II
Madame Vaudrey drew no real pleasure from the commonplace receptions at the ministry, or at her Wednesday at homes, except when by chance, Denis Ramel permitted himself to abandon the Batignolles to call at Place Beauvau, or when Guy enlivened this dull spot by recounting the happenings of the outside world.
Adrienne felt herself terribly isolated; she knew hardly any one in Paris. Since Vaudrey had installed himself in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, she had not had time to form acquaintances among the wives of the deputies to the Assembly, the majority of whom lived in the provinces or dwelt at Versailles for economical reasons.
Evidently the residence at the ministry had only brought her ready-made relations, depressingly inevitable visitors who resembled office-seekers or clients. These official receptions filled her with sadness. The conversation always took the same hackneyed tone, disgusting in its flattery or disquieting by reason of its allusions. People discussed coming interpellations of ministers; government majorities, projected legislation; the same phrases, as dreary as showers, fell with all the regularity of drops of rain. Even young girls, brought up in this centre of infuriated politicians, spoke of the breaking up of the majority, reports or ballots, in the same manner as shopkeepers talk of their trade.
Poor Adrienne exerted herself to acquire an interest in these matters. Since her husband's very existence was involved therein, hers should also be. She had, however, formerly dreamed of an entirely different youth and on bright, sunshiny days she reflected that yonder on the banks of the Isère, it was delightful in her sweet, little, provincial house.
Besides, she carefully concealed her melancholy. She knew that she was already reproached for being somewhat sad. A minister's wife should know how to smile. This was what Madame Marsy never failed to repeat to her as often as possible when she visited her at Place Beauvau. This woman who hardly concerned herself at all about her son, allowing him to grow up badly enough and committing all her maternal duties to the grandmother, was perpetually cheerful, notwithstanding that her life had been chequered by chance and her widowhood of sufficiently dramatic character, as was said. She endeavored to play the part of an adviser, an intimate friend to Adrienne. She frequently said to Madame Gerson, who rarely left her, that Madame Vaudrey would be altogether charming if she had chic.
"Unfortunately, she is provincial; not in her element. She still smacks of Dauphiny. And then—what is the funniest thing: she knows nothing of politics."
"She does not even concern herself about it," said the pretty Madame Gerson, laughing heartily.
According to these ladies she did not take the trouble to fulfil the rôle of a minister's wife faultlessly. Ah! if only Sabine or Blanche Gerson occupied the position filled by this petite bourgeoise of Grenoble! Well! Paris would have seen what an Athenian Republic was.
Sabine Marsy was decidedly clever. She politely advised Adrienne, without appearing to do so, as to many matters, in such a way as to convey reproof under the guise of kindness. Madame Vaudrey would have done well, as Madame Gerson also observed, to have studied the Code du Cérémonial on reaching Place Beauvau.
Like Madame Marsy, Madame Gerson had gradually gained Adrienne's friendship. From an ostentatious desire to be able to tell of what happened at the ministry; to be on the first list of guests, when the minister received or gave a ball, Sabine Marsy, who had suffered from the mania of aspiring to become an artist, patronized the intransigeant painters and exhibited at the salon, now set her mind on playing the rôle of a political figure in Paris. Madame Gerson, Blanche, as Sabine called her, had a similar ambition, but simply from a desire to be in fashion.
She wished to bring herself into notice. Everything attracted her, tempted her. She belonged, body and soul, to that machine with its manifold gearing, brilliant, noisy, active, puffing like a locomotive, that is called chic. Chic, that indefinite, indefinable word, changeable and subtle like a capillary hygrometer, is a Parisian tyranny that grinds out more fashionable lives than the King of Dahomey offers as victims on his great feast days. For Blanche, everything in this most stimulated, over-excited, feverishly deranged life, was reduced to these two inevitable conclusions: what was chic and what was not chic. Not only was this the inevitable guide in reference to style, clothing, hat, gloves, costume, material, jewelry, the dress that she should wear, but also the book that should be read, the play that should be heard, the operatic score that should be strummed on the piano, the bonbon that should be presented, the opinion that one should hold, the picture one should comment upon, all was hopelessly a question of chic.
