“What, then, does your grace take me for? It is not that I wish it known that there is a king here.”
“Then in heaven’s name do not be obstinate, but let us have dinner at four.”
“But at four o’clock, your grace, what I am expecting will not have arrived.”
“What are you expecting? a fish, like M. Vatel?”
“Does your grace wish that I should tell you?”
“Then, your grace, I wait for a bottle of wine.”
“A bottle of wine! Explain yourself, sir, the thing begins to interest me.”
“Listen then, your grace; his majesty the King of Sweden—I beg pardon, the Count Haga I should have said—drinks nothing but tokay.”
“Well, am I so poor as to have no tokay in my cellar? If so, I must dismiss my butler.”
“Not so, your grace; on the contrary, you have about sixty bottles.”
“Well, do you think Count Haga will drink sixty bottles with his dinner?”
“No, your grace; but when Count Haga first visited France, when he was only prince royal, he dined with the late king, who had received twelve bottles of tokay from the Emperor of Austria. You are aware that the tokay of the finest vintages is reserved exclusively for the cellar of the emperor, and that kings themselves can only drink it when he pleases to send it to them.”
“Then, your grace, of these twelve bottles of which the prince royal drank, only two remain. One is in the cellar of his majesty Louis XVI.——”
“Ah, your grace!” said the maître-d’hôtel, with a triumphant smile, for he felt that, after the long battle he had been fighting, the moment of victory was at hand, “the other one was stolen.”
“By one of my friends, the late king’s butler, who was under great obligations to me.”
“Certainly, your grace,” said the maître-d’hôtel with pride.
“I placed it carefully in my master’s cellar.”
“Your master! And who was your master at that time?”
“And you have sent to seek this bottle for me!” cried the old marshal.
“For you, your grace,” replied the maître-d’hôtel, in a tone which plainly said, “ungrateful as you are.”
The Duke de Richelieu seized the hand of the old servant and cried, “I beg pardon; you are the king of maîtres d’hôtel.”
“And you would have dismissed me,” he replied, with an indescribable shrug of his shoulders.
“Oh, I will pay you one hundred pistoles for this bottle of wine.”