VII
On rising the following morning, after a feverish night, Sulpice realized a feeling of absolute moral destruction. It seemed to him that he had lost a dear being. In that huge, silent hôtel one would have thought that a corpse was lying. He did not dare to present himself to Adrienne. He could not tell what to say to her. He went downstairs slowly, crossing the salons that were still decorated with the now fading flowers, to reach his cabinet. The carpet was littered with the broken leaves of dracænas and petals that had fallen from the azaleas, and presented the gloomy, forsaken aspect peculiar to the morrow of a fête. The furniture, stripped of its coverings, offered the faded tint of old maids at their rising. With heavy head, he sat at his desk and looked at the piled-up documents with a vague expression. Always the eternal pile of despatches, optimistic reports, and banal summaries of the daily press. Nothing new, nothing interesting, all was going well. This tired world had no history.
The minister still remained there, absorbed as after an unhealthy insomnia, when Warcolier entered, ever serious, with his splendid, redundant phrases and his usual attitude of a pedantic rhetor. He came to inform the minister that a matter of importance, perhaps of a troublesome nature, loomed on the horizon. Granet was preparing an interpellation. Oh! upon a matter without any real importance. An affair of a procession that had taken place at Tarbes, accompanied by some little disturbance. It was only a pretext, but it was sufficient, perhaps, to rally a majority around the minister of to-morrow. Old Henri de Prangins, with his eye on a portfolio, and always thirsting for power, was keeping Granet company: the man who would never be a minister with the man who was sure to be.
"Well, what has this to do with me?" asked Vaudrey indifferently.
Granet! Prangins! He was thinking of a very different matter. Adrienne knew all and Marianne deceived him. She was to marry Rosas.
The very serious Warcolier manifested much surprise at the little energy displayed by Monsieur le Ministre. He expected to see him bound, in order to rebound, as he said, believing himself witty. Was Vaudrey himself giving up the game? Was Granet then sure of the game? He surmised it and had already taken the necessary measures in that direction. But surely if Granet were the rising sun, Vaudrey was himself abandoning his character of the setting sun. He was not setting, he was falling. A sovereign contempt for this man entered Warcolier's lofty soul, Warcolier the friend of success.
"Then you do not understand, Monsieur le Président?"
Vaudrey drew himself up with a sudden movement that was frequent with him. He struck the table on which his open portfolio rested, and said:
"I understand that Granet wants that portfolio! Well, be it so! I set little store by it, but he does not have it yet!"
"That is something like it! It is worthy of a brave man to show a resolute front to his enemies! It is in battle that talent is retempered, as formerly in the Styx were tempered—"
Warcolier's intelligent smile was not understood by the minister.
Sulpice, who was in despair over his shattered domestic joys, had no wish to enter on a struggle except to bring about a reaction on himself. To hold his own against Granet, was to divert his own present sadness.
"All right," he said to Warcolier. "Let Granet interpellate us when he pleases—In eight days, to-morrow, yes, to-day even, I am ready!"
"Interpellate us!" thought Warcolier. "You should say, interpellate you."
He had already got out of the scrape himself.
Vaudrey debated with himself as to whether he would try to see Adrienne. No? What should he say to her? It would be better to let a little time shed its balm upon the wound. Then, too, if he wished to bar the way to Granet, he had not too much time before him. The shrewd person should act promptly.
"I shall see him on the Budget Committee!" thought Vaudrey.
He found it necessary now to force an interest in the struggle which a few months before would have found him eagerly panting to enter on. The honeymoon of his love of power had passed. He had too keenly felt, one after another, the discouragements of the office that he sought in order to do good, to reform, to act, in the pursuit of which he found himself, from the first moment, clashing with routine, old-fashioned ideas, petty ambitions, the general welfare, all the brood of selfish interests. It had been his to dream a sort of Chimera bearing the country toward Progress on outstretched wings: he found himself entangled in the musty mechanism of a worn-out and rancid-smelling engine, that dragged the State as a broken-winded horse might have done. Then, little by little, weariness and disgust had penetrated the heart of this visionary who desired to live, to assert himself in putting an end to so many abuses, and whom his colleagues, his chiefs of division, his chief of service, the chief of the State himself cautiously advised: "Make no innovations! Let things go! That has gone on so for so long! What is the use of changing? It will still do very well!"
Ah! it was to throw off the shackles and to try the impossible! Vaudrey found himself hemmed in between his dearest hopes and the most disheartening realities. He was asked for offices, not reforms. The men charged with the fate of the country were not straggling after progress, they were looking after their own interests, their landed and shopkeeping interests. He felt nauseated by all this. He held those deputies in contempt who besieged his cabinet and filled his antechamber in order to beg, claim and demand. All of them sought something, and they were almost strangled by the solicitations of their own constituents. They appeared to Sulpice to be rather the commissionaires of universal suffrage than the servants. This abasement before the manipulators of the votes made Vaudrey indignant. He felt that France was becoming by degrees a vast market for favors, a nation in which everyone asked office from those who to keep their own promised everything, and the thought filled him with terror. The ministers, wedded to their positions, became the mere servants of the deputies, while the latter obeyed the orders of their constituents. All was kept within a vast network of office-seeking and trafficking. And with it all, a hatred of genuine talent, bitter selfishness and the crushing narrowness of ideas!
Vaudrey recalled a story that had been told him, how during the Empire, the Emperor, terrified, feeling himself isolated, asked and searched for a man, and how a certain little bell in the Tuileries was especially provided to warn the chamberlains of the entry into the château of a new face, of the visit of a stranger, in order that the camarilla, warned by the particular ring, would have time to place themselves on their guard, and to send the newcomer to the right about if he might become an aid to the master and a danger to the servants. Well! Sulpice did not hear that invisible and secret bell, but he guessed its presence, he divined its presence around him, warning the interested, always ready to chase away the stranger; he felt that its secret thread was everywhere thrown around the powerful, the mighty of four days or a quarter of a century and that, so long as influence existed in the world, there would be courtiers and that these courtiers, eager for a crumb, would prevent the stranger, that is to say, truth, from reaching the light, fearing that this stranger might play the part of the lion and chase the flies away from the honeycomb.