Madame Gerson would have preferred to be compromised in the matter of her honor rather than to be ridiculed as to her opinions or to express an idea that was not chic. The necessary result was that all this woman's conversation—and she often came to see Madame Vaudrey,—was on well-known topics; so that Adrienne knew in advance what Blanche's opinion was upon such and such a matter, and that ideas could only pass muster with Madame Gerson when they bore the stamp of chic, just as a coin, to escape suspicion of being counterfeit, must bear the stamp of the mint.
Blanche would have been heartbroken if she had not been seen in the President's salon on the occasion of a great reception at the Élysée; at the ministry, on the evening of a comedy; if she had not been in the front rank of the ladies' gallery on the day of interpellation at the Assembly; if she had not been greeted from the top of the grand stand by some minister, on Grand Prix day; if she had not been the first at the varnishing; the first at the general rehearsals, a little chic,—the first everywhere. Slender, delicate, but hardy as a Parisian, she dragged her exhausted husband, with her hand of fine steel, through receptions, balls, soirées, salons, talking loudly, judging everything, chattering, cackling and haranguing, delighted to mount, with head erect, the grand staircase of a minister and feel the joy of plunging her little feet into the official moquettes as if her heels had been made for state carpets; swelling with pride when she heard the usher, amid the hubbub of the reception, call loudly the name which meant the fashionable couple, a couple found at every fête:
"Monsieur and Madame Gerson!"
While the husband, fatigued, weary, left his office heavy-headed, after having eaten a hasty meal, put on his dress coat and white tie in haste, got into his carriage in haste, hurriedly accompanied his wife, left her in order to take a doze on an armchair during the height of the ball, woke in haste, returned home in haste, slept hurriedly, rose the same, dragging this indefatigable creature about with him like a convict's chain, she smiled at others, enticed others, waltzed with others, adorned herself for others, keeping for him only her weariness, her yawns, her pallor and her sick-headaches.
For these two galley-slaves of chic, the winter passed in this manner, as fatiguing as months of penal servitude, and they went none too soon, when the summer arrived, to breathe the sea air or enjoy the sunshine of the country, in order to restore their frames, wan, worn-out, seedy and "gruelled," as Sabine Marsy said, when she recalled her connection with the artists.
"Ah! how much better I like my home!" thought Madame Vaudrey.
Sabine and Madame Gerson, with the wives of the ministers, those of the chiefs of departments, and the regular visitors, were the most assiduous in their attentions to Adrienne, whom they considered decidedly provincial. She, stupefied, was alarmed by these Parisian bustlers, that resembled machines in running order, jabbering away as music-boxes play.
"Do they tire you?" said Guy de Lissac to her bluntly one evening, succumbing to a feeling of pity for this pensive young woman,—who was a hundred times prettier than Madame Gerson, whose beauty was so highly extolled in the journals,—this minister's wife, who voluntarily kept herself in the background with a timidity that betrayed no awkwardness, but was in every way attractive, especially to a man about town like Guy.
"They do not tire me, they upset me," Adrienne replied.
"Ah! they are in full go, as it is called. An express train. But they amuse themselves so much that they have not even time to smile. When the locomotive spins along too rapidly, try to distinguish the scenery!"
Adrienne instinctively felt that under his irony this sceptic disguised a sort of sincerity. Lissac's wit pleased her. He surprised her somewhat at times, but the probably assumed raillery of the young man compensated for the insipid nonsense of the conversation to which she listened daily.
At first from mere curiosity and after from a sentiment of respectful devotion, Guy was impelled to study that delicate and sensitive nature, entirely swayed by love of Sulpice, that suffered at times a vague pressure as of some indefinable anguish at the throat, as if a vacuum—a choking vacuum—had been created about her by some air-pump.
