IV
José de Rosas thought himself much more the master of himself than he actually was.
This energetic man, firm as a very fine steel blade, had hoped to find that in living at a distance from Marianne, he might forget her or at least strengthen himself against her influence. He found on his return that he was, however, more seduced by her than before, his heart was wholly filled and gnawed by the distracting image of the pretty girl. He had borne away with him to London, as everywhere in fact, the puzzling smile, the sparkling glance of this woman's gray eyes that ceaselessly appeared to him at his bedside, and beside him, like some phantom.
The phantom of a living creature whose kiss still burned his lips like a live coal. A phantom that he could clasp in his arms, carry away and possess. All the virgin sentiments of this man whose life had been the half-savage one of a trapper, a savant or a wanderer, turned toward Marianne as to an incarnated hope, a living, palpitating chimera.
José felt certain that if he returned to Paris it was all over with him, and that he was giving his life to that woman. But he returned. His fight against himself over, the first visit he made, once again, was to the den where he knew well that he could discover Marianne's whereabouts. He went to her as he might walk to a gulf. Under his cold demeanor of a Castilian of former days, he was intensely passionate and would neither reflect nor resist. He had experienced that delightful sensation of impulse when, upon the rapids at the other end of the globe, the river carried into a whirlpool his almost engulfed boat. He would doubtless have been stupefied had he found Marianne installed in a fashionable little mansion. She promised herself to explain that to him when she next saw him while informing him, there and then, that she had taken up her abode there. A mere whim: Mademoiselle Vanda having gone away, the idea had attracted her of sleeping within a courtesan's curtains. "I will tell him that this transient luxury recalls my former follies when I made him believe that I was spending an inheritance from my grandmother."
She had, indeed, already lied to him, for the money she had formerly squandered had been provided by De Lissac, but even then it was necessary—for the duke was in expectancy—to conceal its source from Rosas, hence the story of the inheritance that never existed. But she at once thoroughly realized that the surroundings which were favorable to the progress of the duke's love were not the bedroom and the dressing-room of Mademoiselle Vanda. What difference would Rosas have found between her and the fashionable courtesans whom he had loved, or rather, enriched, in passing? He would not believe this new lie this time.
All that luxury might seduce Sulpice Vaudrey; it would have disgusted José. What satisfied the appetite of the little, successful bourgeois would nauseate the gentleman.
As soon as Rosas returned to her, happy and stupefied at the same time, extravagantly happy in his joy, her plan of campaign was at once arranged. She did not wish to receive him in the vulgar hôtel, where the clubmen had wiped their feet upon the carpets. She entreated him, since he wished to see her again, to see her at her "own house," yes, really, at her own house, in that little, unknown room, in Rue Cuvier, far from the noise of Paris and near the Botanical Garden, a kind of hidden cell into which no one entered.
"No one but me," she said.
The order had been given to Uncle Kayser in advance: in case Rosas should reappear, Simon was to at once inform his niece and prevent the duke from discovering Marianne's new address. And this had been done.
The duke was then going to see Mademoiselle Kayser only at Rue Cuvier, after having rediscovered her at Uncle Simon's.
He felt in advance a kind of gratitude to this woman who thus abandoned the secret of her soul to him; giving him to understand that it was there that she passed her days, buried in her recollections, dreaming of her departed years, of that which had been, of that which might be, a living death.
Marianne had shrewdly divined the case. For this great soul, mystery added a new sentiment to the feelings that Rosas experienced. The first time that he found himself in that little abode where Simon Kayser's niece awaited him, he was deeply moved, as if he had penetrated into the pure chamber of a young girl. There, yonder, in that distant quarter, he found a peaceful retreat for one wounded by life, thirsting for solitude and passing there secret hours in the midst of loved books; in fact, the discreet dwelling of a poor teacher who had collected some choice bibelots that she had found by chance. Rosas there felt himself surrounded by perfect virtue, amid the salvage of a happier past. Marianne thus became what he imagined her to be, superior to her lot, living an intellectual life, consoling herself for the mortification of existence and the hideous experiences of life by poet's dreams, in building for herself in Paris itself a sort of Thebais, where she was finally free and mistress of herself and where, when she was sad, she was not compelled to wear a mask or a false smile, and was free from all pretended gaiety. And she was so often sad!
She had occasionally mentioned to Rosas the assumed name under which she lived at that place.
"Mademoiselle Robert!"
He had manifested surprise thereat.
"Yes, I do not wish them to know anything of me, not even my name. You should understand the necessity that certain minds have for repose and forgetfulness. Did not one of your sovereigns take his repose lying in his coffin? Well! I envy him and when I have pushed the bolt of my little room in Rue Cuvier, I tremble with delight, just as if I felt my heart beating in a coffin. Do not tell any one. They would desire to know and see. People are so curious and so stupid!"
Marianne now seemed to be still more strange and seductive to Rosas. All this romantic conduct, commonplace as it was, with which she surrounded herself, exalted her in the estimation of the duke. She became in that little chamber where she was simply Mademoiselle Robert, a hundred times more charming and attractive to him than any problem: a veritable Parisian sphinx.