Thus, how much nausea and contempt he felt for that transient power which in spite of himself was rendered useless! A power that placed him at the mercy of the bawling of a colleague or an enemy, and even at the mercy of that all-powerful master so readily dissatisfied: everybody. He had seen, at too close quarters, the vile intrigues, the depressing chafferings, the grinding of that political kitchen in which so many people,—this Warcolier with his voluble rhetoric, this Granet with his conceited smile of superiority,—were hungering to hold the handle of the saucepan. He recalled a remark that Denis Ramel had often repeated to him: "What is the use of putting one's self out in order to bask in the sunshine? The best are in the shade."
He was seized with lawful indignation against his own ambitions, against the lack of energy that prevented him from sweeping away all obstacles,—men, and routine,—and he recalled with afflicting bitterness his entry on public life, in the blaze of divine light, and his dreams, his poor noble dreams! "A great minister! I will be a great minister!"
"Ah! yes, indeed! one is a minister, that is all! And that is enough! It is often too much! We shall see indeed what he will do, that Granet who ought to do so much!"
Vaudrey laughed nervously.
"What he will do? Nothing! Nothing! Still nothing! That is very easy! To do anything, one should be a great man and not a politician captivated with the idea of reaching the summit of power. Ah! parbleu! to be a great man! 'That is the question.'"
He grew very excited over the proud rebellion of his old faith and shattered hopes against the negative success he had obtained. Besides, there was no reason for giving up the struggle. There was a council to be held at the Élysée. He went there, but at this moment of disgust, disgust of everything and himself, this palace like all the rest, seemed to him to be gloomy and mean. An usher in black coat and white cravat, wearing a chain around his neck, wandered up and down the antechamber, according to custom, his shoes covered with the dust from the carpet trodden upon by so many people, either applicants or functionaries. The gaslight burning in broad day as in the offices in London was reflected on the cold walls that shone like marble. Doors ornamented with gilt nails and round, ivory knobs and without locks, were noiselessly swinging to and fro. Wearied office-seekers with tired countenances were spread out upon the garnet-colored velvet chairs, which were like those of a middle-class, furnished house.
From time to time, the tiresome silence was broken by the sound of near or distant electric bells. Vaudrey, who arrived before his colleagues, studiously contemplated the surroundings ironically. An estafette, a gendarme, arrived with a telegram; the usher signed a receipt for it. That was all the life that animated this silent palace. A man with a military air, tall, handsome and in tightly-buttoned frock-coat, passed and saluted the President of the Council; then, Jouvenet, the Prefect of Police, looking like a notary's senior clerk, his abundant black hair plastered on his head, a large, black portfolio under his arm, approached the minister and bowed. Vaudrey, having Lissac in mind, returned his salutation coldly.
"I will speak to you presently, Monsieur le Préfet."
"Good! Monsieur le Ministre!"
In spite of the foot-soldier and the Parisian guard on duty at the door of the palace, all that now seemed to Vaudrey to lack official solemnity, and resembled rather a temporary and melancholy occupation.
"Bah! And if I should never set my foot in this place again," he thought, as he remembered Granet's interpellation, "what would it matter to me?"
He was informed first at the Council and then at the Chamber, that Granet would not introduce his question until the next day. Vaudrey had the desired time to prepare himself. In the Budget Committee, where he met Granet, the minister of to-morrow asked him an inopportune question concerning the expenses of the administration. Vaudrey was angered and felt inclined to treat it as a personal question. It now only remained for his adversaries to begin to suspect him! To appear so was even now too much. Sulpice took Granet up promptly, the latter assured him that "his colleague and friend, the President of the Council," had entirely misconstrued the meaning of his words.
"Well and good!" said Vaudrey.
He was not sorry that the interpellation was not to take place at once. Before to-morrow, he would have placed his batteries. And then he would think of quieting Adrienne, of regaining her, perhaps. On returning to the ministry, he caused some inquiries to be made as to whether Madame were not sick. Madame had gone out. She had gone out as if she were making a pilgrimage to a cemetery, to the apartment in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, whereon might have been written: Here lies. It was like the tomb of her happiness.
She would not see Sulpice again. In the evening, however, she consented to speak to him.
Her poor, gentle face was extremely pale, and as if distorted by some violent pain.
"You will find some excuse," she said, "for announcing that I am ill. I am leaving for Grenoble. I have written to my uncle, the Doctor expects me, and all that now remains to me is a place in his house."
"Adrienne!" murmured Sulpice.
She closed her eyes, for this suppliant voice doubtless caused her a new grief, but neither gesture nor word escaped her. She was like a walking automaton. Even her eyes expressed neither reproach nor anger, they seemed dim.
There was something of death in her aspect.
After a few moments, she said: "I hope that my resolve will not work any prejudice to your political position. In that direction I will still do my duty to the full extent of my strength. But people will not trouble themselves to inquire whether I am at Grenoble or Paris. They trouble themselves very little about me."
By a gesture, he sought to retain her. She had already entered her room, and Vaudrey felt that between this woman and him there stood something like a wall. He had now only to love Marianne.
To love Marianne, ah! yes, the unhappy man, he still loved her. When he thought of Marianne, it was more in wrath, when he thought of Adrienne, it was more in pity; but, certainly, his wife's determination to leave Paris caused him less emotion than the thought that his mistress was to wed Rosas.
That very evening he went to Marianne's.
They told him that Madame was at the theatre. Where? With whom? Neither Jean nor Justine knew.
Vaudrey despised himself for jealously questioning the servants who, when together, would burst with laughter in speaking of him.
"Oh! miserable fool!" he said to himself. "There was only one woman who loved you:—Adrienne!"
Nevertheless, he recalled Marianne in the hours of past love, and the recollection of her kisses and sobs still made his flesh creep. The tawny tints that played in her hair as it strayed unfastened over the pillow, the endearing caresses of her bare arms, he wished to see and feel again. He calculated in his ferocious egotism that Adrienne's wrath would afford him more complete liberty for a time, and that he would have Marianne more to himself, if she were willing.
He had written to Mademoiselle Kayser, but his letter had remained unanswered. He thought that he would go to Mademoiselle Vanda's house the next day, after the Chamber was up. Very late, he added, since the sitting would be prolonged. Long and decisive, as the fate of his ministry was at stake.
