What a howling solitude was that Ministry! It was like Sunday in a factory with the boiler cold and silent. In all the departments upstairs and downstairs, in his own cabinet, where he vainly attempted to write, in his bed-chamber, which he began once more to fill with his sobs, everywhere that little January snow was whirling about the big windows, veiling the horizon and increasing the silence which was like that of the Eastern steppes.
Oh, the misery of men in lofty positions!
A clock struck four and then another answered and then still others replied through the vast desert of the palace until it seemed as if there was nothing alive there except the hour. The idea of remaining there till evening face to face with his wretchedness frightened him. He felt that he must thaw himself a little with a bit of friendship and tenderness. Steam radiators and warm-air registers and half trees flaming in the chimneypiece did not constitute a hearth; for a moment he thought of the Rue de Londres. But he had sworn to his lawyer—for the lawyers were already at work—to keep quiet until the suit was decided. All of a sudden a name flashed across his mind: “Bompard! Why had he not come?” Generally he was observed to arrive the first on mornings of feast-days, his arms full of bouquets and paper sacks with candies for Rosalie, Hortense and Mme. Le Quesnoy, wearing on his lips a smile which expressed his character of grandpapa or of Santa Claus. Of course Roumestan paid the bill of these surprises, but friend Bompard was possessed of imagination enough to forget that fact, and, notwithstanding her antipathy, Rosalie could not help being touched when she thought of the privations which the poor devil must have undergone in order to be so generous.
“Suppose I go and get him and we dine together.”
He was reduced to that. He rang, took off his evening dress, all his medals and orders and went out on foot by the Rue Bellechasse.
The quays and bridges were all white; but when he had crossed the courtyard of the Carrousel neither ground nor air betrayed a trace of snow. It disappeared under the wheels that crowded the street, in the swarming myriads of the mob covering the sidewalks at the shop-fronts and pushing round the offices of the omnibus lines. This tumult of a feast-day evening, the calls of the coachmen, the shrill cries of peddlers in the luminous confusion of the shop-fronts, where the lilac-colored jets from the Jablochkoff burners extinguished the twinkling yellow of the gas and the last reflections from the pale afternoon, lulled the despair of Roumestan and dissolved it, as it were, by means of the agitation of the street. Meantime he directed his steps toward the Boulevard Poissonnière where the old Circassian, very sedentary like all men of imagination, had lived for the last twenty years, in fact since his arrival in Paris.
Nobody had ever seen the interior of Bompard’s home, of which nevertheless he talked a good deal, as well as of his garden and his artistic furniture, to complete which he haunted all the auctions at the Hôtel Drouot.
“Do come to breakfast one of these days and eat a chop with me!”
That was the regular form of invitation which he scattered right and left, but any one who took him at his word never found anybody at home; he came up standing against signs left by the janitor, against bells wrapped in paper or deprived of their wire. During an entire year Lappara and Rochemaure obstinately continued to try to reach Bompard’s rooms and overcome the extraordinary stratagems of the Provençal who was guarding the mystery of his apartment—but all in vain. One day he even took out some of the bricks near the front door in order to be able to say across this species of barricade to the friends he had invited:
“Awfully sorry, dear boys—we have had an escape of gas—everything blown up last night!”