I was only too conscious of this when, within the week, I received a hurried note from Madame de Brindes, begging me as a particular favour to come and see her without delay. I had not seen Vendemer again, but I had had a characteristic call from Heidenmauer, who, though I could imagine him perfectly in a Prussian helmet, with a needle-gun, perfectly, on definite occasion, a sturdy, formidable soldier, gave me a renewed impression of inhabiting, in the expansion of his genius and the exercise of his intelligence, no land of red tape, no province smaller nor more pedantically administered than the totality of things. I was reminded afresh too that _he_ foresaw no striking salon-picture, no _chic_ of execution nor romance of martyrdom, or at any rate devoted very little time to the consideration of such objects. He doubtless did scant justice to poor Vendemer's attitude, though he said to me of him by the way, with his rosy deliberation: "He has good ideas--he has good ideas. The French mind has--for me--the taste of a very delightful _bonbon_!" He only measured the angle of convergence, as he called it, of their two projections. He was in short not preoccupied with the personal gallantry of their experiment; he was preoccupied with its "æsthetic and harmonic basis." It was without her daughter that Madame de Brindes received me, when I obeyed her summons, in her scrap of a _quatrième_ in the Rue de Miromesnil. "Ah, _cher monsieur_, how could you have permitted such a horror--how could you have given it the countenance of your roof, of your influence?" There were tears in her eyes, and I don't think that for the moment I have ever been more touched by a reproach. But I pulled myself together sufficiently to affirm my faith as well as to disengage my responsibility. I explained that there was no horror to me in the matter, that if I was not a German neither was I a Frenchman, and that all I had before me was two young men inflamed by a great idea and nobly determined to work together to give it a great form. "A great idea--to go over to _ces gens-là?_" "To go over to them?" "To put yourself on their side--to throw yourself into the arms of those who hate us--to fall into their abominable trap!" "What do you call their abominable trap?" "Their false _bonhomie_, the very impudence of their intrigues, their profound, scientific deceit and their determination to get the advantage of us by exploiting our generosity." "You attribute to such a man as Heidenmauer too many motives and too many calculations. He's quite ideally superior!"