VIII
Alone in Paris now, a body without a soul, distracted, and the prey of ennui, with sad and bitter regret for his wasted life, repeating to himself that Adrienne, far away from him, would never forgive, and was doubtless, at this moment, saying and saying again to herself in her solitude at Grenoble, that these politicians, at least, owed her divorce, Vaudrey, not knowing what to do after a weary day of troubled rest, mechanically entered the Opéra House to distract his eyes if not his mind.
They were rendering Aida that evening, and a débutante had been announced as a star.
Sulpice Vaudrey, since Adrienne's departure,—already two weeks!—had wandered about Paris like a damned soul when he did not attend the Chamber, where he experienced the discomforts and the weakness of a fallen man. Weary, disgusted and melancholy, Vaudrey took his seat in the theatre to kill an evening.
There was what was called in the language of a Paris editor, a swell house. In front of the stage there was literally a shower of diamonds and the boxes were gaily adorned. The fauteuils were occupied by Parisian glories and foreign celebrities. Not a stall in the amphitheatre without its celebrity. Chance had placed in this All-Paris gathering, Madame Sabine Marsy and Madame Gerson, the two friends who detested each other. The pretty little Madame Gerson occupied and filled with her prattle, the box of the Prefect of Police—No. 30, in which Monsieur Jouvenet showed his churchwarden's profile. She was talking aloud about her salon, her receptions, her acquaintances. She was eclipsing Madame Marsy with her triumphs. At the back of the box, Monsieur Gerson was sleeping, overcome by fatigue. Madame Gerson laughed on observing Sulpice in the orchestra-stalls.
"See! there is Monsieur Vaudrey! He still looks a little beaten!" she said.
And she told her friends, crowded in the box, leaning over her and looking at the pretty, plump bosom of this little, well-made brunette, how Vaudrey was to dine at her house on the very evening when he fell from power.
"Of course, he did not come!" she said. "I remember what Madame Marsy advised me, one day,—she has passed through that in her time: one should think of the invitations to dinner before dismissing a ministry! Oh! it is tiresome; think of it!—One invites the Secretary of the President of the Council to dinner. He is named on the card. He comes. It is all over; he is no longer Secretary of the President, the President of the Council is no longer President, there is no longer a President, perhaps not even a Council; one should be certain of one's titles and rank before accepting an invitation to dinner!"
She laughed heartily and loud, and Madame Marsy, who was half dethroned, fanned herself nervously in her box, or levelled her glass at some one in the audience, affecting a little disdainful manner toward her fair neighbor. A friendship turned to acid.
Vaudrey, looking fatigued and abstracted, sat in his stall during the entr'acte. He looked unconsciously about the theatre and still felt surprised at not receiving salutations and bows, as formerly. He felt that he was becoming a waif. Bah! he consoled himself with the thought that the human race is thus constructed: everything is in success, he gets most who offers most. Why then trouble about it?
His eyes followed the movement of his glass and one after another he saw Madame Marsy, Jouvenet, Madame Gerson, so many living and exceedingly taunting recollections, when suddenly Sulpice trembled, shaken by a keener and almost angry feeling as his glance was directed to a box against the dark-red of which two faces were boldly outlined: those of Rosas and Marianne.
He was excited and unpleasantly piqued.
There before him he saw, between two large pillars, bearing gigantic, gilded masts that seemed to mock at him, the woman whom he had adored and the sight of whom still tore his heart. Pale and dressed in a white gown, she was leaning toward Rosas in a most adorable attitude, with her fair hair half-falling on her white shoulders—those shoulders that he still saw trembling under his kisses, those shoulders on which he might have pressed his burning lips and his teeth.
That livid beauty, strangely adorable, with her hair and ears dazzling with jewels, stood clearly out against the background of the box in which, like an enormous Cyclopean eye, appeared the round, ground glass let into the door, forming a nimbus of light around Marianne's brow. Paler than her, with a sickly but smiling countenance, Rosas showed his bloodless, pale, Spanish face beside that of Marianne, as tragic looking as a portrait by Coello. His tired-looking, pensive, thin face was resting on his hand, which through the opera-glass looked a transparent hand of wax, on which an enormous emerald ring flashed under the gaslight. Monsieur de Rosas did not move.
She, on the contrary, at times inclined toward him, bringing her mouth close to the Castilian's ear, standing out against his reddish beard as if detached therefrom, and she whispered to Rosas words that Vaudrey surmised, and which caused a spark of feverish delight to lighten up José's sad eyes. As she leaned back tilting her chair, her satin corsage below the bust was hidden from Sulpice by the edge of the box and he saw only her face, neck and white shoulders, and she seemed to him to be quite naked, the lines of her serpentine body sharply marked by the red line of the velvet border. And with his greedy glance he continued to trace the curves of that exquisite torso, the back that he had pressed, all the being moulded by voluptuousness, that had been his.
