It pleased him to think of that woman. It was an entirely changed preoccupation, a relaxation. A curious, strangely agreeable sensation: his imagination thus playing truant, and wandering toward that vision, renewed his youth. He experienced therein the perplexities that troubled him at twenty. Love in the heart means fewer white hairs on the brow. And then, indeed, he would never, perhaps, see Mademoiselle Kayser again! He would, however, do everything to see her again at the coming soirée at the ministry, an invitation—Suddenly his thoughts abruptly turned to Ramel, whom he also wished to invite and meet again. He loved him so dearly. It was he who formerly, in the journalistic days, and at the time of the battles fought in the Nation Française, had called Denis "a conscience in a dress-coat."
Therefore, since he had an afternoon to spare, he would call on Ramel. He was determined to show him that he would never preserve the dignity of a minister with him.
"Rue Boursault, Batignolles," he said to the coachman, lowering one of the windows; "after that, only to the Bois!"
The coachman drove the coupé toward the right, reaching the outer boulevards by way of Monceau Park.
Vaudrey was delighted. He was going to talk open-heartedly to an old friend. Ah, Ramel! he was bent on remaining in the background, on being nothing and loving his friends only when they were in defeat, as Jéliotte had said. Well, Vaudrey would take him as his adviser. This devil of a Ramel, this savage fellow should govern the state in spite of himself.
The minister did not know Ramel's present lodging which he had occupied only a short time. He expected to find dignified poverty and a cold apartment. As soon as Denis opened the door to him, he found himself in a workman's dwelling that had been transformed by artistic taste into the small museum of a virtuoso. After having passed through a narrow corridor, and climbed a small, winding staircase, Vaudrey rang at the third floor of a little house in Rue Boursault and entered a well-kept apartment full of sunlight.
Hanging on the walls were engravings and crayons in old-fashioned frames. A very plain mahogany bookcase contained some select volumes, which, though few, were frequently perused and were swollen with markers covered with notes. The apartment was small and humble: a narrow bedroom with an iron bedstead, a dressing room, a tiny dining-room furnished with cane-seated chairs, and the well-lighted study with his portraits and his frames of the old days. But with this simplicity, as neat as a newly-shaved old man, all was orderly, and arranged and cared for with scrupulous attention.
This modest establishment, the few books, the deep peace, the oblivion found in this Batignolles lodging, in this home of clerks, poor, petty tradesmen and workmen, sufficed for Ramel. He rarely went out and then only to take a walk from which he soon returned exhausted. He had formerly worked so assiduously and had given, in and out of season, all his energy, his nerves and his body, improvising and scattering to the winds his appeals, his protests, his heart, his life, through the columns of the press. What an accumulation of pages, now destroyed or buried beneath the dust of neglected collections! How much ink spilled! And how much life-blood had been mingled with that ink!
Ramel willingly passed long hours every day at his study window, looking out on the green trees or at the high walls of a School of Design opposite, or at the end of a tricolored flag that waved from the frontal of a Primary Normal School that he took delight in watching; then at the right, in the distance, throbbing like an incessant fever, he saw the bustling life of the Saint-Lazare Station, where with every shrill whistle of the engines, he saw white columns of smoke mount skyward and vanish like breaths.
"Smoke against smoke," thought Ramel, with his pipe between his teeth. "And it would be just as well for one to struggle—a lost unity—against folly, as for a single person to desire to create as much smoke as all these locomotives together!"