Granet's interpellation did not make him unusually uneasy. He had acquainted himself in the morning with a résumé of the journals. Public opinion seemed favorable to the Vaudrey ministry, except in the case of some insufferable radical organs, and with which he need not in anyway concern himself, read the report. Vaudrey did not remember that it was in almost these very terms that the daily résumé of the press expressed itself on the eve of Pichereau's fall, to the Minister of the Interior, in speaking of Pichereau's cabinet.
"I shall have a majority of sixty votes," he said to himself. "Everything will be carried—save honor!"
He thought of Adrienne as he thus wished.
The session of the Chamber was to furnish him the most cruel deception. Granet had most skilfully prepared his plan of attack. Vaudrey's ministry was threatened on all sides by lines of approach laid out without Sulpice's knowledge. Granet had promised, here and there, new situations, or had undertaken to confirm the old. He came to the assault of the ministry with a compact battalion of clients entirely devoted to his fortunes, which were their own. They did not reproach Vaudrey too strongly with anything, unless it was that these impatient ones considered that he had given away all that he had to give, prefectures, sub-prefectures, councillors' appointments, crosses of the Legion of Honor, and especially for having lasted too long. Vaudrey would fall less because he had forfeited esteem than because others were impatient to succeed him. Granet was tired of being only the minister of to-morrow, he wished to have his day. He had just affirmed his policy, he asserted that the whole country, weary of Vaudrey's compromises, demanded a more homogeneous ministry. Homogeneity! Nothing could be said against such a word. Granet favored the policy of homogeneity. This vocable comprehended his entire programme. The Vaudrey Cabinet lacked homogeneity! The President of the Republic decidedly ought to form a homogeneous cabinet.
"Granet is then homogeneous?" said Sulpice, with a forced laugh, as he sat on the ministerial bench while Lucien Granet was speaking from the tribune, his right hand thrust into his frock-coat.
The bon mot uttered by the President of the Council, although spoken loudly enough, did not enliven any one, neither his colleagues who felt themselves threatened nor his usual claqueurs who felt themselves vanquished. Navarrot, the ministerial claqueur, was already applauding Granet most enthusiastically. Monsieur le Ministre felt himself about to become an ex-minister. He vaguely felt as if he were in the vacuum of an air-pump.
The order of the day of distrust, smoothed over by Granet with the formulas of perfidious politeness—castor-oil in orange-juice, as Sulpice himself called it, trying to pluck up courage and wit in the face of misfortune,—that order of the day that the Vaudrey Cabinet would not accept, was adopted by a considerable majority: one hundred and twenty-two votes.
For Sulpice, it was a crushing defeat.
"One hundred and twenty-two deputies," he said, still speaking in a loud voice in the corridors, "to whom I have refused the appointment of some mayor or the removal of some rural guard!"
Warcolier, ever dignified, remarked in his usual style, that this manner of defending himself probably lacked some of that nobility which becomes a defeat bravely endured.
Vaudrey had only one course open, to send in his resignation. He was beaten, thoroughly beaten. He returned to the Hôtel Beauvau and after preparing his letter he took it himself to the President at the Élysée.
The President accepted it without betraying any feeling, as an employé at the registry office receives any deed of declaration. Two or three commonplace expressions of regret, a diplomatic shake of the hand, expressive of official sympathy, that was all. Vaudrey returned to the ministry and ordered his servants to prepare everything for leaving the ministerial mansion.
"When is that to be, Monsieur le Ministre?"
"To-morrow," answered Vaudrey, to whom the title seemed ironical and grated on his nerves.
He caused himself to be announced to Adrienne.
Adrienne, weary looking, was seated before a small desk writing, and beneath her fair hair, her face still looked as white as that of a corpse.
"There is some news," Vaudrey said to her abruptly. "I am no longer minister!"
"Ah!" she said.
Not a tremor, not a word of consolation. Three days previously, she would have leaped to his neck and said: "How happy we shall be! I have you back; I have found you again! What joy!"
Again, she would have tried to console him had he been suffering.
Now, she remained passive, frozen, indifferent to that news.
"We shall leave the Hôtel Beauvau!" said Sulpice.
"I am already preparing to leave," she replied. "My trunks are packed."
"Will you do me the kindness of leaving here with me and of going back to Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin with me?—After that, you can set out at once for Grenoble. But let us have no sign of scandal. The world must be considered."
She had listened to him coldly, unmoved by his trembling voice.
"That is proper," she said ironically. "The world must be thought of. I will wait then before leaving."
He was stupefied to find so much coldness and so unswerving a determination in this woman, as gentle as a child—my wife-child, he so frequently said to her of old. In her presence he felt ill at ease, discontented, hesitating whether he should throw himself at her feet and wring pardon from her, or fly from her and be with Marianne, perhaps forever. But no, it was Adrienne, his poor, his dear Adrienne that he would keep and love! Ah! if she pardoned him! If he had dared to kneel at her feet, to plead and to weep! But this living corpse froze him, he was afraid of her, of that gentle and devoted creature.
He went downstairs again, saying to himself that he would take a hurried dinner and then go to Rue Prony.
He was, however, obliged to occupy himself in despatching the last current business. He must hand over his official duties to his successor. There was a mocking expression in these words: his successor!
"After all, he will have one also!"
He still had unexpected heartbreakings to experience. People to whom he had promised appointments and decorations came, almost breathless, suddenly stirred by the news, to entreat him to sign the nominations and to prepare the decrees while he was still minister. The ravens were about the corpse. Monsieur Eugène, still bowing low, although not quite so low as heretofore, endeavored to dismember Vaudrey the Minister. He wanted a little piece, only one piece! A sub-prefecture of the third class!
He had already been informed at the Élysée that Granet was to be his successor. Parbleu! he expected it! But the realization of his fears annoyed him. And who would Granet keep for his Secretary of State? Warcolier, yes Warcolier, with the promise of giving him the first vacant portfolio.
"How correct was Ramel's judgment?" thought Sulpice.
Vaudrey, with a sort of rage urging him, immediately set himself about a task as mournful as a funeral: packing up. It now seemed to him that he had just suffered a total overthrow. Books and papers were being packed in baskets. Before he was certain of his fall, he thought it was delightful to escape from so much daily bother, but now he felt as if he were being discrowned and ruined. Ruin! It truly threatened him indeed and held him by the throat. He had realized on many pieces of property within the past year for Marianne!