This huge mansion seemed to her to be entirely innocent of all memories, and though peopled with phantoms, was as commonplace and vulgar as an apartment house. There were no associations save dust and cracks. These salons, built for the Maréchal de Beauvau, these walls that had listened to the sobs of Madame d'Houdetot at the death-bed of Saint-Lambert, appeared to Adrienne to exude ennui, strangling and inevitable ennui, solemn, official, absolute ennui, nothing but ennui in the very decorum of the place, and isolation in the midst of power.
She cursed her loneliness, she felt lost amid the salons of this furnished ministerial mansion, whose cold, gloomy apartments, with the chairs symmetrically arranged along the walls, she wandered through, but evidently without expecting any one: state chairs lacking occupants,—ordinary chairs, domestic chairs seem to have tongues—that never exchanged conversation. Vast, deserted rooms where the green curtains behind the glass doors of the bookcases were eternally drawn, bookcases without books, forever open, mournful as empty sepulchres.
Yes, this immense gilded dwelling with its Gobelins tapestries stifled her with its terrifying gloom, where nothing, not a single article, recalled her charming provincial home, her Grenoble house with its garden filled with lilacs where she was often wont to read while Sulpice worked upstairs, bent over his table crowded with papers, before his open window. Ah! those cherished rooms, in the humble corner of the provincial home, their happy crouching in the peaceful nest; aye, even the happy first days in Paris, in the Chaussée-d'Antin apartments, in which Adrienne at least felt herself in her own home, free in her actions and thoughts, and where she could talk aloud without feeling that an eye was constantly watching her, and ears were always strained, in fact, a perpetual espionage upon all her actions and a criticism of all her words.
She had reached a point when she asked herself if, even for Sulpice, happiness was not far removed from this life of slavery, of feverish politics, which for some time past had been visibly paling his cheeks and rendering him nervous and altogether different from of old.
"If you did not love me so much," she said with a sweet smile, "I could believe that you loved me no longer."
"What folly! you have only one rival, Adrienne."
"Ah! I know that very well, but that robs me of everything. It is politics. Come! be great, and I shall be happy or resigned, as you wish. I adore you so much! I would give you my life, so I would gladly give you my days of weariness!"
Although she was rich, she strove to introduce into her official surroundings the bourgeois and provincial orderly methods that she had been so virtuously taught. She found that her desserts vanished with frightful rapidity, that dishes scarcely touched and bottles whose contents had only been tasted, were removed to the kitchen. She commented thereon, but the somewhat contemptuous smile of her domestics was her only reply and it made her feel ashamed.
Vaudrey's predecessor, Monsieur Pichereau, was exacting, close-fisted. His table was meagre but there was nothing astonishing in that, Monsieur Pichereau had a delicate stomach. Well and good, but the predecessors of Monsieur Pichereau, they had given fêtes, they had! It is true that one was a count and the other a marquis. One can always tell a gentleman anywhere.
One evening, they heard one of the domestics of the ministry say to another:
"As if it were not our money that the ministers spend! It is the electors' money. They give us wages: we give them salaries. There it is!"
The domestic was discharged immediately, but these remarks, however, recurred to Adrienne's memory and filled her with dislike for the flunkeyism that surrounded her, waiting on her with cold civility, but without any attachment, like hotel waiters or girls at an inn that one will leave the next day, giving them a gratuity.
Vaudrey saw much less of these daily little wounds. He lived in an atmosphere of constant flattery, favor-begging cloaked under complimentary phrases. Had he leisure, he would have been able to calculate with mathematical exactitude how many angles the human form would describe in the process of bowing and scraping. In his department, everybody asked for something or got someone else to ask. Promotion, that insatiable hunger, was the greedy dream of all that little world of intriguing, underhand, begging employés, who opened up around the new minister so many approaches, like military lines around a redoubt.
