“You have only to give my name.”
“Let him only know that I am here.”
“Tell ’im it’s Cabantous.”
The clerk listens to nobody, but marches very solemnly on with a few visiting cards in his hand and the door which he leaves partly open behind him shows the Minister’s sitting-room filled with light from its three windows overlooking the garden, all of one panel of the wall covered by the cloak turned up with ermine of M. de Fontanes, painted standing at full length.
A trace of astonishment showing on his cadaverous face, the clerk comes back and calls:
“Monsieur Valmajour.”
The musician is not at all astonished at passing in this way over the heads of the others.
Since early morning his portrait has appeared placarded on all the walls of Paris. Now he is a personage and hereafter the Minister will no longer cause him to languish among the draughts in a railway station. Conceited and smiling, there he stands in the centre of the luxurious bureau where secretaries are occupied in pulling out drawers and cardboard pigeon-holes in a frantic search for something. Roumestan in a terrible rage scolds, thunders and curses, both hands in his pockets:
“Come now, be done with it! those papers, what the devil!—So they have been lost, have they, that pilot’s papers?... Really, gentlemen, there is an absence of order here!...”
He catches sight of Valmajour: “Ha, it’s you, is it?” and he springs upon him with one leap, the while the backs of the secretaries are disappearing by the side doors in a state of terror, each carrying off an armful of boxes.