She was not his mistress. He loved her too deeply, with a holy, respectful passion, to take her hastily, as by chance, and Marianne was too skilful to risk any imprudent act, well-knowing that if she yielded too quickly, it would not be a woman who would fall into the duke's arms, but an idol that descended from its pedestal.
In the silence of the old house in the deserted quarter, they held conversations in the course of which Rosas freely abandoned himself, and through which she gained every day a more intimate knowledge of the character of that man who was so different from those who hitherto had sought her for pleasure.
Thus, the very respect that he instinctively felt for her, impelled her to love him.
She had not been accustomed to such treatment. Every masculine look that since her puberty she had felt riveted upon her, clearly expressed even before the lips spoke: "You are beautiful. You please me. Will you?" Rosas, at least, said: "I love you," before: "I desire you."
Tainted in the body which she had given, offered, abandoned, sold, she felt that she was respected by him even in that body, and although she considered him silly, she thought him superior to all others, or at least different, and that was a sufficient motive for loving him.
One day she said to him in a peculiar tone and with her distracting smile:
"Do you know, my dear José, there is one thing I should not have believed? You are bashful!"
He turned slightly pale.
"Sincere love is always bashful and clumsy. By that it may be known."
"Perhaps!" said Marianne.
Their conversations, however, only concerned love, so that Rosas might speak of his passion or of his reminiscences.
She once asked him if he would despise a woman if she became his mistress.
"No!" he said, with a smile, "it is only a Frenchman who would despise the woman who surrendered herself. Other nations treat love more seriously. They do not consider the gift of one's self in the light of a fall."
Marianne looked at him full in the face with a strange expression.
"What, then, if I love you well enough to become your mistress?"
"I should still esteem you enough to become your husband!"
She felt her color change.
Was it a sport on the part of Monsieur de Rosas? Why had he spoken to her thus? Had he reflected upon what he had just said?
José added in a very gentle tone:
"Will you permit me to ask you a question, Marianne?"
"You may ask me anything. I will frankly answer all your questions."
"What was Monsieur Sulpice Vaudrey doing at your uncle's the other day? Was he there to see you?"
Marianne smiled.
"Why, the minister simply came to talk of business matters. I hardly see him except for Uncle Kayser, who is soliciting an official commission,—you heard him—"
"Does Monsieur Vaudrey pay his addresses to you?"
"Necessarily. Oh! but only out of pure French gallantry. Mere politeness. He loves his wife and he knows very well that I don't love any one."
"No one?" asked Rosas.
"I do not love any one yet," repeated Marianne, opening her gray eyes with a wide stare under the Spaniard's anxious glance.
From that day, her mind was possessed of a new idea that imperiously directed it. When Rosas had returned to her, she had only regarded him as a possible lover, rich and agreeable. The mistress of a minister, she would become the mistress of a duke. A millionaire duke. The change would be profitable, assuming that she could not retain both. Her calculations were speedily made. She would only make Rosas pay more dearly for the resistance he had offered before surrendering himself.
But now, abruptly and without her having thought of it, he had, with the incautiousness of a soldier who discloses his attack and lays himself open to a bully who tries to provoke him, the duke showed her the extent of his violent passion by a single phrase that feverishly agitated her.
His mistress! Why his mistress, since he had shown her that perhaps?—
"Idiot that I am!" thought Marianne. "Suppose I play my cards for marriage?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"It will cost no more!"
Married! Duchess! and Duchesse de Rosas! At first she laughed. Duchess! I am asking a little from you! The mistress of Pierre Méran, the artist's drudge, the wretch who abducted her and debauched her, adding his depravity to hers, and who died of consumption while quite young, after having plunged this girl into vice, this Marianne Kayser, born and moulded for vice: she a duchess!
"It would be too funny, my dear!" she thought.
Never had Vaudrey, whom she saw that evening at Rue Prony, seemed so provincial, or, as she said, so Sulpice. Besides, he was gloomy and unable to express himself clearly at first, but finally he brought himself to acknowledge that he was embarrassed about providing for the bill of exchange—she understood—
"No, I do not know!"
"The bill of exchange in favor of Monsieur Gochard!"
"Ah! that is so. Well! if you cannot pay it, my dear, I will advise—I will seek—"
There was nothing to seek. Vaudrey would evidently get himself out of the affair—but the document matured at an unfortunate time. He did not dare to mortgage La Saulière, his farm at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont. He had reflected that Adrienne might learn all about it. And then—
Marianne broke in upon his confidences.
"Don't speak to me about these money matters, my friend, you know that sort of thing disgusts me!—"
"I understand you and ask your pardon."
They were to see each other again the next day, as parliament was to take a rest.
"What joy! Not to be away from you for the whole of the day!" remarked Vaudrey.
"Well then, till to-morrow!"
She felt intense pleasure in being alone again, wrapped in her sheets, with the light of the lamp that ordinarily shone upon her hours of love with Sulpice, still burning, and to be free to dream of her Spanish grandee who had said, plainly, with the trembling of passion on his lips: "I should esteem you enough to become your husband!"
She passed the night in reverie.
Vaudrey, in spite of the joy of the morrow,—a long tête-à-tête with his mistress,—thought with increasing vexation of the approaching maturity of his bill of exchange; within two months he would have to pay the hundred thousand francs which he had undertaken to pay Marianne's creditor.