Adrienne, on the contrary, left this great cold hôtel of Place Beauvau, as if she were leaving a prison, with a comforting sense of deliverance. A bad dream was ended. She could lay down her official mask, weep at ease, complain at will, fly to that Dauphiny where her youth was left. She would leave to-morrow. Doctor Reboux awaited her in ignorance.
After having given his first orders and arranged his most important documents, Sulpice went out to walk to Marianne's. At first he wandered along mechanically without realizing that he was going toward the quays, almost fearing the interview with his mistress, now that he was only a defeated man. He had nearly reached the Seine before he was aware of it. He looked at his watch.
Eleven o'clock.
Marianne had been awaiting him for some time.
He now followed, with the slow march of persons oppressed with a sense of weariness, these deserted quays, that terrace on the bank of the river, whose balustrades permitted glimpses of the silhouettes of slender trees. He met no one. Upon the Place de la Concorde, still wet with the scarce dried rain of this November night, as mild as an evening in spring, permeated by a warm mist, he looked for a moment at the Palace of the Corps Législatif, gloomy-looking and outlining its roofs against the misty sky, whose gleams fell on the horizon with a bluish tint, while upon the broad sidewalks, the jets of gas magnified the reddened reflections with their own ruddy hues. Along the grand avenue of the Champs-Élysées there were only two immense parallel rows of gas-lamps and here and there, moving, luminous points that looked like glow-worms. Vaudrey mechanically stopped a moment to contemplate the scene.
That did not interest him, but something within him controlled him. He continued to walk unwittingly in the direction of Parc Monceau. The solitude of the Champs-Élysées pleased him. While passing before an important club with its windows lighted, he instinctively shuddered. Through the lace-like branches of the trees, he looked at the green shades, the lustres, the unpolished sconces, with the backgrounds of red and gold hangings, and the great, gold frames, and he imagined that they were discussing the causes of his defeat and the success of Granet.
"They are speaking of me, in there! They are talking about my fall! He is fallen! Fallen! Beaten!—They are laughing, they are making jokes! There are some there who yesterday were asking me for places."
He continued on his way without quickening his pace; the deserted café concerts, as melancholy-looking as empty stages, the wreaths of suspended pearl-like lamps illuminated during the summer months but now colorless, seemed ironical amid the clumps of bare trees as gloomy as cemetery yews, exhaling a sinister, forsaken spirit as if this solitude were full of extinct songs, defunct graces, phantoms, and last year's mirth. And Vaudrey felt a strangely delicious sensation even in his bitterness at this impression of solitude, as if he might have been lost, forgotten forever, in the very emptiness of this silent corner.
Going on, he passed before the Élysée.
A sergent de ville who was slowly pacing up and down in front of an empty sentry-box, his two hands ensconced in the sleeves of his coat, the hood of which he had turned up, cast a sidelong glance at him, almost suspiciously, as if wondering what a prowler could want to do there, at such an hour.
"He does not know whom he has looked at," he said. "And yesterday, only yesterday, he would have saluted me subserviently!"
The windows of the Élysée facing the street were still lighted up and Vaudrey thought that shadows were moving behind the white curtains.
"The President has not yet retired! He has probably received Granet! And Warcolier!—Warcolier!"
Before the large door opening on Faubourg Saint-Honoré, four lamps were burning over the head of a Parisian guard on duty, with his musket on his shoulder, the light shining on the leather of his shako. Some weary-looking guardians of the peace were chatting together. At the end of the court before the perron, a small, red carpet was laid upon the steps and in front of the marquee faint lights gleamed. Vaudrey recalled that joyous morning when he entered there, arriving and descending from his carriage with his portfolio under his arm.
He hurried his steps and found himself on Place Beauvau. His glance was attracted by the grille, the hôtel, the grand court at the end of the avenue. Sulpice experienced a feeling of sudden anger as he passed in front of the Ministry of the Interior whose high grille, now closed, he had many times passed through, leaning back in his coupé. He pictured himself entering there, where he would never again return except as a place-seeker like those eternal beggars who blocked its antechambers. He still heard the cry of the lackey when the coachman crushed the sand of the courtyard under the wheels of the carriage: "Monsieur le Ministre's carriage!"—He went upstairs, the lackeys saluted him, the coupé rolled off toward the Bois.
Now, here in that vulgar mansion another was displaying himself, seated on the same seats, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same bed and giving his orders to the same servants. He experienced a strange sensation, as of a theft, of some undue influence, of suffering an ejectment by a stranger from some personal property, and this Granet, the man sent there as he had been, by a vote, seemed to him to be a smart fellow, a filibuster and an intruder.
"How one becomes accustomed to thinking one's self at home everywhere!" thought Vaudrey.
He partially forgot the keen wound given to his self-love by the time that he found himself close to Parc Monceau approaching Rue Prony. In Marianne's windows the lights were shining. To see that woman and hold her again in his arms, overjoyed, that happiness would console him for all his mortifications. Marianne's love was worth a hundred times more than the delights of power.
Marianne Kayser was evidently waiting for Sulpice. She received him in her little, brilliantly-lighted salon, superb amid these lights, in a red satin robe de chambre that lent a strange seductiveness to her bare arms and neck which shone with a pale and pearly lustre beneath the light.
Vaudrey felt infinitely moved, almost painfully though deliciously stirred, as he always did when in the presence of this lovely creature.
She extended her hand to him, saying in a singular tone that astonished him:
"Bonjour, vous!"
"Well!" she said at once, pointing to a journal which was lying on the carpet, "is there anything new?"
"Yes," he said. "But what is that to me? I don't think of that when I am near you!"
"Oh! besides, my dear," Marianne continued, "your darling sin has not been to think of two things at one time! I don't understand anything of politics, it bothers me. I have been advised, however, that you have been thrashed by that Granet!"
"Thrashed, yes," said Sulpice, laughing, "you use peculiar phrases!—"
"Topical ones. I am of the times! But it appears that one must read the journals to learn about you. I am going to tell you some news however, before it appears in print."
"That interests me?"
"Perhaps, but it most assuredly interests me!"
"Important news?" asked Sulpice.
"Important or great, as you will!"
He nibbled his blond moustache nervously.
Guy had not deceived him.
"Then I think I know your news, my dear Marianne!"
"Tell me!" she said, as she stretched herself on a divan, her arms crossed, looking ravishingly lovely in her red gown.
He sought some forcible phrase that would crush her, but he could find none. His only desire was to take that fair face in his hands and to fasten his lips thereon.