This was the vanishing of his last dream! This love gone, this deception driven into his heart like a knife, his last faith mocked at, insulted, and branded with its true name, folly, he felt as if a yawning chasm had been opened in him. Life was over! He was old now and he had wasted, yes, wasted his happiness in playing at youth. He had believed himself loved! Loved! Imbecile that he was!
He felt himself urged by a strong temptation to go to that box and open its door and cry out to that man who had not yet given his name to that woman:
"You do not know her! She is debauchery and falsehood itself!"
It seemed to Vaudrey that at times a bearded face, surmounting a white cravat, appeared behind Rosas and Marianne: the haughty face of Uncle Simon.
While the throng of Egyptians filed on the stage, Sulpice endeavored to turn away his thoughts and remove his glances from that group that attracted him. He still, however, looked at it, in spite of himself, and voluntarily wounded his own heart.
Marianne did not seem to have even noticed him.
The curtain fell and he wandered into the wings, less to be there than to escape that irritating sight. In breathing that atmosphere of a theatre, he experienced a strange sensation that pained and consoled him at the same time. The scene-shifters were rolling back the illuminating apparatus pierced with light, and dragged to the rear the huge white sphinxes and the immense canvas on which the palm-trees were outlined upon a blue sky. Sulpice felt the cruelly ironical sensation of finding himself, disheartened and defeated, once more on the very boards where he had entered the first time, smiling, swelling with joy, saluting and saluted and hearing on every side the same murmur, sweet as a May zephyr:
"Monsieur le Ministre."
It was the same scene, the same dress-coats upon the same luminous boards, the same electric rays that fell around him in the hour of his accession, creating the same vulgar aureole. Some firemen crossed the stage slowly and with a wearied expression made their examinations; some water-carriers were sprinkling the parquet, while others were brushing away the dust. And as if these common duties interested Sulpice, he looked on with a vacant expression, as if his thoughts had taken wing.
Suddenly, in the centre of a group, with his hat on, escorted by bending men, whose lips expressed flattery, Sulpice recognized Lucien Granet, who in the dazzling triumph of his new kingdom, crossed and recrossed the stage, distributing here and there patronizing bows.
The coarse Molina accompanied the new minister, laughing in a loud tone like the sound of a well-filled cash-box suddenly shaken.
Vaudrey felt just as if he had received a blow full in the chest.
He recalled his own meeting as a successful man with Pichereau the beaten one, on these very boards and almost in the same place, and in order to avoid having to endure the friendly ironical hand-shake that Pichereau was approaching him to give—the hand-shake formerly given to Pichereau—he quickly hid himself behind a wing, receiving as he did so, a blow, accompanied with a: Pardon, monsieur, from a workman who was pushing along a piece of scenery, and a: What a clumsy fellow! from a little danseuse, the tip of whose pink slipper he had unwittingly grazed with his heel.
He turned to the danseuse to apologize, when he perceived a young girl, all in pink, whose blue eyes looked frightened and her cheeks reddened when she recognized Vaudrey. It was Marie Launay, whom he had seen in the greenroom the previous year, who had not yet scored a success, while he was retired.
"Oh! I did not recognize you," she said. "I beg your pardon, Monsieur le Ministre!"
He wished to make some reply; but this title used by the young girl, ignorant of the political change, grated on his heart like the scratching of a nail and he saw on the other side of the stage, reaching the house by the communicating door, Lucien Granet, surrounded by his staff, and followed by the eternal cortége of powerful ones, among whom Warcolier was talking loudly, and Molina the Tumbler was recognizable by his enormous paunch and loud laugh.
"Perhaps Madame Marsy has asked that this Granet be presented to her," thought Vaudrey as he mockingly recalled how Guy de Lissac ran after him there in order to conduct him to the fashionable woman's box.
How long it was since then!
Sabine Marsy was dethroned. And he!—
He felt a friendly tap on the shoulder as he was moving away, and turning around he saw Warcolier who, having seen him in the distance, doubtless came to him to enjoy the simple pleasure of treating him patronizingly, he who had so long called him Monsieur le Ministre.
"Well, my dear Vaudrey, what is the news?" said Warcolier, bearing his head high and smiling with a silly, but an aggressively benign expression, with the superior tone of satisfied fools.