"It is astonishing how quickly time passes!"
At breakfast the following day, Adrienne saw that her husband was more than usually preoccupied.
"Are political affairs going badly?"
"No—on the contrary—"
"Then why are you melancholy?"
"I am a little fatigued."
"Then," said Madame Vaudrey, "you will scold me."
"Why?"
"I have led Madame Gerson to hope—You know whom I mean, Madame Marsy's friend,—I have almost promised her that you would accept an invitation to dine at her house."
For a moment Vaudrey was put out.
Another evening taken! Hours of delight stolen from Marianne!
"I have done wrong?" asked Adrienne, as she rested her pretty but somewhat sad face on her husband's bosom. "I did it because it is so great a pleasure to me to spend an entire evening with you, even at another's house. Remember you have so many official dinners, banquets and invitations that you attend alone. When the minister's wife is invited with him, it is a fête-day for the poor, little forsaken thing. I do not have much of you, it is true, but I see you, I hear you talking and I am happy. Do not chide me for having said that we would go to Madame Gerson's. The more so, because she is a charming woman. Ah! when she speaks of you! 'So great a minister!' Don't you know what she calls you?—'A Colbert!'"
Vaudrey could not restrain a smile.
"Come, after that, one cannot refuse her invitation. It is the Monseigneur of the beggar," said he, kissing Adrienne's brow. "And when do we dine at Madame Gerson's?"
"On Monday next; I shall have at least one delightful evening to see you," said the young wife sweetly.
The minister entered his cabinet. Almost immediately after, a messenger handed him a card: Molina, Banker.
"How strange it is!" thought Sulpice. "I had him in mind."
In the course of his troublesome reflections concerning the Gochard paper, Vaudrey persistently thought of that fat, powerful man who laughed and harangued in a loud voice in the greenroom of the ballet, as he patted with his fat fingers the delicate chin of Marie Launay.
Why! if he were willing, this Molina—Molina the Tumbler!—for him it is a mere bagatelle, a hundred thousand francs!
Salomon Molina entered the minister's cabinet just as he made his way into the foyer of the Opéra, with swelling chest, tilted chin and stomach thrust forward.
"Monsieur le Ministre," he said in a clear voice, as he spread himself out in the armchair that Vaudrey pointed out to him, "I notify you that you have my maiden visit!—I am still in a state of innocency! On my honor, this is the first time I have set my foot within a minister's office!"
He manifested his independence—born of his colossal influence—by his satisfied and successful air. The former Marseillaise clothes-dealer, in his youth pouncing upon the sailors of the port and Maltese and Levantine seamen, to palm off on them a second-hand coat or trousers, as the wardrobe dealers of the Temple hook the passer-by, Salomon Molina, who had paraded his rags and his hopes on the Canebière, dreaming at the back of his dark shop of the triumphs, the pleasures, the revels and the indigestions that money affords, had, moreover, always preserved the bitterness of those wretched days and his red, Jewish lip expressed the gall of his painful experiences.
His first word as he entered Vaudrey's cabinet, asserting the virginity of his efforts at solicitation, betrayed his bitterness.
Now, triumphant, powerful, delighted, feasted and fat, his massive form, his gross flesh and his money were in evidence all over Paris. His huge paunch, shaking with laughter, filled the stage-boxes at the theatres. He expanded his broad shoulders as he reclined in the calèche that deposited him on race-days at the entrance of the weighing-enclosure. He held by the neck, as it were, everything of the Parisian quarry that yelps and bounds about money, issues of stock, and the food of public fortune: bankers, stock-brokers, and jobbers, financial, political and exchange editors, wretches running after a hundred sous, statesmen in a fair way to fortune; and he distributed to this little crowd, just as he would throw food into a kennel, the discounts and clippings of his ventures, taking malicious pleasure, the insolent delight of a fortunate upstart, in feigning at the moment when loans were issued, sickness that had no existence, in order to have the right of keeping his chamber, of hearing persons of exalted names ringing at his door and dancing attendance upon him,—powerful, influential and illustrious persons,—him, the second-hand dealer and chafferer from Marseilles.
It was then that he tasted the joy of supreme power, that delight which titillated even his marrow, and after having rested all day, the prey of a convenient neuralgia, he experienced the unlimited pleasure of force overcoming mind, the blow of a fist crushing a weakling, as with a white cravat he appeared in some salon, in the greenroom of the ballet, or in the dressing-room of a première, saying with the mocking smile of triumph and the assurance attending a gorged appetite:
"I was sick to-day, I suffered from neuralgia! The Minister of Finance called on me!—Baron Nathan came to get information from me!"
Among all the pleasures experienced by this man, he valued feminine virtue occasionally purchased with gold as little in comparison with the virgin souls, honor and virtue that he often succeeded in humiliating, in bending before him like a reed, and snuffing out with his irony, whenever necessity placed at his mercy any of those puritanical beings who had passed sometimes with haughty brow before the millions of this man of money. It was then that the clothes-dealer took his revenge in all its hideousness. There was no pity to be expected from this fat, smiling and easy-going man. His fat fingers strangled more certainly than the lean hands of a usurer. Molina never pardoned.