Marianne smiled maliciously.
"It is true then," Vaudrey exclaimed, "that you love Monsieur de Rosas?"
"There, you are well-informed! It is strange! Perhaps that is because you are no longer a minister!"
"You love Rosas?"
"Yes, and I am marrying him. I have the honor to announce to you my marriage to Monsieur le Duc José de Rosas, Marquis de Fuentecarral. It surprises me, but it is so!—I have known days when I have not had six sous to take the omnibus, and now I am to be a duchess! This does not seem to please you? Are you selfish, then?"
Stretched on her divan, her neck and arms sparkling under the light of the sconces, she appeared to make sport of Vaudrey's stupefaction as he looked at her almost with fright.
"Now, my dear," she said curtly, but politely, as she toyed with a ring on her finger, "this is why I desired to see you to-day. It is to tell you that if you care to remain friendly on terms that forbid sensual enjoyment, which is not objectionable in putting a lock on the past, you may visit the Duchesse de Rosas just as you have Mademoiselle Kayser. But if you are bent on finding in the Duchesse de Rosas the good-natured girl that I have been toward you, and you are quite capable of it, for you are a sentimental fellow, then it will be useless to even appear to have ever known each other. I am turning the key on my life. Crac! Bonsoir, Sulpice!"
The unhappy man! He had cherished the thought of still visiting his mistress, but he found there an unlooked-for being, a new creature, who was unmistakably determined, in spite of her cunning charm, and she spoke to him in stupefying, ironical language.
"You would have me go mad, Marianne?"
"Why! what an idea! The phrase is decidedly romantic.—You should dispense with the blue in love as well as the exaggeration in politics."
"Marianne," Vaudrey said abruptly, "do you know that for your sake I have destroyed my home and mortally wounded my wife?"
"Well," she replied, "did I ask you to do so? I pleased you, you pleased me; that was quite enough. I desire no one's death and if you have allowed everything to be known, it is because you have acted indiscreetly or stupidly! But I who do not wish to mortally wound," she emphasized these words with a smile—"my husband, I expect him to suspect nothing, know nothing, and as you are incapable of possessing enough intelligence not to play Antony with him, let us stop here. Adieu, then, my dear Vaudrey!"
She extended her hand to him, that soft hand that imparted an electrical influence when he touched it.
"Well, what!—You are pouting?"
"I love you," he replied distractedly. "I love you, you hear, and I wish to keep you!"
"Ah! no, no! no roughness," she said with a laugh, as he, taking a seat near her, tried to draw her to him in his arms.
"To keep you, although belonging to another," whispered Vaudrey slowly.
"For whom do you take me?" said Marianne, proudly drawing herself up. "If I have a husband, I require that he be respected. A man who gives his name to a woman is clearly entitled to be dealt with truthfully!"
"Then," stammered Sulpice, "what?—Must we never see each other again?"
"We shall recognize each other."
"You drive me away?"
"As a lover!"
"Ah! stay," said Vaudrey, as, pale with anger, he walked across the room, "you are a miserable woman, a courtesan, you understand, a courtesan!—Guy has told me everything! You gave yourself to Jouvenet to avenge yourself on Lissac, you made a tool of me and you are making a sport of Rosas who is marrying you!—What have I not done for you!—I have ruined myself! yes, ruined myself!"
"My dear," interrupted Marianne, "see the difference between a gentleman like Monsieur de Rosas and a little bourgeois like yourself. The duke might have ruined himself for me but he would never have reproached me. One never speaks of money to a woman. You are a very honest, domestic man and you were born to worship your wife! You should stick to her! You are not made of the stuff of a true-born lover. What you have just told me is the remark of a loon!"
"Ah! if I had only known you!"
"Or anything! But I am better than you, you see. I was better advised than you. The bill of exchange that you owe to the Dujarrier or to Gochard,—whichever you like—it inconveniences you, I know!"
"Yes," said Vaudrey, "but—"
"You would not, I think, desire me to pay it with the duke's money, that Monsieur de Rosas should pay your debts?"
"Marianne," cried Sulpice, livid with rage.
"Bless me! you speak to me of money? You chant your ruin to me! The De Profundis of your money-box, should I know that? I question with myself as to what it means!—However, knowing you to be financially embarrassed, I have myself found you help—Yes, I told someone who understands how to extricate business men, that you were embarrassed!"
"I?"
"There is nothing to blush about. I told Molina the Tumbler—You know him?"
Did he know him! At that very moment he saw the ruddy gold moon that represented the banker's face amid all the expanse of his shining flesh. He trembled as if in the face of temptation.
"Molina is a man of means," said Marianne. "If you need money, you can have it there! And now, once more, leave me to my new life! The past is as if it had never been!—Bonjour, Bonsoir!—and adieu, go!—Give me your hand!"
She smiled so strangely, half lying on the divan, and stretched out her white hand, which he covered with kisses, murmuring:
"Well, yes, adieu! Yes, adieu!—But once more—once!—this evening—I love you so dearly!—Will you?"
She quietly reached out her bare arm toward a silk bell-rope that she jerked suddenly and Vaudrey rose enraged and humiliated.
"Show Monsieur Vaudrey out," Marianne said to Justine, as she appeared at the door. "Then you may go to bed, my girl!"
Vaudrey left this woman's house in a fit of frenzy. She had just treated him who had paid for the divan on which she was reclining as a genuine duchess might have treated a man who had been insolently disrespectful toward her. He was almost inclined to laugh at it.
"It is well done! well done for you! Ah! the dolt! To trust a wanton! To trust Warcolier! To trust everybody! To trust everybody except Adrienne!—"
He, mechanically and without thought, resumed the way to Place Beauvau, forgetting that the ministerial home was no longer his. The porter—who knows? might not have opened the gate to him. The lackeys would have driven him off as the girl had done whom he had paid, yes, paid, paid! For she was a harlot, nothing more!
