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This was sheer vanity on the Prince's part. He could not bear to have his great Bleriots dark, while our humbler acetylene illumined the way for His Mightiness. Suddenly we ran out of the bewildering lights and shadows, woven across our way by the moon, into the lights of a town; and two douaniers appeared in the road, holding up their hands for us to stop.
In haste to escape from the heat of the plains of Tuscany, we were not sorry when we saw the douaniers of Pistoia, the last of its cities. This town is dulness, not epitomized, but extended over a considerable space; its streets are many, long, and, what is not usual in Italy, wide.
They often drove up to Baraque Michel, that lonely inn on the borders between Belgium and Prussia, in which the douaniers drank their drams of gin when on the look-out for smugglers, and where the peat-cutters dry their smocks that the mist has wetted and their saturated boots at the fire that is always burning on the hearth.
Things as they are may be fun for lawyers and politicians and court people and douaniers; they may suit the loan-mongers and the armaments shareholders, they may even be more comfortable for the middle-aged, but what, except as an inconvenience, does that matter to you or me?" Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept away empires. There was always a point when the rhetoric broke into gesture.
Thus, in 1810, the year of Prussia's deepest woe, when her brave Queen died of a stricken heart, when French soldiers and douaniers were seizing and burning colonial wares, her thinkers came into closer touch with her men of action, with mutually helpful results. Thinkers ceased to be mere dreamers, and Prussian officials gained a wider outlook on life.
Such a tariff called for a highly drilled army of those sufficiently rare individuals, honest douaniers, endowed also with Napoleonic activity and omniscience. But, as Chaptal remarked, the Emperor had never thought much about the needs of commerce, and he despised merchants as persons who had "neither a faith nor a country, whose sole object was gain."
Two douaniers, one French, the other Italian, lounging on opposite sides of the little stream flowing down from the Gorge of St. Louis, told that this was the frontier. It was not the road to Italy that Mary knew, when once or twice she had motored over the high bridge flung across the dark Gorge of St. Louis on excursions to Bordighera and San Remo.
In a word, wherever France had power, the slightest communication with England was henceforth to be treason against the majesty of Napoleon; and every coast of Europe was to be lined with new armies of douaniers and gens-d'armes, for the purpose of carrying into effect what he called "the continental system."
Meanwhile Louis, nettled by the inquisitions of the French douaniers, and by the order of his brother to seize all American ships in Dutch ports, was drawing on himself further reproaches and threats: "Louis, you are incorrigible ... you do not want to reign for any length of time. States are governed by reason and policy, and not by acrimony and weakness."
"You must know, sir, everything is much too dear for us here, and it is much cheaper on the other side of the frontier," said the old man in a troubled voice; then, raising his fist slowly, he shook it at the Venn that lay there so peaceful and remote from the world. "But they were soon on his tracks. They came after him from the Baraque the accursed douaniers. Three, four of them.
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