Ah! if this fellow went to see the minister, most assuredly he wanted a favor from him.
But what?
It was extraordinary, but before Vaudrey, Molina who could hold his own among rascals, found himself ill at ease. There was in the frank look of this ninny, as Molina the Tumbler had one evening called him while talking politics, such direct honesty that the banker, accustomed as he was to dealings with sharks and intriguers, did not quite know how to open the question, nevertheless a very important matter was in hand.
"A rich plum," thought Molina.
A matter of railways, a concession to be gained. A matter of private interest, disguised under the swelling terms of the public welfare, the national needs. Millions were to be gained. Molina was charged with the duty of sounding the President of the Council and the Minister of Public Works. Two honest men. The dodge, as the Tumbler said, was to make them swallow the affair under the guise of patriotism. A strategical railroad. The means of rapid locomotion in case of mobilization. With such high-sounding words, strategy, frontier, safety, they could carry a good many points.
Unfortunately, Vaudrey was rather skittish on these particular questions, besides he was informed on the matter. He felt his flesh creep while Molina was speaking. Just before, on seeing the banker's card, the idea of the money of which the fat man was one of the incarnations, had suddenly dawned upon him as a hope. Who knows? By Molina's aid, he might, perhaps, free himself from anxiety about the Gochard bill of exchange!—But from the minister's first words, although the banker could not get to the point, intimidated as he was by Sulpice's honest look, it was clear that Vaudrey surmised some repugnant suggestions in the hesitating words of this man.
What! Molina hesitating? He did not go straight to the point, squarely, according to his custom, Molina the illustrious Tumbler? Eh! no! the intentionally cold bearing of the minister decidedly discomposed him. Vaudrey's glance never wandered from his for a moment. When the promoter pronounced the word Bourse, a disdainful curl played upon Sulpice's lips, but not a word escaped him. Molina heard his own voice break the silence of the ministerial cabinet and he felt himself entangled. He came to propose a combination, a bonus, and he did not suspect that Vaudrey would refuse to have a hand in it. And here, this devilish minister appeared not to understand, did not understand, perhaps, or else he understood too well. Molina was not accustomed to such hard-of-hearing people. With his fat hand, he had dropped into the hands of senators and ministers of the former régime, a sum for which the only receipt given was a smile. He was accustomed to the style of conversation carried on by hints and ended between intelligent people by a shake of the hand, that in which some bits of paper rested: bank-notes or paid-up shares. And this Vaudrey knew nothing! So he felt himself obliged to explain himself clearly, to stoop to dotting every i, at the risk of being shown out of doors.
Molina was too shrewd to run this risk. He would return at another time, seeing that the minister turned a deaf ear, but pécaïre! he sweat huge drops in seeking roundabout phrases, this man who never minced his words and habitually called things by their proper names. Was the like ever seen! A pettifogger from Grenoble to floor Salomon Molina!
"It made me warm," said the money-maker, on leaving the cabinet, "but, deuce take it! I'll have my revenge. One is not a minister always. You shall pay me dearly, my little fellow, for that uncomfortable little time."
Vaudrey had thoroughly understood the matter, but he did not intend to allow it to be seen that he did. That was a simpler way. He had not had to dismiss the buyer of consciences; he had enjoyed his embarrassment and that was sufficient.
"What, however, if I had spoken to him of money before he had shown his hand! If I had accepted from him—!" he said to himself.
He shuddered at the thought as he had previously done while Molina was talking to him. A single imprudence, a single confidence might easily have placed him under the hand of this fat man. He must, however, find some solution. The days were rolling away and the bills signed for Marianne would in a very short time reach maturity.
"When I think that this Molina could in one day enable me to gain three times this sum."
Salomon had just told him: "To forestall the news on the Bourse is sometimes worth gold ingots!" A forestaller! As well say the revelation of a State secret, base speculation, almost treachery! And yet on hearing these words that covered up an insult, he had not even rung for the messenger to show Molina out, but had striven to comprehend nothing!
As the result of this conversation, he felt uncomfortable. The man had left an odor of pollution, as it were, behind him.
Vaudrey must needs be soon reassured respecting the Gochard paper. In visiting Marianne, he observed that his mistress was a shrewd woman. She informed him immediately that Claire Dujarrier whom she had seen, would secure a renewal from Gochard, who was unknown to Vaudrey, from three months to three months until the expiration of six months in consideration of an additional twenty thousand francs for each period of ninety days.
"I did not understand that at first," Marianne began by remarking.
"Oh!" said Sulpice, "I understand perfectly, it is absolute usury. But time is ready money, and in six months it will be easier for me to pay one hundred and forty thousand francs than a hundred thousand to-day. I have plans."
"What?"
"Very difficult to explain, but quite clear in my mind! The important part is not to have the date of maturity on the first of June, but on the first of December."
"Then nothing is more simple. Madame Dujarrier will arrange it."
"Is Madame Dujarrier a providence then?"
"Almost," said Marianne coldly.
Sulpice was intoxicated with joy, realizing that he had before him all the necessary time in which to free himself from his embarrassment, when Marianne should have returned him his first acceptance for one hundred thousand francs against a new one for one hundred and forty thousand. He breathed again. From the twenty-sixth of April to the first of December, he had nearly seven months in which to free himself. He repeated the calculation that he had formerly made when he said: "I have ample time!"
