Paris
passes judgment on them, and London pays them. Genovese and la Tinti
will not be left to us for six months--"
At this juncture, the Austrian left the box. Vendramin, the Prince,
and the other two Italians exchanged a look and a smile, glancing at
the French physician. He, for a moment, felt doubtful of himself,--a
rare thing in a Frenchman,--fancying he had said or done something
incongruous; but the riddle was immediately solved.
"Do you thing it would be judicious," said Emilio, "if we spoke our
mind in the presence of our masters?"
"You are in a land of slaves," said the Duchess, in a tone and with a
droop of the head which gave her at once the look for which the
physician had sought in vain. "Vendramin," she went on, speaking so
that only the stranger could hear her, "took to smoking opium, a
villainous idea suggested to him by an Englishman who, for other
reasons of his, craved an easy death--not death as men see it in the
form of a skeleton, but death draped with the frippery you in France
call a flag--a maiden form crowned with flowers or laurels; she
appears in a cloud of gunpowder borne on the flight of a cannon-ball
--or else stretched on a bed between two courtesans; or again, she
rises in the steam of a bowl of punch, or the dazzling vapor of a
diamond--but a diamond in the form of carbon.
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