Vanity Fair - Page 534/573

It is conducted with no small comfort and splendour. When there are

balls, though there may be four hundred people at supper, there is a

servant in scarlet and lace to attend upon every four, and every one is

served on silver. There are festivals and entertainments going

continually on, and the Duke has his chamberlains and equerries, and

the Duchess her mistress of the wardrobe and ladies of honour, just

like any other and more potent potentates.

The Constitution is or was a moderate despotism, tempered by a Chamber

that might or might not be elected. I never certainly could hear of

its sitting in my time at Pumpernickel. The Prime Minister had

lodgings in a second floor, and the Foreign Secretary occupied the

comfortable lodgings over Zwieback's Conditorey. The army consisted of

a magnificent band that also did duty on the stage, where it was quite

pleasant to see the worthy fellows marching in Turkish dresses with

rouge on and wooden scimitars, or as Roman warriors with ophicleides

and trombones--to see them again, I say, at night, after one had

listened to them all the morning in the Aurelius Platz, where they

performed opposite the cafe where we breakfasted. Besides the band,

there was a rich and numerous staff of officers, and, I believe, a few

men. Besides the regular sentries, three or four men, habited as

hussars, used to do duty at the Palace, but I never saw them on

horseback, and au fait, what was the use of cavalry in a time of

profound peace?--and whither the deuce should the hussars ride?

Everybody--everybody that was noble of course, for as for the bourgeois

we could not quite be expected to take notice of THEM--visited his

neighbour. H. E. Madame de Burst received once a week, H. E. Madame de

Schnurrbart had her night--the theatre was open twice a week, the Court

graciously received once, so that a man's life might in fact be a

perfect round of pleasure in the unpretending Pumpernickel way.

That there were feuds in the place, no one can deny. Politics ran very

high at Pumpernickel, and parties were very bitter. There was the

Strumpff faction and the Lederlung party, the one supported by our

envoy and the other by the French Charge d'Affaires, M. de Macabau.

Indeed it sufficed for our Minister to stand up for Madame Strumpff,

who was clearly the greater singer of the two, and had three more notes

in her voice than Madame Lederlung her rival--it sufficed, I say, for

our Minister to advance any opinion to have it instantly contradicted

by the French diplomatist.

Everybody in the town was ranged in one or other of these factions. The

Lederlung was a prettyish little creature certainly, and her voice

(what there was of it) was very sweet, and there is no doubt that the

Strumpff was not in her first youth and beauty, and certainly too

stout; when she came on in the last scene of the Sonnambula, for

instance, in her night-chemise with a lamp in her hand, and had to go

out of the window, and pass over the plank of the mill, it was all she

could do to squeeze out of the window, and the plank used to bend and

creak again under her weight--but how she poured out the finale of the

opera! and with what a burst of feeling she rushed into Elvino's

arms--almost fit to smother him! Whereas the little Lederlung--but a

truce to this gossip--the fact is that these two women were the two

flags of the French and the English party at Pumpernickel, and the

society was divided in its allegiance to those two great nations.