Gradually, the thought of that debt swelled by successive bills of exchange, and almost forgotten during the recent days of feverish excitement, took possession of his mind, he remembered that it must be discharged on the first day of December, in five days, and the thought troubled him like an impending danger. The prospect had often, during the last few weeks, made him anxious. He saw the months pass, the days flit with extraordinary rapidity, and the maturity, the inevitable due date draw near with the mathematical regularity of a clock. So long as months were ahead he felt no anxiety. Like gamblers he counted on chance. Besides, he still had some farms in Dauphiny. In short, a word to his notary and he could speedily get out of danger. Then, too, the date of payment was far away. He calculated that by economy as to his personal income and his official salary he could meet the bill to Gochard, whose very name sometimes made him laugh. But Marianne's exactions, unforeseen outlays, the eternal leakage of Parisian life had quite prevented saving, and had dissipated in a thousand little streams the money that he wished to pay out in a lump in December. He soon grew alarmed by degrees at the approach of the maturity of the debt. He had written to his notary at Grenoble, and this old friend had replied that the farms of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, mortgaged and cut up one after another, now represented only a ridiculous value, but that after all, Vaudrey had nothing to be concerned about, seeing that Madame Vaudrey's fortune was intact.
Adrienne's fortune! That then was all that remained to Vaudrey, and that might be his salvation. A fortune that was not very considerable, but still solid and creditable. But even if he were strangled by debt, dunned and driven into a corner, could he pay the debts he had contracted for his mistress by means of his wife's fortune? He was disgusted at the thought. It was impossible.
Vaudrey felt his head turn under the humiliation of his double defeat, the loss of parliamentary confidence, and Marianne's insulting laugh, and urged by the anxiety he felt about the obligation to be met in eight days, in his bewilderment he thought of writing to Gochard of Rue des Marais, to ask for time. This Gochard must be a half-usurer. Certain of being paid, some day, he would perhaps be delighted to renew the bill of exchange in inordinately swelling the amount. The letter was written and Vaudrey mailed it himself the following morning.
That very evening Adrienne was to leave. He endeavored to dissuade her from her plan. She did not even reply to him. She stood looking at a crystal vase on the chimney-piece in which were some winter roses, Christmas roses, fresh and milk-white, that had been sent as a souvenir from yonder Dauphiny. Her glance rested fixedly on that fair bouquet that seemed like a bursting cloud of whiteness.
"Then," said Vaudrey, "it is settled—quite settled—you are going?"
"I am."
"In three hours?"
"In three hours!"
"I know where those roses were gathered," said Sulpice tenderly. "It was at the foot of the window where we leaned elbow to elbow and dreamed."
"Yes," Adrienne answered, in a broken voice whose sound was like that which might have been given out by the vase had it been struck and shattered. "We had lovely dreams! The reality has indeed belied them!"
"Adrienne!" he murmured.
She made no reply.
He tried to approach her, feeling ashamed as he thought that he had similarly wished to approach Marianne.
She instinctively drew back.
"You remember," she said coldly, "that one day when we were speaking about divorce, I told you that there was a very simple way of divorce? It was never to see each other again, never, to be nothing more to each other from the day on which confidence should die?—You have deceived me, it is done. I am a stranger to you! If I were a mother, I should have duties to fulfil. I would not have failed therein. I would have endured everything for a son!—Nothing is left to me. I have not even the joy of caressing a child that would have consoled me. I am your widow while you yet live. Well, be it so. You have willed it, there, then, is divorce!"
For the third time since Adrienne had learned everything, he tried to stammer the word pardon. He felt it was useless. This sensitive being had withdrawn within herself and wrapped herself, as with a cloak, in all her outraged chastity. He could only humiliate himself without softening her. All Adrienne's deceived trustfulness and insulted love strengthened her in her determination never to forgive.
She would go.
Vaudrey in despair returned to his study, where the books that had been sent from the ministry were piled upon the carpet in all the confusion attending an entry into occupation. The servant at once brought him his lamp and handed him a package of cards in envelopes,—cards of condolence as for a death—and a large card, saying: "That gentleman is here!"
"Molina!" said Vaudrey, becoming very pale. "Show him in!"
The fat Salomon entered puffing and smiling, and spread himself out on an armchair as he said to the former minister:
"Well, how goes it?—Not too badly crushed, eh?—Bah! what is it after all to quit office?—Only a means for returning to it, sometimes!"
"All the same," he said with his cackling laugh that sounded like the jingling of a money-bag, "there are too many changes of ministers! They change them like shirts! It puts me out. I get used to one Excellency and he is put aside! So it is settled, henceforth I will not say Excellency save to the usher or an office-boy!"
He accompanied his clumsy jests with a loud laugh, then, changing his tone:
"Come, that is not all. I came to speak of business to you."
He looked Vaudrey full in the face with his piercing glance, took from his pocketbook a printed sheet and said in a precise tone:
"Here is an opportunity where your title of former minister will serve you better than that of minister. So much is being said of Algeria, its mines and its fibre. Well, read that!"
Vaudrey took the paper. It was the prospectus, very skilfully drawn, of a company established to introduce gas into Algeria, almost as far as the Sahara. They promised the subscribers wonders and miracles: acres upon acres of land as a bonus. There was a fortune to be made. Meantime, they would issue six thousand shares of five hundred francs. It was three millions they were asking from the public. A mere trifle.
"They might ask ten," said Molina, smiling. "They would give it!"
"And you wish me to subscribe to your Algerian gas?" asked Vaudrey.
The fat Molina burst out into loud laughter this time.
"I? I simply wish to give you the opportunity to make a fortune!"
"How?"
"That is one scheme. I will bring you four, five, ten of them! I have another, the Luxemburg coal. A deposit equal to that of Charleroi. You have only to allow me to print in the list of directors: Monsieur Sulpice Vaudrey, former President of the Council."
Vaudrey looked the fat man squarely in the face.
"Besides you will be in good company!" said the banker as he read over the names of deputies, senators, statesmen, coupled with those of financiers.
Sulpice knew most of them.
He despised nearly all of them. It was such that Molina styled good company!
"And those mines, are you certain they will produce what you promise?"
"Ah!" said Salomon, "that is the engineers' matter! Here is the report of a mining engineer who is perhaps straining after effect and doing a little puffing up! But one must go with the times! He who ventures nothing, has nothing. In war, one risks one's skin; in business, one risks one's money. That is war."
Vaudrey debated with himself whether he should tear the prospectus in pieces and throw them in the face of the fat man.
"My dear Vaudrey," said the Tumbler, "you have a vein that is entirely your own. A former minister remains always a former minister. Well, such a title as that is turned to account. It is quoted, like any other commodity. You are not rich, that fact proves your honesty, although in America, and we are Americanizing ourselves devilishly much, that would only be the measure of your stupidity. You can become rich, I have the means of making myself agreeable to you and you have the opportunity of becoming useful to us."