"Nothing!" said Sulpice. "I think Verdi's music is superb!"
"Oh! a little Wagnerian," Warcolier replied, repeating what he had heard. "But what of politics?"
"Ah! politics concerns you now!"
"Well! why," Warcolier replied, "that goes on well. There is a little relaxation! a ministry more—more—"
"More homogeneous!" said Vaudrey, in a slightly mocking tone.
"Exactly. And, after all, the duty of every good citizen is to defend the government under which we live."
Ah! assuredly, Vaudrey considered that his former Secretary of State, now become the vassal of Granet, displayed a rather ridiculous assurance. He smiled as if he would have laughed in his face and turned his back upon him.
Warcolier was not annoyed, for he felt certain that he had angered the former minister, and he was delighted. It was a kick from an ass. The witticism of a fool.
Vaudrey regained his place, much dissatisfied at having come and furious at this pretentious imbecile, when, on leaving the wings, he ran against Lissac who was entering a sort of hall where Louis sat writing the names of the entrances on the sheet.
Guy flushed slightly on seeing him.
"In order to see you, one has to meet you here," said Sulpice. "Why have you not called on me? Is it because I am no longer a minister?"
"That would be a reason for seeing me more frequently," said Lissac. "But it is not that. What do you want me to tell you? You know my sentiments. I don't care to become a bore, as it is called, or a ceaseless prater of morality, which is the same thing. Besides, morality to me is something like the Montyon prize to a harlot! Then, too, I am keeping in my corner and I shall stick to it hereafter closer than ever. I have put the brake on. I am getting old, and I shall bury myself in some suburb and look after my rheumatism."
In Lissac's tone there was an unexpected melancholy.
"Then you will not call on me again?"
"What is the use of worrying you?—Reflect for yourself, my good man! You don't need me to emphasize your blunders. By the way, you know, our mad mistress?—She is in the theatre."
"I have seen her!" said Vaudrey, turning very pale.
"She is not yet a duchess, but that will be patched up in four days. If one were only a rascal, how one could punish the hussy! But what is the use? And this devilish Rosas, who is mad enough over her to tie himself to her and to overlook everything he ought to know, would be capable of marrying her all the same! Much good may it do him!"
"But, tell me," continued Lissac, whose cutting tone suddenly became serious, "have you read the paper?"
"No! What is there in it?"
They were then in the corridor of the Opéra, and heard the prelude to the curtain-raising. Guy took the Soir from his pocket and handed it to Vaudrey:
"Here, see!—That poor Ramel!—You were very fond of him, were you not?"
"Ramel!"
Vaudrey had no need to read. He knew everything as soon as Guy showed him the paper and mentioned Denis's name in a mournful tone.
Dead!—He died peacefully in his armchair near the window, as if falling asleep.—"The death is announced," so read the paragraph, "of one of the oldest members of the Parisian press, Monsieur Denis Ramel, who was formerly a celebrated man and for a long time directed the Nation Française, once an important journal, now no longer in existence."—Not a word beyond the brief details of his death. No word of praise or regret, merely the commonplace statement of a fact. Vaudrey thought it was a trifling notice for a man who had held so large a place in the public eye.
"What do you think of it?" he said to Lissac. "People are ungrateful."
"Why, what would you have? Why didn't he write operettas?"
They parted after exchanging almost an ordinary grasp of the hand, though, perhaps, somewhat sad. Sulpice wished to cast a last look at Rosas's box. Marianne was standing, her outline clearly defined against the brightly-lighted background of the box. She was holding a saucer in her hand, eating an ice. He saw her once more as she stood near the buffet at Madame Marsy's, stirring her sherbet, a silver-gilt spoon smoothly gliding over her tongue. He closed his eyes, and with a nervous start quickly descended the grand stairway, where he found himself alone.
In order to forget Marianne, he turned his thoughts to Ramel.
Denis had been suffering for a long time. He smiled as he felt the hour of his departure draw near. He wished to disappear without stir, and in a civil way as he said, without attracting attention, à l'Anglaise. Poor man! his wish was accomplished.
Vaudrey threw himself into a carriage and was driven to Batignolles. On the way he thought of the eternal antitheses of Parisian life: the news of the death of a friend communicated to him at the Opéra while a waltz-tune was being played!
And thinking to himself:
"From the Opéra to the Opéra! That, moreover, is the history of my ministry—and that of the Granet administration, probably!"
The portress at Rue Boursault led him to Denis Ramel's apartment. Lying on his bed with a kindly smile on his face, the old journalist seemed as if asleep. The cold majesty of death gave a look of power to his face. One might almost believe at times, from the scintillating light placed near his bony brow, that its rigid muscles moved.
