“Now look here, are you never going to stop persecuting me with your dog-at-the-fair music? Haven’t you had enough with one chance at it? How many do you require? Now they tell me that there you are on all the walls in your hybrid costume. And what is all this bosh that they have brought me here?—that your biography? A mass of blunders and lies. You know perfectly well that you are no more a Prince than I am and that those parchments which are talked about here have never existed save in your own imagination!”
With the brutal gesture of the man who loves argument he grabbed the wretched fellow by the flap of his jacket with both hands and as he talked kept shaking him. In the first place this “eskating-rink” didn’t have a penny—perfect fakirs! They would never pay him and all he would get would be the shame of this dirty advertisement on the strength of his name, the name of his protector. Now the newspapers could begin their jokes again—Roumestan and Valmajour the fifer for the Ministry; and, growing excited at the memory of these attacks, his big cheeks quivering with the anger hereditary in his family, with a fit of rage like those of Aunt Portal, more scaring in the solemn surroundings of an office where the personality of a man should disappear before the public situation, he screamed at the top of his voice:
“But for God’s sake get out of here, you wretched creature, get out of here! We have had enough of your shepherd’s fife!”
Stunned and silly, Valmajour let the flood go on, stuttering, “All right, all right,” and appealed to the pitying face of Méjean, the only man whom the Master’s rage had not sent into headlong flight, and then gazed piteously on the big portrait of Fontanes, who looked scandalized at excesses of this sort and seemed to accentuate his grand Ministerial air the more, in proportion as Roumestan lost his own dignity. At last, escaping from the powerful fist which clutched him, the musician was able to reach the door and fly half-crazed with his tickets for the “eskating.”
“Cabantous, pilot!” said Numa, reading the name which the impassive clerk presented to him, “There’s another Valmajour! But no, I won’t have it; I have had enough of being their tool—enough for to-day—I am no longer in....”
He continued to march up and down his office, trying to get rid of what remained of that furious rage, the shock of which Valmajour had very unfairly received. That Cadaillac, what impudence! daring to come and reproach him about the little girl, in his own office, in the Ministry itself, and before Méjean, before Rochemaure! “Well, certainly, I am too weak; the nomination of that man to the directorship of the opera was a terrible blunder!”
His chief clerk was entirely of that opinion but he would have taken good care not to say so; for Numa was no longer the good fellow he used to be, who was the first to laugh at his own embarrassments and took railleries and remonstrances in good part. Having become the practical chief of the cabinet in consequence of his speech at Chambéry and a few other oratorical triumphs, the intoxication that comes with heights gained, that royal atmosphere where the strongest heads are turned, had changed him quite, had made him nervous, splenetic and irritable.
A door beneath a curtain opened and Mme. Roumestan appeared, ready to go out, her hair fashionably dressed and a long cloak concealing her figure. With that serene air which for five months back lit up her pretty face: “Have you your council to-day, my dear? Good-morning, Monsieur Méjean.”
“Why, yes, council—a meeting—everything!”
“I wanted to ask you to come as far as Mamma’s house; I am breakfasting there; Hortense would have been so glad!”