This was a real period of power for the young woman. In her dressing-room, amidst a litter of dirty basins, she contrived to centralise the policy of all the courts of Europe. She received information, even detailed reports, in which the slightest pulsations of governmental life were carefully noted, before the embassies did, and without anyone knowing whence her news was derived. As a natural consequence she was surrounded by a court of bankers, and diplomatists, and friends, who came to her in the hope of obtaining information. The bankers showed her particular attention. She had enabled one of them to gain a hundred million francs in a single haul by merely telling him of an approaching change of ministry in a neighbouring state. Truth to tell, however, she disdained to employ her knowledge for purposes of gain, and she readily told all that she knew--the gossip of diplomatists, and the talk of the different capitals--for the mere pleasure of hearing herself speak, and of showing that she had her eyes upon Turin, Vienna, Madrid, and London, as well as on Berlin and St. Petersburg. She could supply endless information concerning the health of the different sovereigns, their amours and habits, the politicians of the various states, and all the scandals of even the smallest German duchies. She judged statesmen in a single phrase; jumped from north to south without the slightest transition; spoke as carelessly of the different countries of Europe as if they had been her own, as if, indeed, the whole wide world, with its cities and nations, had formed part of a box of playthings, whose little cardboard houses and wooden men she could set up, and move about as she pleased. And, when at last her tongue ceased wagging, and she was tired of chattering, she would snap her fingers, as though to say that this was quite as much as all these things were worth.