"In a word, you buy my name?"
"I hire it from you! Very dearly," said Molina, still laughing.
"Certainly," said Vaudrey, "you did not understand me on the first occasion that you called on me to speak about money, and when I questioned with myself whether I should ask you not to call again."
Molina interrupted him abruptly by rising. He felt that an insult was about to be uttered. He parried it by anticipating it.
"Stupidity!" he said. "Here is the prospectus. There are the names of the directors. You will consider. It has never injured any one to take advantage of his position. The puritans, in an age of trickery, are idiots; I say so. What I propose to you surprises you. To place your name beside that of Monsieur Pichereau or Monsieur Numa de Baranville! It is as simple as saying good-day. Perhaps you think then that you will be the only one? They all do it, all those who are extravagant and shrewd. It is a matter of coquetting in these days over a hundred-sou piece! Come, I will wager that Monsieur Montyon would not mince matters—especially if he had transferable paper in circulation!"
"You know that?" said Vaudrey, turning pale.
"Ah! I know many others in like condition! Come, no false modesty! It is a matter of business only! I tell you again, I have many other cases. All this is in order to have the pleasure of offering you certificates for attendance fees. I will open a credit for you of two hundred thousand francs, if you wish. We will arrange matters afterwards."
"I will leave you these declarations of faith!" added Molina, showing the prospectus of the gas undertaking. "Fear nothing! It is not more untruthful than the others! It is unnecessary to show me out. A la revista!"
He disappeared abruptly, Vaudrey hearing the floor of the hall creak under this man's hippopotamus feet, and the unhappy Sulpice who had spun so many, such glorious and grand dreams, dreams of liberty, freedom and virtue, civic regeneration, reconstructed national morals and character, the sacredness of the hearth and the education of the conscience; this Vaudrey, bruised by life, overthrown by his vices, was there under the soft light of his lamp, looking with staring eye, as a being who wishes to die contemplates the edge of an abyss, looking at that printed paper soliciting subscriptions, beating the big drum of the promoter in order to entrap the vast and ever-credulous horde.
His name! To put his name there! The name of Vaudrey that he had dreamed of reading at the foot of so many noble, eternal and reforming laws, to inscribe it upon that paper beneath so many cunning names, jugglers, habitual drainers of the public cash-box. To fall to that! To do that!
To lend himself?
To sell himself!
And why not sell himself? Who would discharge this bill of exchange? The Gochard paper! The debt of the past! The price of the nights spent with Marianne! The hundred thousand francs for that girl's kisses!
Sulpice felt in the weakness increased by a growing fever, that his self-possession was leaving him. All his ideas clashed confusedly. Amid the chaos, only one clear idea remained; a hundred and sixty thousand francs had to be found. Where were they to be found? Yes, where? Through Molina, who offered him two hundred thousand! This open credit seemed to him like an opened-up placer in which he had only to dig with his nails. The cunning and thick voice of the Hebrew banker echoed in Sulpice's ears: "They all do it!" It was not so difficult to give his name, or to hire it, as Salomon said. Who the devil would notice it at a time when indifference passes over scandals as the sea covers the putrid substances on the shore and washes them with its very scum?
"They all do it!"
No, despite the irony of the handler of money, there are some consciences that refuse to yield: and then, what then?—Vaudrey had desired virtue of a different kind and other morals! Ah! how he had suffered the poison to penetrate him; even to his bones! How Marianne had deformed and moulded him at her fancy, and he still thought of her only with unsatisfied longings for her kisses and ardor! Ah! women! Woman! Yes, indeed, yes, woman was the great source of moral weakness and inactivity. She used politics in her own way, in destroying politicians. If he had only left office with head erect and not dragging the chain-shot of debt! But that bill of exchange! Who would pay that?
"Eh! Molina, parbleu! Molina! Molina!"
He was right, too, that triumphant Jew with his insolent good humor. It is an absurd thing, after all, to be prudish and to thrust away the dish that is offered you. To be rich is, in fact, quite as good as to be powerful! Money remains! That is the only real thing in the world! It would be a fine sight to see a man refuse the opportunity to make a fortune, and to refuse it—why? For a silly, conscientious scruple. And after all, business was the very life of modern society. This Molina, circulating his money, was as useful as many others who circulate ideas.
"His Algerian gas is a work of civilization just like any other!"
Urged by the necessity of escaping from that debt that strangled him like a running noose, Sulpice gradually arrived at argumentative sophistries, which were but capitulations to his own probity, cowardly arrangements with his own conscience. His name? Well, he would turn it into money since it was worth a gold ingot! The journalist who sells his thought, the artist who sells his marble, the writer who sells his experiences and his recollections, equally sell their names and for money, the flesh of their flesh. Like a living answer and a remorse, he saw the lean face and white moustache of Ramel, who was seated at the window, breathing the warm rays of the sun, in the little room on Rue Boursault, but he answered, speaking aloud:
"Well, what?—Ramel is a saint, a hero!—But I am no saint. I am a man and I will live!"
Somewhat angered, he took the prospectus that Molina had left him and rereading it again and again, he relapsed into a sitting posture and with haggard eyes scanned the loud-swelling lines of that commercial announcement, seeking therein some pretext for accepting. For he would accept, that was done. Nothing more was to be said, his conscience yielded. He was inclined to laugh.
"Still another victim caught and floored by Molina the Tumbler!"
He remained there, terrified at the prospect of the quasi-association he had determined on and by his complicity with a jobber of questionable business.
With his eye fixed upon this solicitation for capital, wherein were the words which would formerly have repelled him: joint stock company, capital stock, public subscription, subscription certificate, and at the head of which he was about to inscribe his name as one of the directors, at the foot of a capitulation, as it were, Sulpice had not seen, standing in the doorway of his half-lighted study, a woman in travelling costume, who stopped for a moment to look at the unfortunate, dejected man within the shade of the lamp which made him look more bald than he was, then advanced gently toward him, coughing slightly—for she did not dare to call him by his name or touch him with her gloved hand—to warn him that she was there.
Vaudrey turned round abruptly, instinctively pushing aside Molina's prospectus, as if he already felt some shame in holding it in his hands.
He flushed as he recognized Adrienne.