Sulpice felt himself besieged and the target for a crowd of greedy ambitions. The sub-heads of departments cast bitterly envious glances at the offices of chiefs, like hungry beggars hypnotized by the display at Chevet's. Commendatory letters rained on him. This shower of begging-missives nauseated the minister to such an extent that he endeavored to arrest the stream, ordering Warcolier, the Under Secretary of State, to be called and requesting him to reply to the deputies, to the senators, to everybody, in fact: that he had no influence to use, that the era of favoritism was over; that he, Vaudrey, understood that only merit would receive official gifts. "Merit only. You understand, Monsieur Warcolier?"
Warcolier rolled his huge eyes in astonishment; then, with the self-satisfied smile of an expressionless beau, after passing his fat hand through his long whiskers, yellow and streaked with gray, that decorated his rosy cheeks, he remarked doctorally, that Monsieur le Ministre was entering on a path that, in all conscience, he could qualify as being only dangerous. Eh! bon Dieu! one must do something for one's friends!—Vaudrey's accession to the Department of the Interior had given birth to many new hopes; on all grounds they must be satisfied. Vaudrey would never be forgiven for such deception.
"What deception?" asked Sulpice. "I promised reforms and I am going to carry them out, but people laugh at my reforms and ask what?—Places."
"Bless me!" replied Warcolier, "entirely logical."
"Be it so! but there are places and places. I cannot, however, retire a whole staff of employés to give place to a new one. That's precisely what they want. There is not a deputy who has not one candidate to recommend to me."
"That's very natural, Monsieur le Ministre, seeing that there is not a deputy who may not himself be a candidate."
"Still, he should be independent of his electors, but in truth, it is not the rights of those who have elected them that my colleagues defend, it is their own interests."
"Every man for himself, Monsieur le Ministre. Yesterday, even yesterday, one of my electors whose wife has just given birth to a child, wrote me, asking for a good nurse. That is like one of our colleagues, Perraud—of the Vosges.—One of his electors commissioned him to take back an umbrella with him upon his early return. The electors regard their deputies in the light of commission merchants."
"And as tobacco bureaus! Well, I wish to have more morality than that in State affairs. I like giving, but I know how to refuse," said Vaudrey.
"That will be easy enough so long as you are popular and solid in Parliament; but on the day that it is clearly proved that such and such a future minister can make himself more useful than you to the personal interests of everybody—and there are such ministers in sight—"
"Granet, yes, I know! He promises more butter than bread, to cry quits later in giving more dry crusts than fresh butter. But I don't care to deceive any one."
"As you please, Monsieur le Ministre, as you please," answered Warcolier, in a mocking and gentle tone.
Sulpice did not like this man. He was a phrase-maker. He had a vague feeling that this Warcolier who in public affected strictly severe principles was privately undermining him and that he yielded to favors in order to win support. It was enough for the minister to discourage coarse, greedy ambitions, provided that the Under Secretary of State encouraged unsavory, eager hopes by shrewd smiles and silence that assented to all that was desired. This little underhand work going on in his office was unknown to Vaudrey; he did not know that out of every refusal he gave, Warcolier secured friends; but he maintained a watchful distrust for this republican who had become so stanch a supporter of the Republic only since that form of government had triumphed. Besides, what had he to fear? The President of the Council, Monsieur Collard, of Nantes, had the unbounded confidence of the head of the State and of the Chamber; and he was Collard's intimate friend. The majority of the cabinet was compact. The perfect calm of the horizon was undisturbed by a cloud. Vaudrey could rule without fear, without excitement and give all his spare time to that woman whose piercing glance, wandering smile, palpitating nostrils, dishevelled, fair hair, kisses, fondness, cries, and tones pursued him everywhere.
Marianne, how he loved her! From day to day, how his love of her increased like a madman's! It seemed to him that he suddenly found himself in the presence of the only woman who could possibly understand him, and in the only world in which he could live; his petty bourgeois, sensual inexperience flourished in the little hôtel of the courtesan.