He reëntered the Hôtel Beauvau in a cheerful mood, Adrienne was delighted. She feared to see him return nervous and dejected.
"Then you will be brilliant presently at Madame Gerson's."
"Stop! that's so. It is this evening in fact!—"
He had forgotten it.
Marianne, too, was not free. She was going, she said, to Auteuil for that bill of exchange. Vaudrey did not therefore, regret the soirée. His going to Madame Gerson's was now a matter of indifference to him.
"As for me, I am so happy, oh! so happy!" said Adrienne, clapping her little hands like a child.
In undressing, Vaudrey fortunately found this document which he had folded in four and left in his waistcoat pocket:
"On the first of June next, I will pay to the order of Monsieur Adolphe Gochard of No. 9, Rue Albouy, the sum of One Hundred Thousand Francs, value received in cash.
"SULPICE VAUDREY,
"Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 37."
He turned pale on reading it. If Adrienne had seen it!—
He burned the paper at a candle.
"I am imprudent," he said to himself. "Poor Adrienne! I should not like to cause her any distress."
She was overjoyed as she made the journey in the ministerial carriage from Place Beauvau to the Gersons' mansion. At last she had a rapid, stolen moment in which she could recover the old-time joy of happy solitude, full of the exquisite agitation of former days.
"Do you recall the time when you took me away like this, on the evening of our marriage?" she whispered to him, as the carriage was driven off at a gallop.
He took her hands and pressed them.
"You still love me, don't you, Sulpice?—You believe too, that I love you more than all the world?"
"Yes, I believe it!"
"You would kill me if I deceived you?—I, ah, if you deceived me, I do not know what I should do.—Although I think that you are here, that I hold you, that I love you, you may still belong to another woman—"
"Again! you have already said that. Are you mad?" said Sulpice. "See! we have reached our destination."
Madame Gerson had brilliantly illuminated her house in Rue de Boulogne with lights, filled it with flowers, and spread carpets everywhere to receive the President of the Council. The house was too small to accommodate the guests, who were about to be stifled therein. She packed them into her dining-room. For the soirée which was to follow, she had sounded the roll-call of her friends. She was bent on founding a new salon, on showing Madame Marsy that she was not alone to be the rival of Madame Evan.
Madame Gerson was not on friendly terms with Sabine Marsy. People were ignorant as to the cause. Adrienne, who was not familiar with the history of such little broils, was very much surprised to learn of this fact.
"She claims that we take away all her personnel," said Madame Gerson. "It is not my fault if people enjoy themselves at our house. I hope that you will find pleasure here, Monsieur le Président."
Vaudrey bowed. "Madame Gerson could not doubt it."
The guests sat down to dinner. Madame Gerson beamed with joy beside the minister. Guy de Lissac, Warcolier, some senators and some deputies were of the dinner party. Monsieur and Madame Gerson never spoke of them by their names but: Monsieur le Sénateur, Monsieur le Député! They lubricated their throats with these titles, just as bourgeois who come in contact with highnesses swell out in addressing a prince as Monseigneur, absolutely as if they were addressing themselves.
Sulpice felt in the midst of this circle in which everything was sacrificed to chic, as he invariably did, the painful sensation of a man who is continually on show. He never dined out without running against the same menu, the same fanfare, and the same conversation.
Monsieur Gerson endeavored to draw the President of the Council into political conversation. He wished to know Vaudrey's opinion as to the one-man ballet. Sulpice smiled.
"Thanks!" he said. "We have just been dealing with that. I prefer truffles, they are more savory."
Through the flowers, Adrienne could see her husband who was seated opposite to her beside Madame Gerson. She conversed but little with Guy de Lissac, who was sitting on her right, although the formalities of the occasion would have suggested that Monsieur le Senator Crépeau and Monsieur de Prangins, the deputy, should have been so placed. Madame Gerson, however, had remarked with a smile, that Madame Vaudrey would not feel annoyed at having Monsieur de Lissac for her neighbor. "I have often met Monsieur de Lissac at the ministry; he is received noticeably well there."
Not knowing any one among the guests, Adrienne was, in fact, charmed to have Guy next to her. He was decidedly pleasing to her with his sallies, his skepticism which, as she thought, covered more belief than he wished to disclose. For a long time, he had felt himself entirely captivated by her cheerful modesty and the grace of her exquisite purity. She was so vastly different from all the other women whom he had known. How the devil could Vaudrey bring himself to neglect so perfect a creature, who was more attractive in her fascinating virtue than all the damsels to be met with in society, among the demi-monde, or those of a still lower grade? For Vaudrey remained indifferent to Adrienne; and this was a further and manifest blow. A specialist in matters of observation like Guy was not to be deceived therein. Madame Vaudrey had not yet complained, but she was already suffering. Was it merely politics, or was it some woman who was taking her husband from Adrienne? Guy did not know, but he would know. The pretty Madame Vaudrey interested him.
"If that idiot Sulpice were not my friend, I would make love to her. Besides," he said to himself, as he looked at Adrienne's lovely, limpid eyes, "I should fail; there are some lakes whose tranquillity cannot be disturbed."
