His Excellency the Minister / Claretie, Jules, 1840-1913

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Title: His Excellency the Minister

Author: Jules Claretie

Translator: Henri Roberts

Release Date: May 29, 2005 [EBook #15934]

Language: English

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THIS EDITION
DEDICATED TO THE HONOR OF THE
ACADEMIE FRANCAISE
IS LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND NUMBERED AND REGISTERED
SETS, OF WHICH THIS IS

NUMBER 358


THE ROMANCISTS
JULES CLARETIE
HIS EXCELLENCY THE MINISTER


BIBLIOTHEQUE
DES CHEFS-D'OEUVRE
DU ROMAN
CONTEMPORAIN

_HIS EXCELLENCY
THE MINISTER_

JULES CLARETIE

OF THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE


PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY

GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PHILADELPHIA
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY G.B. & SON

THIS EDITION OF
HIS EXCELLENCY THE MINISTER
HAS BEEN COMPLETELY TRANSLATED
BY
HENRI ROBERTS

THE ETCHINGS ARE BY
EUGENE WALLET
AND DRAWINGS BY
ADRIEN MARIE




TO ALPHONSE DAUDET


My dear friend,

Ideas sometimes float about in the air like the pollen of flowers. For
years past I have been at work collecting notes for this book which I
have decided to dedicate to you.

In one of your charming prefaces, you told us lately that you only
painted from nature. We are both of us, I imagine, in our day and
generation, quite captivated and carried away by that modern society
from which in your exquisite creations you have so well understood how
to extract the essence.

What is it that I have desired to do this time? That which we have both
been trying to do at one and the same time: to seize, in passing, these
stirring times of ours, these modern manners, that society which
perpetuates the antediluvian uproar, that feverish, bustling world
always posing before the footlights, that market for the sale of
appetites, that kirmess of pleasure that saddens us a little and amuses
us a great deal, and allows us romance-writers, simple seekers after
truth, to smile in our sleeves at the constant seekers after portfolios.

This book is true, I have seen the events narrated in it pass before my
own eyes, and I can say, as a spectator greatly interested in what I
see, that I am delighted, my old fellow-traveller, to write your great
and honored name on the first page of my book as a witness to the
sincere affection and true comradeship of

Your devoted,

JULES CLARETIE.




PREFACE


_There was once a Minister of State who presented to his native land the
astonishing spectacle of a Cabinet Minister dying whilst in office. This
action was so astounding to the nation at large that a statue has since
been erected to his memory._

_I saw his funeral procession defile past me, I think I even made one of
the Committee sent by the Society of Men of Letters to march in the
funeral convoy. It was superb. This lawyer from the Provinces, good
honest man, eloquent orator, honest politician that he was, who came to
Paris but to die there, was buried with the greatest magnificence._

_De Musset had eight persons to follow him to the grave; his Excellency
had one hundred thousand._

_I returned home from this gorgeous funeral in a thoughtful mood,
thinking how much emptiness there is in glory, and particularly in
political glory. This man had been "His Excellency the Minister" and not
only his own province, but the whole country had placed its hopes on
him. But what had he done? He had left his home to cast himself into the
great whirlpool of the metropolis. It was the romance of a great
provincial plunged in Paris into the reality of contemporary history,
and become as ordinary as the commonplace items of the Journals. "What a
subject for a study at once profoundly modern and perfectly lifelike!"
The funeral convoy had hardly left the church of the Madeleine when my
plot of this romance was thought out, and appeared clearly before me in
this title, very brief and simple: _His Excellency the Minister_._

_I have not drawn any one in particular, I have thought of no individual
person, I even forgot all about this departed Minister, whose face I
hardly caught even a glimpse of, and of whose life I was completely
ignorant; I had only in my mind's eye a hero or rather a heroine:
Politics with all its discouragements, its vexations, its treacheries,
its deceptions, its visions as fair as the blue sky of summer, suddenly
bursting like soap bubbles; and to the woes of Politics, I naturally
endeavored to add those of the pangs of love._