He had doubtless loved; often enough he had thought himself once more in love; the poor grisettes, to whom he had written in verse, as he might have sung songs to them, were gone from his thoughts, though they had occupied his heart for a short time. He had profoundly loved her who bore his name, perhaps he loved her still as warmly, as sincerely—the unfortunate man!—as of old. He sometimes recalled with tearful eye, how his whole frame trembled with love in the presence of that young girl who had given herself entirely to him, in all her trust and sincerity, in all her candor, and all her chastely-timid innocent modesty. But Adrienne's love was insipid compared with the intoxicating and appetizing voluptuousness of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her attitudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared everything, mocked, caressed, beginning with a pout and ending with some drollery, and challenged passion by exasperating it with refusals and mockery that changed into distracting lasciviousness.
When she extended to Vaudrey her little hand, covered with rings, and indolent and soft, he felt as if he had received an electric shock and that his marrow had been touched. This man of forty felt all the enthusiasm and distraction of a youth. It seemed to him that this was the only woman that he possibly could love, and in truth she was the only one that he could have loved as he did, with his forgetfulness of self, his outbursts of madness, the distracted sentiment of a love for which he would have braved and risked everything.
When he confessed it frankly, she had a way of answering with a questioning manner full of doubt, which conveyed the delicacy of the woman's self-love and the intentionally refined doubt of the coquette, a questioning yes:
"Yes?"
Simply that.
And in this yes, there was a world of tenderness, excitement and burning promises for Sulpice.
Then he drew her to him:
"Yes, yes, yes, yes!" he repeated in burning tones, as he thrust his head between her shoulders that emerged from her embroidered chemise, and her neck perfumed and satiny, that he covered with eager kisses.
Yes! And he would have uttered this yes before every one like a bravado. Yes! It was his delight to give himself wholly to Marianne and to tell her again and again that nothing in the whole world could take the place of this mistress who made him forget everything: politics, the home, the ambition that had been his life, and his affection for Adrienne that had been his joy.
Thanks to the Dujarrier, Marianne had paid the rent of the house, the servants and the pressing debts. Claire Dujarrier advanced the hundred thousand francs demanded by Mademoiselle Kayser, and which she had apparently—in reality she took them from her own funds—borrowed from Adolphe Gochard, her lover, who had not a sou, and in whose favor Vaudrey signed in regular legal form, a bill of exchange at three months' date value received in cash. The Dujarrier merely retained twenty thousand francs as her commission and handed only eighty thousand to Marianne.
"But Vaudrey's acceptance to Gochard is for one hundred thousand!"
"You are silly, my girl! What if I lose the balance? If your minister should not pay?"
"What do you mean?"
"Stranger things have happened, my little one."
Vaudrey having paid, given his name, signed this bill of exchange, felt the extreme joy arising from the base self-love of the man who pays a lovely creature and who, nevertheless, believes himself loved.
In the early days, Sulpice went to Rue Prony only during the day or at night after dinner, or on leaving a reception or the theatre. Marianne awaited him. He came stealthily, distracted with joy. There, in the closed chamber he remained with Marianne, who was full of pride at the complete subjugation of the will of this man in her embrace. She amused herself occasionally by calling him Your Excellency, in reading to him from some book which spun out the ceremonial necessary in applying for an interview with a minister:
"If ever I ask you for an audience, do you know how I must address myself to the secretary? Listen to this book, it is funny: 'Ordinary toilet. The etiquette for the toilet is not very strict, but it is, however, in good taste to appear dressed as for a ceremonious call. For women, the toilet should be simple and the gloves new.'"
She laughed as she rested almost naked in Sulpice's arms, and repeated, looking into his eyes:
"A simple toilet!"
