one of that lot——"

"Here!" I said, "give me the hair-brushes, and leave 'that lot,' as you call them alone."

I wondered to myself what Joubert would have said had he known the real cause of my lameness, but I had never spoken to anyone of the child, so like little Carl, the mysterious child who had lured me through the bushes into the hidden gravel-pit. If I had, what ammunition it would have given him against "that lot," as he was pleased to call anyone who had been present at the Schloss Lichtenberg that September nine years ago!

I dined tÊte-À-tÊte with my guardian, then we played a game of ÉcartÉ; and at ten o'clock, the carriage being at the door, we departed for the Marquis d'Harmonville's in the Avenue Malakoff.

It was a very big affair; the Avenue Malakoff was lined with carriages; and we, wedged between the carriage of the Countess de PourtalÈs and that of the Russian Ambassador, had time on our hands, during which the Vicomte, irritated by the loss of five louis at ÉcartÉ and the slowness of the queue, continued his strictures on the social life of Paris and the condition of France.

We passed up the stairs, between a double bank of flowers; and despite the condition of the social life of Paris and the state of France, the scene was very lovely.

The great ballroom—with its scheme of white and gold, its crystal candelabra and its extraordinarily beautiful ceiling, in which, as in a snowstorm, the ice spirits whirled in a fantastic dance—might have been the ballroom in the palace of the Ice Queen but for the warmth, the banks of white camellias, and the music of M. Strauss's band.

Following my usual custom, I cast round for someone whom I could bore with my conversation, a fellow-wall-flower; and it was not long before I lit on M. de PrÉsensÉ, a friend of my guardian, one of those old gentlemen who go everywhere, know everything, talk to everybody, and from whom everyone tries to escape. Delighted to obtain a willing listener, M. de PrÉsensÉ, who did not dance, drew me into a corner and pointed out the notabilities. We had mounted to a kind of balcony, and presently, when M. de PrÉsensÉ was engaged in conversation with a lady of his acquaintance, I stood alone and looked down on the assembled guests.

Recalling them now, and recalling the Vicomte's strictures, it seems strange enough that amidst the guests were most of those who, fatuously playing into Bismarck's hands, brought war and the destruction of war on France; all, nearly, of the undertakers of the Second Empire's funeral were there. The Duc d'Agenor de Gramont; Benedetti, who happened to be in Paris at that time; Marshal Leboeuf, that ruinous fool the clap of whose portfolio cast on the council table at Saint-Cloud was answered by the mobilisation of the German Army; Vareigne, the Palace Prefect of the Tuileries; and, to complete the collection, Baron JÉrome David, destined to be the first recipient of the news of Sedan.

I was looking on and listening, amused and interested by old M. de PrÉsensÉ's descriptions, that were not destitute of barbs and points, when through the crowd in my direction, walking beside my old enemy the Comte de Coigny, came a young man.

A young man, pale, very handsome, with an air of distinction which marked him at once as a person above other people, a distinction which, starlike, reduced the surrounding crowd to the level of wax lights and the function of D'Harmonville to a bourgeois rout. He was dressed in simple evening attire, without jewellery or adornment of any description, except an order set in brilliants, a point of sparkling light which gave the last touch to a picture worthy of the brush of Vandyck or Velasquez.

"Quick!" I said, plucking old M. PrÉsensÉ by the sleeve. "That young man with the Comte de Coigny: who is he?"

"That!—ma foi—he is Baron Carl von Lichtenberg, the new attachÉ at the Prussian Embassy. Oh, yes; he is the sensation of the moment in Paris. The women rave about him——"

But I did not hear what more the old man may have said, for at that moment Von Lichtenberg, as they called him, looking in my direction, caught my eye and halted dead, with his hand on De Coigny's arm.

He seemed stricken with paralysis; the words he had just been saying to his companion withered on his lips; we stared at each other for ten seconds; then De Coigny, glancing in my direction, broke the spell, and, pulling old PrÉsensÉ by the arm, I retired precipitately through an alcove which led to the cardroom.

I was terrified, shocked. Terrified as an animal which suddenly finds itself trapped in a gin; shocked as a man who sees a ghost.

All the nameless excitement and soul-terror that had filled me for a moment as a child when Gretel, in the gallery of the Schloss, had held the light to the portrait of Margaret von Lichtenberg, were mine now again, for the face I had just seen was hers. The Baron Carl von Lichtenberg was little Carl.

I said "Good-evening," to M. PrÉsensÉ, escaped through the cardroom door, got my hat and coat from the attendants, and found myself in the street.