"Ah! I know that very well, but that robs me of everything. It is politics. Come! be great, and I shall be happy or resigned, as you wish. I adore you so much! I would give you my life, so I would gladly give you my days of weariness!"
Although she was rich, she strove to introduce into her official surroundings the bourgeois and provincial orderly methods that she had been so virtuously taught. She found that her desserts vanished with frightful rapidity, that dishes scarcely touched and bottles whose contents had only been tasted, were removed to the kitchen. She commented thereon, but the somewhat contemptuous smile of her domestics was her only reply and it made her feel ashamed.
Vaudrey's predecessor, Monsieur Pichereau, was exacting, close-fisted. His table was meagre but there was nothing astonishing in that, Monsieur Pichereau had a delicate stomach. Well and good, but the predecessors of Monsieur Pichereau, they had given fêtes, they had! It is true that one was a count and the other a marquis. One can always tell a gentleman anywhere.
One evening, they heard one of the domestics of the ministry say to another:
"As if it were not our money that the ministers spend! It is the electors' money. They give us wages: we give them salaries. There it is!"
The domestic was discharged immediately, but these remarks, however, recurred to Adrienne's memory and filled her with dislike for the flunkeyism that surrounded her, waiting on her with cold civility, but without any attachment, like hotel waiters or girls at an inn that one will leave the next day, giving them a gratuity.
Vaudrey saw much less of these daily little wounds. He lived in an atmosphere of constant flattery, favor-begging cloaked under complimentary phrases. Had he leisure, he would have been able to calculate with mathematical exactitude how many angles the human form would describe in the process of bowing and scraping. In his department, everybody asked for something or got someone else to ask. Promotion, that insatiable hunger, was the greedy dream of all that little world of intriguing, underhand, begging employés, who opened up around the new minister so many approaches, like military lines around a redoubt.
Sulpice felt himself besieged and the target for a crowd of greedy ambitions. The sub-heads of departments cast bitterly envious glances at the offices of chiefs, like hungry beggars hypnotized by the display at Chevet's. Commendatory letters rained on him. This shower of begging-missives nauseated the minister to such an extent that he endeavored to arrest the stream, ordering Warcolier, the Under Secretary of State, to be called and requesting him to reply to the deputies, to the senators, to everybody, in fact: that he had no influence to use, that the era of favoritism was over; that he, Vaudrey, understood that only merit would receive official gifts. "Merit only. You understand, Monsieur Warcolier?"
Warcolier rolled his huge eyes in astonishment; then, with the self-satisfied smile of an expressionless beau, after passing his fat hand through his long whiskers, yellow and streaked with gray, that decorated his rosy cheeks, he remarked doctorally, that Monsieur le Ministre was entering on a path that, in all conscience, he could qualify as being only dangerous. Eh! bon Dieu! one must do something for one's friends!—Vaudrey's accession to the Department of the Interior had given birth to many new hopes; on all grounds they must be satisfied. Vaudrey would never be forgiven for such deception.
"What deception?" asked Sulpice. "I promised reforms and I am going to carry them out, but people laugh at my reforms and ask what?—Places."