Adrienne, pleased to have him beside her, enquired of him the names of the guests. On the left of Madame Gerson sat a little, broad-backed man, with black hair pasted over his temples, long leg-of-mutton whiskers decorating his bright-colored cheeks, and a keen eye: he was Monsieur Jouvenet, formerly an advocate; to-day Prefect of Police.
Senator Crépeau sat further away. He was a fat manufacturer, who talked about alimentary products and politics. In the Analytical Table of the Accounts of the Sittings of the Senate, his name shone brilliantly, with the following as his record: "CRÉPEAU, of L'Ain, Life Senator—Apologizes for his absence—8 January—. Apologizes for his absence—20 February—. Member of a commission—Journal Officiel, p. 1441. Apologizes for not being able to take part in the labors of the commission—4 March—. Apologizes for his absence—20 March—. Asks for leave of absence—5 April—." Such were his services during the ordinary work of that year. Monsieur Crépeau—of L'Ain—had earned the right to take a rest.
"He eats very heartily," said Lissac. "His appetite is better than his eloquence."
Next to Crépeau was another legislator, Henri de Prangins, a publicist, an old, wrinkled, stooping, dissatisfied grumbler.
"Ah! that is Monsieur de Prangins," said Adrienne, "I have heard much about him."
"He is a typical character," Lissac said, with a smile. "You know Granet, the gentleman who will become a minister; well, Prangins is the gentleman who would be a minister, but who never will be! Moreover, he is five hundred times more remarkable than a hundred others who have been in office ten times, for what reason cannot be said."
For nearly half a century Prangins, the old political wheel-horse, had plotted and jockeyed in politics, set up and overthrown ministries, piled up review articles on newspaper articles, contradiction on contradiction, page on page, spoiled cartloads of paper in his vocation of daily or fortnightly howler, and withal he was applauded, rich and popular, famous and surrounded by flatterers, knife-and-fork companions, without friends but not wanting clients, as he had made and spoiled reputations, ministers, governments, and although he well knew the vanity and nothingness of power, he aspired to secure that vain booty, oft alleging, with bitter enviousness of authority and impatient of tyranny, that to enjoy popularity uninterruptedly was not worth a quarter of an hour of power, approaching with greedy eagerness the desired lot, yet seeing it inevitably, eternally, relentlessly escape and recede from him, plucked from his grasp as it were, like a shred of flesh from the jaw of a Molossian. And now, in his unquenchable lust of power, amid the monuments of combination and deception he had created, this man was weary, disgusted and irritated,—believing himself vanquished and smothering the anger of defeat in the luxurious isolation of his wealth. He was neither officially influential nor liked. Feared he was, probably, and envied because of his good fortune, recognized, too, as a force, but only as acting in the whirlwind of his ideas and struggling in the emptiness of his dreams. After having immolated everything, youth, family, friendship, love, to this chimera: power, he found himself old, worn-out, broken by his combats, face to face with the folly of his hopes and the worthlessness of his will. Never had his nervous hand been able to grasp in its transition, the fragment of morocco of a portfolio and now that his parchment-like fingers were old and feeble, they would never cling to that shred of power! And now this Prangins avenged himself for the contempt or the injustice of his colleagues and the folly of circumstances, by criticism, defiance, mockery, denial and by loudly expressing his opinion:
"The defect of every government is that it will try to play new airs on an old violin! Your violin is cracked, Monsieur Vaudrey! I do not reproach you for that, you did not make it!"
Vaudrey laughed at the sally, but Warcolier felt that he was choking. How could the minister allow his policy to be thus attacked at table? Ah! how Warcolier would have clinched the argument of this Prangins.
Madame Gerson was delighted. The dinner was served sumptuously and went off without a hitch. The maître d'hôtel directed the service admirably. The soirée that was to follow it would be magnificent. The journals would most certainly report it. Gerson had invited one reporter in spite of his dislike of journalists. Ah! those gossipers and foolish fellows, they never forgot to describe the toilettes worn by "the pretty Madame Gerson" at first nights, at the Élysée or at Charity Bazaars. Occasionally, her husband pretended to be angered by the successes of his wife:
"Those journalists! Just imagine, those journalists! They speak about my wife just as they would about an actress! 'The lovely Madame Gerson wore a gown of crêpe de Chine!' The lovely Madame Gerson! What has my wife's beauty or her toilette to do with them?"
In truth, however, he felt flattered. He was only sincerely annoyed when people respected the devilish wall of private life, the cement of which he would have stripped off himself, in order to show his wife's beauty. To be quoted in the paper, why! that is chic.
Adrienne felt a little stunned by the noise of the conversation which increased in proportion as the dinner advanced. She was also very much astonished and not a little grieved when Madame Gerson abruptly spoke in a loud voice before all the guests concerning Madame Marsy, at whose house it was, in fact, that she made the acquaintance of Vaudrey. Madame Gerson showed her pretty teeth in a very charming manner as she tore her old friend Sabine to pieces, as it were. In a tenderly indulgent tone which was the more terrible, she repeated the tales that were formerly current: the affecting death of Philippe Marsy, the painter of Charity, and a particular escapade in which Sabine was involved with Émile Cordier, one of the leaders of the intransigeante school of painters.
