Nevertheless, he recalled Marianne in the hours of past love, and the recollection of her kisses and sobs still made his flesh creep. The tawny tints that played in her hair as it strayed unfastened over the pillow, the endearing caresses of her bare arms, he wished to see and feel again. He calculated in his ferocious egotism that Adrienne's wrath would afford him more complete liberty for a time, and that he would have Marianne more to himself, if she were willing.
He had written to Mademoiselle Kayser, but his letter had remained unanswered. He thought that he would go to Mademoiselle Vanda's house the next day, after the Chamber was up. Very late, he added, since the sitting would be prolonged. Long and decisive, as the fate of his ministry was at stake.
Granet's interpellation did not make him unusually uneasy. He had acquainted himself in the morning with a résumé of the journals. Public opinion seemed favorable to the Vaudrey ministry, except in the case of some insufferable radical organs, and with which he need not in anyway concern himself, read the report. Vaudrey did not remember that it was in almost these very terms that the daily résumé of the press expressed itself on the eve of Pichereau's fall, to the Minister of the Interior, in speaking of Pichereau's cabinet.
"I shall have a majority of sixty votes," he said to himself. "Everything will be carried—save honor!"
He thought of Adrienne as he thus wished.
The session of the Chamber was to furnish him the most cruel deception. Granet had most skilfully prepared his plan of attack. Vaudrey's ministry was threatened on all sides by lines of approach laid out without Sulpice's knowledge. Granet had promised, here and there, new situations, or had undertaken to confirm the old. He came to the assault of the ministry with a compact battalion of clients entirely devoted to his fortunes, which were their own. They did not reproach Vaudrey too strongly with anything, unless it was that these impatient ones considered that he had given away all that he had to give, prefectures, sub-prefectures, councillors' appointments, crosses of the Legion of Honor, and especially for having lasted too long. Vaudrey would fall less because he had forfeited esteem than because others were impatient to succeed him. Granet was tired of being only the minister of to-morrow, he wished to have his day. He had just affirmed his policy, he asserted that the whole country, weary of Vaudrey's compromises, demanded a more homogeneous ministry. Homogeneity! Nothing could be said against such a word. Granet favored the policy of homogeneity. This vocable comprehended his entire programme. The Vaudrey Cabinet lacked homogeneity! The President of the Republic decidedly ought to form a homogeneous cabinet.
"Granet is then homogeneous?" said Sulpice, with a forced laugh, as he sat on the ministerial bench while Lucien Granet was speaking from the tribune, his right hand thrust into his frock-coat.
The bon mot uttered by the President of the Council, although spoken loudly enough, did not enliven any one, neither his colleagues who felt themselves threatened nor his usual claqueurs who felt themselves vanquished. Navarrot, the ministerial claqueur, was already applauding Granet most enthusiastically. Monsieur le Ministre felt himself about to become an ex-minister. He vaguely felt as if he were in the vacuum of an air-pump.
The order of the day of distrust, smoothed over by Granet with the formulas of perfidious politeness—castor-oil in orange-juice, as Sulpice himself called it, trying to pluck up courage and wit in the face of misfortune,—that order of the day that the Vaudrey Cabinet would not accept, was adopted by a considerable majority: one hundred and twenty-two votes.
For Sulpice, it was a crushing defeat.