_And this is how my book came to see the light. I have been frequently
asked from what living person I borrowed the character of Vaudrey, with
its sufferings, its disappointments, its falterings. From whom? An
American translator, better informed, it appears, than myself, has, I
believe, brought out in New York a _key_ to the characters presented in
my book. I should have publicly protested against this _Key_ which
unlocks nothing, however, had it been published in France. Reader, do
not expect any masks to be raised here--there are no masks; it is only a
picture of living people, of passions of our time. No portraits,
however, only types. That, at least, is what I have tried to do. And if
I expected to find indulgent critics, I have certainly succeeded, and
the two special characters which I sought to portray in my romance--in
Parisian and political life--have been fortunate enough to win the
approval of two critics whose testimony to the truth of my portraitures
I have set down here._

_An author of rare merit and an authority on Statecraft, Monsieur J.-J.
Weiss, was kind enough one day to analyze and praise, apropos of the
comedy founded upon my book, the romance which I am to-day republishing.
It has been extremely pleasant for me to put myself under the
sponsorship of a man of letters willing to vouch for the truth of my
portrayals. I must beg pardon for repeating his commendations of my
work, so grateful are they to me, coming from the pen of a critic so
renowned, and which I take some pride in reading again._

_"I had already twice read _Monsieur le Ministre_," wrote Monsieur J.-J.
Weiss in the _Journal des Debats_ the day following the production at
the Gymnase, "before having seen the drama founded on the book, and I do
not regret having been obliged to read it for the third time. The
romance is both well conceived and admirably executed. To have written
it, a union of character and talent was necessary. A Republican tried
and proved, permitting his ideal to be tarnished and sullied; a patriot
wronged by the vices of the times in which he lived; an honest,
clean-handed man; the representative of a family of rigid morality; the
strict impartiality of the artist who cares for nothing but his ideas of
art, and who protects those ideas from being injured or influenced by
the pretensions of any group or coterie; a close and long
acquaintanceship with the ins and outs of Parisian life; an eye at once
inquiring, calm and critical, a courageous indifference, hatred for the
mighty ones of the hour, and a loftiness of soul which refuses to yield
to the unjust demands of timid friendship: such are the qualities that
make the value of this matchless book. Monsieur Claretie has been
accused of having gathered together and exposed to the public gaze two
or three more or less scandalous episodes of private life, and using
them as the foundation of his romance. The fictitious name of Vaudrey
has been held to cloak that of such and such a Minister of State. Those,
however, who search for vulgar gossip in this book, or who look for
private scandal are far astray. They are quite mistaken as regards the
tendency and moral of Monsieur Claretie's book. The Vaudrey of the
romance is no minister in particular, neither this statesman nor that.
He is the Minister whom we have had before our eyes for the last quarter
of a century. He is that one, at once potential and universal. In him
are united and portrayed all the traits by which the species may be
determined. He had been elected to office without knowing why, and to do
him this justice, at least without any fault of his; he was deposed from
power without knowing the reason, and we have no hesitation in saying,
without his having done anything either good or bad to deserve his fall.
There he is minister, however; Minister of the Interior, and who knows?
in a fair way, perhaps, to be swept by some favorable wind to the post
of President of the Council; while not so very long ago to have been
made sub-prefect of the first class, would have surpassed the wildest
visions of his youth. In Monsieur Claretie's romance it is the old
Member of Parliament, Collard--of Nantes--converted late in life to
Republicanism, who chose the provincial Vaudrey for his Minister of the
Interior; this may, with equal probability be Marshal MacMahon._