"What! you did not know that?" said the pretty Madame Gerson in astonishment.
Adrienne knew nothing. She was delighted moreover to know nothing. She heard this former friend relate how Sabine had, at one time, exhibited at the Salon. Oh! mere students' daubs, horrid things! Still-life subjects that might have passed for buried ones, and yet, perhaps, Cordier retouched them.
"I thought that Madame Gerson was on the best of terms with Madame Marsy," whispered Adrienne to Lissac, who replied:
"They have been on better! They perhaps will be so again. That is of very little importance. Women revile each other and associate at the same time."
Adrienne decided that she would not listen. She knew Sabine Marsy only slightly; she was not interested as a friend; but this little execution, gracefully carried out here by a woman who recently did the honors at the Salon of Boulevard Malesherbes seemed to her as cowardly as treachery. This, then, was society! And how right was her choice in preferring solitude!
Then, in order that she might not hear the slander that was greeted with applause by those very persons who but yesterday besieged Madame Marsy's buffet, and who would run to-morrow to pay court to that woman, she conversed with Lissac. She frankly told him what she suffered at Place Beauvau. She spoke of Sulpice, as Sulpice was loved by her beyond all else in the world.
"Fancy! I do not see him, hardly ever! The other week he passed two days at Laon, where an exposition was held at which he was present."
"An exposition at Laon?" asked Lissac, astonished. "What exposition?"
"I do not know. I know nothing myself. Perhaps it is wrong of me not to keep myself informed of passing events, but all that wearies me. I detest politics and journals—I am told quite enough about them. Politics! that which takes my husband from me! My uncle, Doctor Reboux, often said to me: 'Never marry a doctor; he is only half a husband.' Vaudrey is like a doctor. Always absent, with his everlasting night-sessions."
"Night-sessions?" asked Lissac.
"Yes, at the Chamber—continually—"
Guy determined to betray nothing of his astonishment; but he knew now as surely as if he had learned everything, why Sulpice neglected Adrienne. The fool! some girl from the Opéra! some office-seeker who was skilfully entangling His Excellency! That appertained to his functions then? He was exasperated at Vaudrey and alternately looked at him and at Adrienne. So perfect a woman! Ravishing. What an exquisite profile, so delicate and with such a straight nose and a delightful mouth! Was Vaudrey mad then?
The guests rose from the table, and, as usual, the men went into the smoking-room, leaving the salon half-empty. Madame Gerson profited thereby to continue distilling her little slanders about Sabine, which she did while laughing heartily. In the smoking-room the men chatted away beneath the cloud that rose from their londrès. The clarion tones of Warcolier rung out above all the other voices.
Guy, seated in a corner on a divan, was still thinking of Adrienne, of those night-sessions, of those expositions, of those agricultural competitions invented by Sulpice, and caught but snatches of the conversation, jests, and nonsensical stories which were made at the cost of the colleagues of the Chamber and political friends:
"You know how Badiche learned at the last election that he was not elected?"
"No, how?"
"He returned to his house, anxious as to the result of the ballot. And he heard, what do you think? His children, a little boy and a little girl, who on receipt of the telegram that papa was waiting for and that mamma in her feverish expectation had opened, had already composed a song to the air of The Young Man Poisoned:
Résultat très négatif,
Ballottage positif!
Badiche est ballo—
Bâté,
Est ballotté!
Oui, Badiche est ballotté;
C'est papa qu'est ballotté!
Happy precocity! genuine frightful gamins!"
"Du Gavarni!"
"Apropos, on what majority do you count, Monsieur le Président?"
"One hundred and thirty-nine."
"That is a large one."
"I! my dear fellow,"—it was old Prangins speaking to Senator Crépeau,—"I do not count myself as likely to be included in the next ministry, no! I do not delude myself, but I shall be in the second—or rather in the third—no, in the fourth—yes, in the fourth ministry—Assuredly!"
An asthmatic cough, the cough of an old man, interrupted his remarks.
Guy heard Warcolier, as he held a small glass of kirsch in his hand, say with a laugh:
"I have a way of holding my electors in leash. Not only when I visit them do I address them as my friend, my brave, which flatters them, but from time to time, I write them autograph letters. They look upon that like ready money. Some of them, the good fellows, are flattered: 'He has written to me, he is not proud!' Others, the suspicious fellows, are reassured: 'Now—I have his signature, I have him!' And there you are!"
They laughed heartily.
"How they laugh afterward," thought Lissac, "at the electors whose shoes they would blacken beforehand."
"The course that I have followed is very simple," said another. "I desired to become sub-prefect so as to become a prefect and a prefect to become a deputy, and a deputy so as to reach a receiver-generalship. The salaries assured, why, there's the crowning of a career."
"Why, that fellow plays the whole gamut," again thought Guy, "but he is frank!"
"I read very little," now replied Crépeau to Warcolier—"I do not much care for pure literature—we politicians, we need substantial reading that will teach us to think."
"I believe you!—" murmured this Parisian Guy, still smoking and listening. "Go to school, my good man!"
The conversation thus intermingled and confused, horrified and irritated this blasé by its gravity and selfishness. He summed up an entire character in a single phrase and shook his head as he very shrewdly remarked: "Suppose Universal Suffrage were listening?"
