The Baron could be excessively amusing, and was so this day of his arrival at S. Pharamond; but Othmar would gladly have been free of his presence. He knew that the old man would see at a glance, if he and Nadine Napraxine met before him, that time had not cured him of passion; and the malice and the contempt of his uncle were both disagreeable to him. Moreover, Othmar had been too perpetually agreed with all his life to be pleased by the constant enunciation of opinions and sentiments the reverse of his own. There was that in the tranquil cynicism of Baron Friederich which left him with a sense of moral nausea. Men, it is true, were not worth much; but he could never get accustomed to the calm manner in which his uncle was habitually ready to sacrifice all their interests--their bodies, too, had there been any question of them--to what he considered advantageous to himself and to his house in public life and finance.
He did not care for the new Russian loan, for the new Turkish loan, for the great naval dockyards to be made by Germany on the Baltic, for the railway that was to be driven along the ancient bed of the Oxus, nor for the necessities of the empire of Brazil, nor for the development of Canadian forests. It did not interest him that such and such a sovereign would be a cripple without his help, or such and such a country as virtually in pawn to him as though it had been a pledged estate; that the assistance of his gold could enable a Ministry to keep its tenure of office, or the refusal of it could precipitate a State into revolution; to Baron Fritz it was like holding the reins of the universe, but to Othmar himself it was excessively dull work. The heir of four generations of money-lenders, he was absolutely indifferent to the immense power which lay in the stroke of his pen; the genius of finance was inherited by him, though dormant in him; even his uncle did justice to the accuracy of his vision, to the certainty of his instinct; but it was genius unused; he had no taste to employ its capacities. Europe was as indifferent to him as a mound of clay.
'We only do mischief, unmitigated mischief,' he asserted very often. 'Look at the Canal of Suez; it has only bred wars and pretexts for wars, and will probably embroil England and France for the next century,--until indeed India shall have become Russian, or the African negro have avenged Abd-el-Kadir. Then again take the Panama project: it will set Great Britain and the United States at each other's throats like two bull-dogs.'