"And again, listen!" she said, as she resumed the book. "'In speaking to a minister as in writing to him, one should address him as Monseigneur or Your Excellency. On reaching the door as you leave the salon, you should again bow respectfully.' That is amusing, ah! how amusing it is!—Then they respect you as much as that? Your Excellency! Monseigneur! Shall I be obliged to courtesy to you?—Your lips, give me your lips, Monseigneur! I adore you!—You are my own minister; my finance minister, my lover, my all! I do not respect you, but I love you, I love you!"
He trembled to the very roots of his hair when she spoke to him thus. He felt transports of joy in clasping her in his arms and genuine despair when he left her. Leave her! leave her there under that lamp alone, in that low bed where he had just forgotten that there existed anything else in the world besides that apartment, warm with perfumes. He would have liked to pass the whole night beside her, separating only when satiated and overwhelmed with caresses. But how could he leave Adrienne alone over there in the ministerial mansion? However trustful this young wife might be, and innocent, credulous and incapable of suspicion, if he had passed a night absent from her, she would have been terrified and warned.
He easily invented prolonged receptions and night sessions that detained him until an advanced hour.
"One would say that the evening sessions grow more frequent than formerly," Adrienne remarked gently at breakfast.
"Don't talk to me about it," replied Sulpice. "In order to reach the vacation sooner, the deputies talk twice as long."
Adrienne never opened the Officiel, which Vaudrey received in his private office, pretending that the sight of a newspaper too vividly recalled the fatiguing political life that absorbed him. One day, however, he allowed the journals to be brought into the salon and to lie about in Madame's room. He informed Adrienne that he was going to pass the day in Picardy, at Guise or at Vervins, where an important deputy had invited him to visit his factory. He would leave in the morning and could not return until the following day toward noon.
"What a long time!" said Adrienne.
"It is still longer for me than for you, since you remain here, in our home."
"Oh! our home! we have only one home: in Chaussée-d'Antin, or the house at Grenoble, you know."
"Dear wife!" cried Vaudrey, as he embraced her tenderly,—sincerely, perhaps.
And he left. He set out for Guise, returned in the evening and ordered the Director of the Press to send to all the journals by the Havas agency, a message which ran: The Minister of the Interior passed the entire day yesterday at Guise, at Monsieur Delair's, the deputy from L'Aisne. He dined and slept at the house of his host. Monsieur Vaudrey is to return to Paris this morning, at eleven o'clock.
Then he showed the news to Adrienne, and laughed as he said:
"It is surprising! one cannot take a single step without it appears in print and the entire population is informed at once!"
"Tell me everything," Adrienne replied, as she embraced him with her glance. "Are you tired? You look pale. How did you spend the day? You made a speech? Were you applauded?"
It was mainly by kisses that Vaudrey answered. What could he say to Adrienne? She knew perfectly well how similar all these gatherings were, with their official routine. Monsieur Delair had been very agreeable, but the minister had necessarily had to endure much talk, much importunity.
"The day seemed very long to me!"
"And to me also," she said.
Sulpice indeed returned from Guise, but the last train on the previous night had taken him to Rue Prony, at Marianne's. He had then found out the secret of remaining at her side undisturbed for a long time, and the telegraph, managed by the Director of the Press, enabled him to prove an alibi to Adrienne from time to time. He had taken to Marianne a huge bouquet of fresh flowers gathered in the park at Guise for Madame Vaudrey by Monsieur Delair's two daughters. That appeared to him to be quite natural.
Marianne, who was waiting for him, put the flowers in the Japanese vases and said to him as she threw her bare arms around him:
"Very good! You thought of me!—--"
The next morning Vaudrey left, more than ever enchained by the delight of her embraces. He sometimes returned on foot, to breathe the vivifying freshness of the roseate dawn, or taking a cab, he stretched himself out wearily therein, as he drove to the ministry, musing over the hours so recently passed and striving to arrest them in their flight, to enjoy again their seductive joy and to squeeze as from a delicious fruit, all their intoxicating poetry, delight and fascination.