Denis Ramel! the sure guide of his youth and his counsellor through life! He recalled his entry on public life, his arrival in Paris, the first articles brought into the old editorial rooms of the Nation Française! If for a moment he had been one of the heads of the State, it was due to the man stretched out before him now!
He gently stooped over the corpse and pressed a farewell kiss on the dead man's brow.
As he turned round, he saw a man whom he had not at first seen and who had risen.
The man was very pale and greeted him with a timid air.
Vaudrey recognized Garnier, the man whom he had seen previously at Ramel's, a cough-racked, patient, dying man.
The consumptive had nevertheless outlived the old man.
"It is good of you to have come, monsieur," said the workman. "He loved you dearly."
"He died suddenly then?"
"Yes, and quite alone, while reading a book. He was found thus. They thought he was sleeping. It is all over, he is to be buried to-morrow. Will you come, monsieur?—I did not know who you were when—you know—I said—In fact, it is kind—let us say no more about it—I beg your pardon—There will be a vast gathering at Denis Ramel's funeral, if there are present only a quarter of those whom he has obliged."
Vaudrey was heartbroken the next day. Behind Ramel's coffin, not a person followed. Himself, Garnier, and one or two old women from the house on Rue Boursault, who did not go all the way to the cemetery of Saint-Ouen because it was too far, were all that were present. At the grave Sulpice Vaudrey stood alone with the grave-digger and the workman Garnier. They buried Ramel in a newly-opened part close to the foot of a railway embankment.
For years Ramel had been forgotten, had even forgotten himself, he had let ambitious men pass beyond him, ingrates succeed and selfish men get to the top! He no longer existed! And those very men who had entreated him and called him dear master in the old days, soliciting and flattering him, now no longer knew his name. Had he disappeared, or did he still live, that forerunner, a sort of Japanese idol, an ancient, a useless being who had known neither how to make his fortune nor his position, while building up that of others? Nobody knew or cared. Occasionally when circumstances called for it, they laughed at this romantic figure in politics, living like a porter, poor, lost, and buried under a mass of unknown individuals, after having made ministers and unmade governments. Yet, at the news of his death, not one of those who were indebted to him for everything, not a single politician who was well in the saddle, and for whom he had held the stirrup, not a comedian of the Chambers or the theatre who had pleaded with him, urged and flattered him, was to be found there to pay the most ordinary respects of memory to the man who had disappeared. That fateful solitude, added to a keen winter's wind, appeared to Sulpice to be a cruel abandonment and an act of cowardice. Two men followed the cortége of that maker of men!
"Follow journalism and you make the fame of others," said Vaudrey, shaking his head.
"After all," answered Garnier, "there are dupes in every trade, and they are necessarily the most honest."
When this man, who had been a minister, left the grave above which the whistling trains passed, a freezing rain was falling and he passed out of the cemetery in the company of the poor devil who coughed so sadly within the collar of his overcoat that was tightly drawn up over his comforter.
Before leaving him, Vaudrey, with a feeling of timidity, desired to ask him if work was at least fairly good.
"Thanks!" replied Garnier. "I have found a situation—And then—" he shook his head as he pointed out behind the black trees and the white graves, the spot where they had lowered Ramel—"One has always a place when all is over, and that perhaps is the best of all!"
He bowed and Vaudrey left in a gloomy mood. It seemed to him that his life was crumbling away, that he was sowing, shred by shred, his flesh on the road. The black hangings of Ramel's coffin—and he smiled sadly at this new irony—recalled to him the bills of the upholsterers that he still owed for the furnishing of that fête at the ministry on the last day of his power and his happiness. The official decorations of Belloir and the Gobelins were not sufficient for him. He had desired more modern decorations. He gave the coachman the upholsterer's address, Boulevard des Capucins. He hardly dared to enter and say: "I have come to pay the account of the furnishing supplied at the ministry!" It still seemed like a funeral bill he was paying. This upholsterer's account, paid for forgotten display, seemed to him a sort of mortuary transaction.
When he paid the upholsterer, the latter seemed to wear a cunning smile.
On finding himself again outside, he felt a sensation of relief; being cold, he was inclined to walk with a view to warming his chill blood.
On hearing his name spoken by some one, he turned round and perceived before him his compatriot Jéliotte, the friend of his childhood, the comrade, who, with a smile, cordially extended his hands toward him.
"I told you that you would always find me when I should not appear before you as a courtier! Well, then, here I am," said Jéliotte. "Now you may see me as much as you please!"