The young woman's reserved attitude showed absolute firmness. She came to say adieu, she was about to leave.
He had not even the energy to keep her. He was afraid of an unbending reply that would have been an outrage.
"Do you intend to become associated with Molina?" Adrienne asked in a clear voice, as she looked at Sulpice, who had risen.
"What! Molina?" he stammered.
"Yes, oh! he understands business. On leaving, he called on me. He thought that I had still sufficient influence over you to urge you, as he says, to make your fortune. He told me that you were in want of money, and after having been sharp enough to try the husband, he offered me, as you might give a commission to a courtesan, I do not know what emerald ornament, if I would advise you to accept his proposals!—That gentleman does not know the people with whom he is dealing!"
"Wretch!" said Vaudrey. "He did that?"
"And I thanked him," Adrienne replied calmly. "I did not know that you had debts and that, in order to pay them, you had come so near accepting the patronage of such a man. He told me so and he rendered me and you a service."
"Me?"
Vaudrey snatched up the prospectus of the Algerian gas and angrily tore it in pieces.
"We shall probably not see each other again," said Adrienne, in a firm voice that contrasted strangely with her gentle grace; "but I shall never forget that I bear your name and that being mine, I will ever honor it."
She handed Sulpice a document.
"Here is a power of attorney to Monsieur Beauvais, my notary. All that you need of my dowry to free yourself from liabilities is yours. I do not wish to know why you have incurred debts, I am anxious only to know that you have paid them, and my signature provides you with the means to do so."
Dejected, his heart burning, and his sobs rising, Sulpice uttered a loud cry as he rushed toward her:
"Adrienne!"
She withdrew her hand slowly while he was trying to seize it.
"You have nothing to thank me for," she said. "I am a partner, saving, as I best can, the honor of the house. That association is better than Molina's."
"Adieu," she added bitterly.
"Are you going—? Going away?" asked Sulpice, trying to give to his entreaty something like an echo of the love of the former days.
"Whose fault is it?" replied the young woman, in a voice as chilly as steel.
She was no longer the Adrienne of old, the little timid provincial with blushing cheek and trembling gesture. Sorrow, the most terrible of disillusions, had hardened and, as it were, petrified her. Vaudrey felt that to ask forgiveness would be in vain. Time only could soften that poor woman, obstinately unbending in her grief. He needed but to observe her attitude and cutting tones to fully realize that.
"It is quite understood," she continued, treating this question of her happiness as if she were cutting deep into her flesh and severing the tenderest fibres of her being, but without trembling,—"it is quite understood, is it not, that we shall make no scene or scandal? We are separated neither judicially nor even in appearance. We live apart by mutual consent, far from each other, without anything being known by outsiders of this definitive rupture."
"Adrienne!" Sulpice repeated, "it is impossible, you will not leave!"
"Oh!" she said. "I gave myself and I have taken myself back. Your entreaties will not now alter my determination. I am eager to leave Paris. It seems to me that I have regained myself and that I escape from falsity, lies, and infamy, and from a swarm of insects that crawl over my body!—I bid you farewell, and farewell it is!"
"Well, let it be so!" exclaimed Vaudrey. "Go! But if it is a stranger who leaves me, I will accept nothing from her. Here is the authority. Will you take it back?"
"I? No, I will not take it back! If you desire me to be worthy of the name that you have given me, keep it honored, at least, in the sight of the world, since to betray a woman, to mock and insult her, is not dishonoring. I alone have the right to save you from shame. Do not deny me the privilege that I claim. I do not desire that the man who has been my husband should descend to the questionable intrigues of a Molina. You have outraged me enough, do not impose this last insult on me!"
"For the last time, adieu!"
She went out, and he allowed her to disappear, overwhelmed by this living mourning of a faith. She fled and he allowed her to descend the stairway, followed by her femme de chambre. She entered the carriage that was waiting for her below, in Rue Chaussée-d'Antin, but he had not the courage, hopeless as he was, to follow the carriage whose rumbling he heard above the noise of the street as it rolled away more quickly and more heavily than the others, and it seemed to him that its wheels had crushed his bosom.
"Ah! what a wretch I have been!" he said as he struck his knee with his closed fist. "How unhappy I am! Adrienne!"
He rose abruptly, as if moved by a spring, and bounded toward a window which he threw wide open to admit the cold wind of this November evening, and tried to distinguish among the many carriages that rolled through the brownish mud, with their lighted lamps shining like so many eyes, to discover, to imagine the carriage that was bearing Adrienne away. He believed that he recognized it in a vehicle that was threading its way, loaded with trunks, almost out of sight yonder.
He leaned upon the window-sill, and like a shipwrecked sailor who sees a receding ship, he called out, with a loud cry lost in the tempest of that bustling and busy street:
"Adrienne! Adrienne!"
No reply! The carriage had disappeared in the distance, in the fog.
For a moment, Sulpice remained there crushed but drawn by the noise of the street, as if by some whirlpool in the deep sea. Had he been thrown out and been dashed upon the pavements, he would have been happy. Only a void seemed about him, and before him that black hollow in which moved confusedly only strangers who in no way formed part of his life.
This isolation terrified him. At last, he went downstairs in haste, threw himself into a carriage and had himself driven to the railway, intending to see Adrienne again.
"Quickly! quickly! at your best speed!"
The driver whipped up his horses and the carriage-windows clattered with the noise of old iron.
Vaudrey arrived too late. The train had left twenty minutes before. He had reflected too long at his window.
"Besides," he said to himself sadly, "she would not have forgiven me! She will never forget!"
Buried in the corner of the coach that took her away, and closing her eyes, recalling all her past life, so cruelly ironical to-day, Adrienne, disturbed by the noise and rolling of the train that increased her feverish condition, felt her heart swell, and poor, broken creature that she was, called all her strength to her aid to refrain from weeping, from crying out in her grief. She was taking away, back to the country, the half-withered Christmas roses received from Grenoble, and in the morbid confusion of the ideas that clashed in her poor brain, she saw once more Lissac's blanched face and heard Guy tell her again: "It is because you are a virtuous woman that I love you!"
"A virtuous woman! Does he know how to love as well as the others?" she murmured, as she thought of Vaudrey whom she would never see again, and whom she no longer loved.
"See! I am a widow now, and a widow who will never love anyone, and who will never marry again."