He closed his eyes. He saw Marianne again with her eyes veiled as he kissed her, he drank in the odor of her hair that fell like a sort of fair cover over the lace pillow. It seemed that he was permeated with her perfume. He breathed the air with wide-open nostrils to inhale it again, to recover its scent and preserve it. His whole frame trembled with emotion at the recollection of that lovely form that he had left whiter than the sheet of the bed, in the dim light that filtered through the opal-shaded lamp.
Then he thought that he must forget, and invent some tale for Adrienne. Again he opened his eyes and trembled in spite of himself, as he saw, on both sides of the cab, workmen slowly trudging along the sidewalks with their hands in their pockets, their noses red, a wretched worn-out silk scarf about their necks and swinging on their arms the supply of food for the day, or again with their fingers numb with the cold, holding some journal in their hands in which they read as they marched along, the speech of "Monsieur le Ministre de l'Intérieur," that magnificent speech not made during the night session as Sulpice had told Adrienne, but the day before yesterday, in broad day, when the majority, faithfully grouped about him, had applauded this phrase: I, whose hours are consecrated to the amelioration of the lot of the poor and who can say with the poet,—I shall be pardoned for this feeling of vanity:
"What I steal from my nights, I add to my days!"
Sulpice heard again the applause that he received. He saw those devoted hands reached out to him as he descended from the tribune; he again experienced a feeling of pride, and yet he felt dissatisfied with himself now that he saw the other hands, the servile hands of the applauders, hidden by the red, cold hands of a mason who held this speech between his horny fingers.
Sulpice returned to the ministry, shaking himself as if to induce forgetfulness, busy, weary, and still,—eternally,—as if immovably fixed in an antechamber of Place Beauvau, he found the inevitable place-hunters, the hornets of ministries.
Vaudrey caused these urgent people, as well as some others, to be received by Warcolier, who asked nothing better than to make tools, to sow the seed of his clientage. Guy de Lissac and Ramel had simultaneously called Vaudrey's attention to the eagerness which Warcolier manifested in toying with popularity.
"He is not wholly devoted to you, is this gentleman who prefers every government!" said Guy.
"He will undermine you quietly!" added Ramel.
"I am satisfied of that. But I am not disturbed: I have the majority. Oh! faithful and compact."
"Woman often changes," muttered Ramel.
Guy was troubled about Vaudrey for another reason. He vaguely suspected that Sulpice was neglecting Adrienne. Political business, doubtless. Vaudrey unquestionably loved his wife, who adored him and was herself adorable. But he manifestly neglected her.
Lissac found them one day smilingly discussing a question that was greatly occupying the journalists: divorce. Apropos of a trifle, of a suit for separation that Adrienne had just read in the Gazette Tribunaux. It referred to an adulterous husband, a pottery dealer in Rue Paradis, Monsieur Vauthier, the lover of a singer at a rather notorious café-concert, named Léa Thibault. The wife had demanded a separation. Adrienne had just read the pleadings.
"Poor woman!" she said. "She must have suffered, indeed."
Sulpice did not reply.
"Do you know that if that were my case, I could never forgive you?"
"You are mad! What are you thinking of?"
"Oh! it is true, the idea that you could touch another woman, that you could kiss her as you kiss me, that would make me more than angry, horrified and disgusted. I tell you, I would never forgive you."
"Who puts all this stuff in your head? Come, I will do as I used to do," said Vaudrey. "Not another paper shall enter your house! What an idea, to read the Gazette des Tribunaux!"
"It is because this name: Vauthier, somewhat resembles your own that I was induced to read it. And then this very mournful title: Separation de corps. I would prefer divorce myself. A complete divorce that severs the past like a knife-cut."
"But what an idea!" repeated Sulpice, who was somewhat uneasy.
