Vaudrey could not restrain a smile.
"Come, after that, one cannot refuse her invitation. It is the Monseigneur of the beggar," said he, kissing Adrienne's brow. "And when do we dine at Madame Gerson's?"
"On Monday next; I shall have at least one delightful evening to see you," said the young wife sweetly.
The minister entered his cabinet. Almost immediately after, a messenger handed him a card: Molina, Banker.
"How strange it is!" thought Sulpice. "I had him in mind."
In the course of his troublesome reflections concerning the Gochard paper, Vaudrey persistently thought of that fat, powerful man who laughed and harangued in a loud voice in the greenroom of the ballet, as he patted with his fat fingers the delicate chin of Marie Launay.
Why! if he were willing, this Molina—Molina the Tumbler!—for him it is a mere bagatelle, a hundred thousand francs!
Salomon Molina entered the minister's cabinet just as he made his way into the foyer of the Opéra, with swelling chest, tilted chin and stomach thrust forward.
"Monsieur le Ministre," he said in a clear voice, as he spread himself out in the armchair that Vaudrey pointed out to him, "I notify you that you have my maiden visit!—I am still in a state of innocency! On my honor, this is the first time I have set my foot within a minister's office!"
He manifested his independence—born of his colossal influence—by his satisfied and successful air. The former Marseillaise clothes-dealer, in his youth pouncing upon the sailors of the port and Maltese and Levantine seamen, to palm off on them a second-hand coat or trousers, as the wardrobe dealers of the Temple hook the passer-by, Salomon Molina, who had paraded his rags and his hopes on the Canebière, dreaming at the back of his dark shop of the triumphs, the pleasures, the revels and the indigestions that money affords, had, moreover, always preserved the bitterness of those wretched days and his red, Jewish lip expressed the gall of his painful experiences.