...of diplomatic rivals

Friedrich ran into a number of people here whom he had known well in Zurich. He even saw Bernadin and Dr Schleicher again. They had both become diplomats and maintained their understanding. They had sealed an alliance for life, were inseparable, and promenaded silently together because they had no more to say to each another. They had talked themselves out. They knew everything about one another. Now they were united by their bartered confessions. They were peace comrades just as two men who once met in the trenches were war comrades. Each also represented his country. And as both were concerned with so-called peaceful relations between Germany and France, and as they might have been reproached with remissness for any clouding of these relations, they both cherished peace like their own careers and their ambition accorded it to the value that generals accord to war. And just as professional marriage-brokers are concerned about the bliss of the parties they have brought together, because their living depends on it, so Dr Schleicher and Bernadin were similarly concerned about peace between the two countries. They trafficked in peace as they had trafficked in state secrets during the war. Their friendship was troubled only if the name of one of them was mentioned in the newspapers more often than that of the other, or if, in the group photographs of conference participants published in the illustrated magazines, the face of one was more distinctly recognizable than that of his friend. This 'congenial gathering' too was taken by the photographer for publicity purposes, to appear under the title 'A diplomatic tea-party' in the Sunday supplements. Bernadin and Dr Schleicher seperated since they took it for diplomatic subtlety not to let their association become apparent to the other nations. While they stationed themselves in the background with heroic modesty, they pressed their faces between the shoulders of the front row so as to appear on the plate nonetheless. And furtively but persistently, in their anxiety at the critical moment when the flash blazed out, they would discard the facial expressions they had donned as advantageous, cast sidelong glances at each other, and consider which of them was standing in a better and more prominent position. The journalists whose vocation is ever to scent out secrets, believed that the glances of the two were the equivalent of abbreviated diplomatic Notes. And every reporter who spotted this exchange of glances thought at once of the possibility of drawing attention to it in the morning paper under the magic formula of 'as rumoured in exclusive circles'.

[The Silent Prophet, Roth, J.]