Vaudrey was delighted to hear Guy announced in the midst of this discussion. They would then change the topic. But Adrienne, who was much affected by her reading, returned to the same subject in an obstinate sort of way and Lissac commenced to laugh.
"What a joke! To speak of divorce between you two! Never fear, madame, your husband will never present to the Chamber a law in favor of divorce."
"Who knows?" Sulpice answered. "I am in favor of divorce myself, yes, absolutely."
"And I cannot understand, for my part, how a woman can belong to two living men," said Adrienne.
"You reason for yourself. But the unhappy women who suffer—and the unhappy men—The existing law, in fact, seeing that it admits separation, permits divorce, but more cruel, heartrending, and unjust. Divorce without freedom. Divorce that continues the chain."
"Sulpice is right, madame, and sooner or later, we shall certainly arrive at that frightful divorce."
"After all, what does it matter to me?" Adrienne replied.
She threw the accursed Gazette des Tribunaux into the waste basket with its Suit of Vauthier vs. Vauthier. "We are not interested, neither my husband nor I; he loves me and I love him. I am as sure of him as he is sure of me. He may demand all the laws that are possible: it would not be for selfish interest, for he would not profit by them."
"Never!" said Sulpice with a laugh, delighted to be released from the magnetic influence of Adrienne's strange excitement.
There was, however, a somewhat false ring in this laugh. Face to face with the avowed trustfulness of his wife, Sulpice experienced a slight pricking of conscience. He thought of Marianne. His passion increased tenfold, but this very increase of affection made him afraid. He hastened to find himself again at Rue Prony. The Hôtel Beauvau depressed him. It became more than ever a prison. How gladly he escaped from it!
Yes, it was a prison for him as it was for Adrienne; a prison that he fled from to seek Marianne's boudoir, to enjoy her kisses and mirth, while, at the same moment, his wife, the dear abandoned, disdained creature, sad without being cognizant of the cause of her melancholy, terrified by the emptiness of that grand ministerial mansion, that "sounded hollow," as she said, quietly and stealthily took the official carriage that Vaudrey sent back to her from the Chamber, and had herself driven—where?—only she knew!
"You ought to make a great many calls," the minister had frequently said. "It would divert your mind and it is well to appear to know a great many persons."
But she only found pleasure in making one visit, she gave the coachman the address of the apartments on Chaussée-d'Antin, where she had lived long, happy years with Sulpice, sweet and peaceful under the clear light of the lamp. She entered this deserted apartment, now as cold as a tomb, and had the shutters opened by the concierge in order that she might see the sunlight penetrate the room and set all the motes dancing in its cheerful rays. She shut herself in and remained there happy, consoled; sitting in the armchair formerly occupied by Sulpice, she pictured him at the table at which he used to work, his inkstand before him and surrounded by his books, his cherished books! She lived again the vanished life. "Return!" she said to the dream, the humble dream she had at last recovered. She rambled about those deserted rooms that on every side reminded her of some sweet delight, here it was a kiss of chaste and eternal love, there a smile. Ah! how easy life would have been there all alone, happy for ever!
The Ministry! Power! Popularity! Fame! Authority! What were they worth?
Is all that worth one of the blessed hours in this little dwelling, where the cup of bliss would have been full if the wife could have heard the clear laugh or the faint cry of a child?
Poor Sulpice! how he was exhausting himself now in an overwhelming task! He was giving his health and life to politics, while here he only experienced peace, consoling caresses and the quieting of every excitement. On the study-table there still remained some pens and some books that were formerly in constant use.
Adrienne went away with reddened eyes from these pilgrimages, as it were, to her former happiness. She returned to her carriage and moistened her cambric pocket handkerchief with her warm breath, in order to wipe her eyes so that Sulpice might not see that she had been weeping. Then when her well-known carriage passed before the shops in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the wives of mercers or booksellers, dressmakers, young girls, all of whom enviously shook their heads, said to each other:
"The minister's wife!—Ah! she has had a glorious dream!—She is happy!"