And I heard in the neighbouring room the self-possessed, measured tread of a man accustomed to rule an office. A moment later, the door of our office opened and Raulot appeared.
"M. Oudard wants M. Alexandre Dumas," he said.
I rose and cast a glance at Lassagne: he understood what I felt like.
"Go along," he said; "he is a capital fellow, but you have to become acquainted with him: however, you will soon do that."
This was not altogether reassuring; so it was with my heart beating very rapidly that I proceeded along the corridor and entered M. Oudard's office.
I found him standing before the fireplace. He was a man of five feet six inches high, with a brown complexion, black hair and an impassive face, gentle although firm. His black eyes had that direct look to be found in men who have risen from a lower class to a high position; its expression was almost stonily hard when it was fixed on you; you would have said he had ridden rough-shod over everything and everybody that had come in his way, as so many obstacles on the road towards that goal, known only to himself, which he had made up his mind to reach. He had fine teeth; but, contrary to the habit of those who possess this advantage, he rarely smiled: one could see that nothing—not even the most insignificant event—was indifferent to him; a pebble under the foot of an ambitious man will raise him higher by the size of that pebble. Oudard was very ambitious; but as he was also essentially honest, I doubt whether his ambition had ever, I will not say inspired him with an evil thought—what man is master of his thoughts?—but caused him to commit a mean action. Later, it will be seen that he was hard on me, almost pitiless. He was, I am sure, well intentioned in being so; he did not think of the future I wanted to carve for myself, and he feared I should only lose the position I had made—the position which he had helped me to make. Oudard, unlike other upstarts (and let us admit, he was really more a man who had achieved success than a mere parvenu), talked a great deal of the village where he was born, of the home in which he had been brought up, of his old mother, who came to see him, dressed in her peasant's costume, with whom he would walk out in the Palais-Royal or whom he would take to the play, just as she was: perhaps all this talk was only another form of pride, but it is a pride I like. He was devoted to his mother—a sentiment sufficiently rare in ambitious men to be noted here as out of the common. Oudard must have been thirty-two at that period; he was head of the Secretarial Department, and private secretary to the Duchesse d'Orléans. These two posts combined must have been worth about twelve thousand francs a year to him, perquisites included. He was clad in black trousers, a white piqué waistcoat and a black coat and cravat. He wore very fine cotton stockings and slippers. Such was the get-up of a man who was not merely chief clerk of an office, but one who might be called into the presence of a prince or princess at any moment.
"Come in, Monsieur Dumas," he said.
I went up to him and bowed.
"You have been very especially commended to me by two persons, one of whom I greatly respect and the other of whom I love dearly."
"Is not General Foy one of these, monsieur?"