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240 MY TRANSFER TO STOCKHOLM [ch. xiv.
When I recall these strange and significant
conversations held in a festive setting, and to the strains of
dance music, I say to myself that Madame Bovary was
not entirely wrong when she imagined diplomats to be
"people who with a smile on their lips and death in
their hearts whispered terrible secrets to each other,
midst feasts and festivities!"
The last great ball at which I was present was the
one given at the German Embassy. When I entered
those over-gilded rooms, full of valuable marbles
and bronzes, and offering the most ostentatious
specimen of the vilest Berlin taste, I could certainly
not have imagined that less than six months later a
furious yelling crowd would burst in, would break and
shatter all these luxurious possessions, would stain
the well-polished floors with blood, and would wreck
even the marble facings of the palace, henceforth
accursed.
I went, of course, to call on M. Kokovtzoff, and found
him even more gloomy than at our last interview in
Paris. Moreover, at the moment questions of foreign
policy were relegated—temporarily at least—to the
second place, because of the burning question of the
spirit monopolies raised in the bosom of the Council of
the Empire by Count Witte with the obvious intent to
compass the downfall of Kokovtzoff, and—who knows—
perhaps to get his post. With all his serious and
respectable qualities of judgment and intelligence,
Kokovtzoff did not possess the adaptability and subtle
mind necessary for parliamentary struggles; he was too
straight, too upright, and perhaps also too susceptible
for this see-saw policy. He ought to have addressed to
Count Witte the insidious question : how the former
Minister of Finance proposed to make good the loss of
revenue from the spirit monopoly in the Budget; he who
had been the author of this monopoly, and who, like all
his predecessors, had based a third of the Budget of the
Empire on the revenue furnished by the drunkenness
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