For the time being, amidst her many tangled schemes, there was one very serious matter which excited her warmest enthusiasm, and on which she tried her best to keep silent, though, occasionally, she could not deny herself the pleasure of alluding to it. She wanted Venice. Whenever she spoke of the great Italian minister, she referred to him familiarly as 'Cavour.' 'Cavour,' said she, 'did not want it, but I want it, and he has understood.' Morning and night she shut herself up at the embassy with Chevalier Rusconi. And tranquilly lounging, throwing back her narrow, but goddess-like brow, as if in a sort of somnambulism, she would utter scraps of disconnected sentences, shreds of revelations; a hint of a secret interview between the Emperor and some foreign statesman; a projected treaty of alliance, some clauses of which were still under discussion; a war which would take place in the coming spring. On other days she became excited and angry, kicked the chairs about her room and knocked the basins over at the risk of breaking them. On these occasions she looked like some angry queen who has been betrayed by imbecile ministers, and sees her kingdom going from bad to worse; and, with a tragic air, she would stretch her bare majestic arm in the direction of Italy and clench her fist, exclaiming: 'Ah! if I were over yonder there would be none of this folly!' However, the worries of high politics did not prevent Clorinde from engaging in all sorts of other businesses, in which she seemed to get quite lost. She was often to be found sitting on her bed with the contents of her large portfolio spread over the counterpane, while she plunged her arms into the papers, distracted and crying with irritation. She would be unable to find anything amidst such a chaos of documents; or else, after long hunting for some lost batch of papers, she would at length discover it behind some piece of furniture or amongst her old boots or dirty linen. When she went out to conclude any particular piece of business, she generally contrived to involve herself in two or three fresh affairs on her way. She was for ever rushing about to all sorts of places, lived in a perfect whirl of ideas, a state of perpetual excitement; while beneath her lay the mazy depths of mysterious, unfathomable intrigues. When she came home again in the evening, after a day's scouring of Paris, tired out by climbing so many flights of stairs, and carrying in the folds of her skirts an odour of all the strange haunts which she had visited, no one would have guessed one half of the errands that she had been engaged upon. And if anyone happened to question her, she only laughed; she herself did not always remember what she had been doing.