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The orchestra looked resignedly bored. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Marquis Drouyn de l'Huys, gave a costume ball which was even finer than the last. Worth, Laferrieres, and Felix outdid themselves. The Empress had a magnificent dress une ancienne dame Bavaroise. She looked superb, actually covered and blazing with jewels. The Comtesse de Castiglione had imagined a costume as "La Verite."
The count remained with Porthos at a farm-house near by. He made a slow recovery, the colonel complaining bitterly that M. Merton's methods lacked the refinement of the French duel. The papers contained, among other documents, a rough draft of a letter dated October 15, 1862, from M. Drouyn de Lhuys proposing intervention to the courts of England and Russia.
Bigelow, in the course of a conversation with M. Drouyn de Lhuys, asked him, "in his own name, and without prejudicing the opinion of his government, if he did not think that the recognition of Maximilian by the United States would facilitate and hasten the recall of the French troops."
On the 26th, just as Bismarck was going to the final sitting of the Conference, the French Ambassador again called on him, this time to lay before him a despatch in which Drouyn de Lhuys stated that he had not wished to impede the negotiations with Austria, but would now observe that the French sanction to the Prussian annexations presupposed a fair indemnification to France, and that the Emperor would confer with Prussia concerning this as soon as his rôle of mediator was at an end.
He took a hand by attempting to inspire M. Drouyn de L'huys with distrust of England, telling him he "HAD SEEN...a letter from a leading member of the British Cabinet...in which he very plainly insinuated that France was playing an unfair game," trying to use England as Napoleon's catspaw.
Among them was a draft of a letter of Drouyn de Lhuys, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, and on this and on others were sharp comments in the emperor's well-known hand, giving reasons for acknowledging the Confederacy without delay. There were even hints at intervention by the European powers as desirable.
More than any minister with whose official correspondence we are acquainted, he carried the principle of paper money into diplomacy, and bewildered Earl Russell and M. Drouyn de Lhuys with a horrible doubt as to the real value of the verbal currency they were obliged to receive.
Drouyn de Lhuys, and to suggest to him that the interests of the United States, and, as it seems to us, the interests of France herself, require that a solution of the present complications in Mexico be made, as early as may be convenient, upon the basis of the unity and independence of Mexico.
These, however, had preceded us, so that with the exception of M. Drouyn de Lhuys, we had the saloon carriage to ourselves. The party was a very large one, including the Walewskis, the Persignys, the Metternichs he, the Austrian Ambassador Prince Henri VII. of Reuss, Prussian Ambassador, the Prince de la Moskowa, son of Marshal Ney, and the Labedoyeres, amongst the historical names.
France, indignant at such cavalier treatment, recalled M. Drouyn de Lhuys from London, and again the war-cloud lowered.
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