Lissac did not take any part in these conversations. It was his delight to observe. He drew amusement from all these wearisome commonplaces, according to his custom as a curious spectator.
He was about, however, to rise and approach Vaudrey, who was instinctively coming toward him, when the Prefect of Police, Monsieur Jouvenet, without noticing it, placed himself between the minister and his friend.
Jouvenet spoke in a low tone to Vaudrey, smiling at the same time very peculiarly and passing his fingers through his whiskers. Whatever discretion the prefect employed, Guy was near enough to him to hear the name of Marianne Kayser, which surprised him.
Marianne! what question of Marianne could there be between these two men?
Lissac observed that Vaudrey suddenly became very pale.
He drew still nearer, pretending to finish a cup of coffee while standing. Then he heard these words very distinctly:
"A reporter saw you leave her house the other evening!"
Guy moved away very quickly. He felt a sort of sudden bewilderment, as if the few words spoken by the Prefect of Police were the natural result of his conversation with Adrienne, an immediate response thereto.
"It would be astonishing if Marianne—" thought Lissac.
Besides, he would know soon. He would merely question Vaudrey.
As soon as Jouvenet, always polite, grave and impassive, had left "Monsieur le Ministre" in a state of visible nervousness, almost of anxiety, he entered upon his plan.
"You know Mademoiselle Kayser intimately then?" he asked Vaudrey, who, taken aback, looked at him for a moment without replying and endeavored to grasp Lissac's purpose.
"Am I imprudent?" further asked Guy.
"No, but who has told you—?"
"Nothing, your Prefect of Police only spoke a little too loud. He seemed to me to understand."
Vaudrey's hand rapidly seized Lissac's wrist.
"Hush! be silent!"
"Very well! Good!" said Lissac to himself. "Poor little Adrienne."
"I will tell you all about that later. Oh! nothing is more simple! It isn't what you think!"
"I am sure of that!" answered Lissac, with a smile.
In a mechanical way, and as if to evade his friend, Sulpice left the smoking-room for the salon, tritely observing:
"We must rejoin the ladies—the cigar kills conversation—"
He felt uncomfortable. It was the first time that Jouvenet had informed him that there are agents for learning the movements of ministers. The Prefect of Police, in a chance conversation at the Opéra with the editor-in-chief of a very Parisian journal, had suppressed a rumor which stated that a minister hailing from Grenoble set propriety at defiance in his visits to Rue Prony. It would have been as well to print Vaudrey's name.
Hitherto he had been able to enjoy his passion for Marianne without scandal and secretly. His mysterious intrigue was now known to the police, to everybody, to a reporter who had stumbled against him on leaving a supper-party at the house of a courtesan in the neighborhood.
The minister was bitterly annoyed. The very flattering applause that the women bestowed upon him when he returned to the salon could not dissipate his ill-humor. He tried to chat and respond to the affected remarks of Madame Gerson and to the smiles of the women; but he was embarrassed and nervous. Adrienne thought he looked ill.
Everything was spoken of in the light but pretentious, easy tone of the conversation of those second-rate salons where neither ideas nor men are made, where, on the contrary, they are accepted, ready-made and en bloc. On every question, the picture in vogue, the favorite book, the man of the hour, they expressed themselves by the same stereotyped, expected word, borrowed from the ceaseless repetition of current polemics. Nothing was new. The conversation was as well worn as an old farthing. Adrienne was pained to see a man of Vaudrey's intelligence compelled to listen to these truisms and wondered if he would presently reproach her for having brought him into the suffocating void of this Parisian establishment where all was superficial, glittering and chic.
She was in a hurry to get away. She saw that Sulpice was growing weary, and took advantage of the first opportunity to whisper to him:
"Would you like to go?"
"Yes, let us go!" he said.
He sought Lissac and repeated to him that he would have something to say to him, and Guy bowed to the Minister and Madame Vaudrey, who left too early to please the Gersons.
Adrienne, out of heart and discouraged by commonplace gossip and slander, was eager to be again with her husband, to tell him that nothing could compensate her for the deep joy of the tête-à-tête, their evenings passed together as of old—he remembered them well,—when he read to her from the works of much-loved poets.
"Poetry!" said Vaudrey. "Will you be quiet! The Gersons would find me as antiquated as Ramel. It is old-fashioned."
"I am no longer surprised," added the young wife, "at being so little fashionable. Morally speaking, those hot-houses of platitudes stifle one. Never fear, Sulpice, I shall not be the one to ever again drag you into salons. Are you tired? Are you weary?"
"No, I was thinking of something else," replied Vaudrey, who really was thinking of Marianne.
Madame Vaudrey had not left Madame Gerson's salon before that pretty little Parisian whispered imprudently enough in the ear of a female friend:
"Our ministers' wives are always from Carpentras, Pont-à-Mousson, or Moulins; don't you think so?"
"And what would you have!" said Lissac, who on this evening heard everything that he ought not to hear, "it is as good as being from the Moulin-Rouge!"
Madame Gerson smiled, thought the expression charming, very apt, very happy, but again reflected that Lissac was exceedingly considerate toward Adrienne and that Madame Vaudrey was a little too indulgent toward Monsieur de Lissac.