"Under your aureole of hair, do you mean?"
"What if I do?" she smiled back. "You must not trust me too far. I am
a spoilt child--wild, unbridled, unaccustomed to please others except
by pleasing myself."
Her actress-nature enjoyed the picture of herself. She felt that
Baudelaire himself would have admired it. Lassalle's answer was subtly
attuned:
"My Satanic enchantress! my bewitching child of the devil."
"_Bien fou qui s'y fie._ When I lived at Nice in that royal Bohemia,
where musicians rubbed shoulders with grand-duchesses, and the King of
Bavaria exchanged epigrams with Bulwer Lytton, do you know what they
called me?"
"The Queen of all the Follies!"
"You know?"
"Did I not love my Brunehild ere we met?"
"Yes, and I--knew of you. Only I didn't recognize you at first,
because they told me you were a frightful demagogue and--a--a--Jew!"
He laughed. "And so you expected a gaberdine. And yet surely Bulwer
Lytton gave you a presentation copy of _Leila_. Don't you remember the
Jew in it? As a boy I had his ideal--to redeem my people. But if my
Judaism offends you, I can become a Christian--not in belief of
course, but--"
"Oh, not for worlds. I believe too little myself to bother about
religion. My friends call me the Greek, because I can readily believe
in many gods, but only with difficulty in one."