Jimgrim by Talbot Mundy

I can read and write French fluently; and I can speak it so that Frenchmen understand me when they genuinely try, which is not often. But to follow closely a four-cornered, quickfire exchange of verbal thrust and counter-thrust interspersed with professional argot and the latest idioms and catch-words, is beyond my powers. So I can only give a resume of what happened after Bonfils came in, and the greater part of it is summarized from scraps of Grim's subsequent conversation. Jeff talks better French than I do, but even Jeff was a bit bewildered by the speed, and it took both of us weeks to extract all the details, as a rule one detail at a time, from Grim, who can be as laconic as a stone jug and who hardly ever fully realizes that others are not so quick as himself to pick the fine points from a maze of irrelevant suggestions, hints and purposely confused statements of probable fact.

Looking back, it is easy enough to summarize. The main point was that the Princess Baltis, having thoroughly established herself in the confidence of the French secret service, had done what almost all spies do eventually, and that Bonfils knew she had been playing false. But it was also true that she knew a lot too much about too many important people; and in peacetime it is no simple matter to dispose of anyone entrenched in that position, since a secret service never courts publicity, and, ever since the Dreyfus scandal, the French have been particularly touchy on that point.