"Ah!" said Vaudrey.
Jéliotte took his arm.
"Probably you are going to the Chamber?"
"Yes, exactly."
"Well, I will accompany you!—Ah, since you are no longer minister, my dear friend, and that one does not appear to be a flatterer or a seeker of patronage, one can speak to you—You have faults enough!—You are too confident, too moderate—It is necessary to have a firm hand—And then that could not last. Those situations are all very fine but they are too easily destroyed!—They are like glass, my old friend!—A place is wanted for everybody, is it not?—Bah! must I tell you?—Why, you are happier! I like you better as it is!"
Vaudrey felt strongly inclined to shake off this pretentious ninny who was clinging to his arm.
"That is like me!" continued Jéliotte. "I like my friends better when they are down! What would you have? It is my generous nature. By the way, do you know that the reason I have not seen you before is because I have not been in Paris! I have returned from Isère!"
"Ah!" said Vaudrey, thinking of Adrienne.
"Well, you know, I have still some good news for you. If you have had enough of politics, you can retire at the approaching election!"
"How?" asked Sulpice.
"Why, Thibaudier is stirring up Grenoble. He has got the whole city with him. He is very much liked and is a model mayor. He is a very mère—mother—that mayor!—Jéliotte laughed heartily, believing that he was funny.—If there is a list balloted for, and there certainly will be, Thibaudier will head the list. If they had maintained the scrutin d'arrondissement, he would have been capable of passing muster, all the same!"
"Against me?"
"Against you. Thibaudier is very popular!—And as firm as a rock!—He thinks you moderate, too moderate, as everybody else does!"
"He?—He was a member of the Plebiscite Committee under the Empire!"
"Exactly! He is an extreme Republican, just as he was an extreme Bonapartist. Oh! Thibaudier is a man, there is no concession with him. Never! He is always the same. He will beat you. Moreover, in Isère, they want a homogeneous representation—"
"Again!" said Vaudrey, who felt that he was pursued by this word.
After all, what did Thibaudier matter to him, or the deputation, the election or politics? Denis Ramel had sounded its depths in his grave in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen.
"Let us drop Thibaudier. By the way," said Jéliotte, "I saw your wife at Grenoble."
Vaudrey grew pale.
He again repeated: "Ah!"
"She is greatly changed. She doesn't leave the house of her uncle, the doctor, nor does she receive any one."
"Is she sick, then?"
"Yes, slightly."
"And you are separated, then?"
"No," replied Sulpice.
Jéliotte smiled.
"Ah! joker, I understand!—Your wife was too strict!—Bless me, a provincial! Bah! that will come right! And if it doesn't, why, you will be free, that's all! But, say, then, if you are not re-elected, you will rejoin her at Grenoble. Oh! your clients will return to you. You are highly esteemed as an advocate, but as a minister, I ought to say—"
"I shall be re-elected," said Vaudrey, in a decisive tone, so as to cut short Jéliotte's interminable phrases.
He was exceedingly unnerved. This man's stupidity would exasperate him. He would never come across any but subjects of irritation or disheartenment. He felt inclined to seek a quarrel with some one. He would have liked to wrench Marianne's wrist with his fingers.
As he entered the hall leading to the assembly, he unwittingly stumbled against a gentleman who was walking rapidly and without saluting him, although he thought that he recognized him.
"Yet I know him!"
He had not gone three steps before he perfectly recalled this eternal lobbyist, always bending before him and clinging to the armchairs of the antechambers, like an oyster to a rock, and whom the messengers, accustomed to his soliciting, bowing and scraping for years past, called Monsieur Eugène—out of courtesy.
It was too much! And, in truth, this strange fellow's impoliteness was ill-timed.
Sulpice suddenly turned round, approached Renaudin, and said to him sharply:
"You bowed more obsequiously to me a short time since, monsieur! It seems to me that you were in the ministerial antechambers every morning!"
He expected a haughty reply from Renaudin, and that this man would have compensated him for the others.
Monsieur Eugène smiled as he answered:
"Why, I am still there, monsieur!"
Vaudrey looked at him with a stupefied air, then in an outburst of anger, as if he conveyed in the reply that he hurled at this contemptible fellow, all the projects of his future revenge upon the fools, the knaves, the dull valets and the ungrateful horde, he said, boldly:
"Well, you will salute me again, for I shall return there."
He turned on his heels away from this worthless fellow, and entered the Chamber.
He heard an outburst of bravos; a perfect tempest of enthusiasm reached him. He looked on and bit his lips.
Lucien Granet was in the tribune, and the majority were applauding him.