_"In Monsieur Claretie's romance, _Monsieur le Ministre_ is of the Left
Centre or the so-called Moderate Party, he is therefore on the side of
Law and Order. He enters into the Cabinet with the determination to
reform every abuse, to recast everything; to seek for honest men, to
make merit and not faction, the touchstone of advancement. In short, to
apply in his political life the glorious principles which--and the noble
maxims that--He is only, however, forty-eight hours in office when he
becomes quite demoralized, paralyzed and stultified for the rest of his
ministerial life. It is the phenomenon of crushing demoralization and of
complete enervation of which the public, from the situation in which it
is placed, sees only the results of which Monsieur Claretie, with a
skilful hand describes for us the mechanism and the cause. This Minister
of State, supposed to be omnipotent in office, has not even the power to
choose an undersecretary of State for himself. The Minister who only the
day before, from his seat upon one of the benches of the Opposition, sat
with his head held aloft, his long body erect, with rigid dignity, as if
made of triple brass, cannot now take the initiative in the appointment
of a '_garde champetre_.' His undersecretaries of State, his _gardes
champetres_, he himself, his whole environment, in fact, are only
painted dummies and the meek puppets that a director of the staff, a
chief of a division, or a chief of a bureau sets in motion, to the tune
he grinds out of his hand-organ, or moves them about at his will like
pawns upon a chess-board. The Minister will read with smiling confidence
the reports by which his subordinates who are his masters, inform
him--what no one until then had thought of--that he has been called by
the voice of the nation to his high office, and that he can in future
count upon the entire and complete confidence of the country. To please
these obliging persons, the hangers-on of governments that he has passed
a quarter of his life infighting against and whom he will call gravely,
and upon certain occasions, very drolly, the hierarchy, he will betray
without any scruples all those whose disinterested efforts and great
sacrifices have brought about the triumph of the cause which he
represents._

_"Monsieur le Ministre is from the Provinces! You understand. Solemn and
pedantic, if his youth has been passed upon the banks of the Isere, a
puppy with his muzzle held aloft and giddy, if Garonne has nourished
him, broad faced and vulgarly pedantic if his cradle has been rocked in
upper Limousin. But whether he comes from Correze, from Garonne or
Isere, it is always as a Provincial that he arrives in Paris, the air of
which intoxicates him. He is in the same situation and carries with him
the same sentiments as Monsieur Jourdain when invited to visit the
Countess Dorimene. For the first adventuress who comes along, a born
princess who has strayed into a house of ill fame, or one who frequents
such a house, who masquerades as a princess in her coquettish house in
Rue Bremontier, he will forsake father, mother, children, state
documents, cabinet, councils, Chamber of Deputies, everything in fact.
He will break away from his young wife who has grown up under his eyes
in the same town with him, among all the sweet domestic graces, moulded
amid all the fresh and sapid delicacies of the provinces, but pshaw! too
provincial for a noble of his importance, and he will go in pursuit of
some flower, no matter what, be it only redolent of Parisian patchouli.
He will break the heart of the one, while for the other, he will bring
before the councils of administration suspected schemes, blackmailings,
concessions, treachery and ruin. Monsieur Claretie had shown us the
Vaudrey of his romance involved in all these degradations, although he
has checked him as to some, and in his novel, at least, with due
submission to the exalted truth of art, he has not shrunk from punishing
this false, great man and pretended tribune of the people, by the very
vices he espoused._

_"I do not stop to inquire if even in the story, Monsieur Claretie's
'Marianne Kayser' is frequently self-contradictory, and if in some
features I clearly recognize his Guy de Lissac; two characters that play
an important part in the narrative! But after all, what does it matter?
It suffices for me that his Excellency the Minister and all his
Excellency's entourage are fully grasped and clearly described. Granet,
the low _intriguer_ of the lobbies; Molina, the stock-company cut-throat
and Bourse ruffian; Ramel, the melancholy and redoubtable publicist, who
has made emperors without himself desiring to become one, who will die
in the neighborhood of Montmartre and the Batignolles, forgotten but
proud, poor, and unsullied by money, true to his ideals, among the
ingrates enriched by his journal and who have reached the summit only by
the influence of his authority with the public; Denis Garnier, the
Parisian workman who has had an experience of the hulks as the result of
imbibing too freely of sentimental prose and of lending too ready an ear
to the golden speech of some tavern demagogue, who has now had enough of
politics and who scarcely troubles to think what former retailer of
treasonable language, what Gracchus of the sidewalk may be minister,
Vaudrey or Pichereau, or even Granet: all these types are separately
analyzed and vigorously generalized. Monsieur Claretie designated no one
in particular but we elbow the characters in his book every day of our
lives. He has, moreover, written a book of a robust and healthy novelty.
The picture of the greenroom of the Ballet with which the tale opens and
where we are introduced in the most natural way possible to nearly all
the characters that play a part in the story of Vaudrey is masterly in
execution and intention. It is Balzac, but Balzac toned down and more
limpid."_

_I will stop here at the greenroom of the Ballet commended by Monsieur
J.-J. Weiss, to give a slight sketch, clever as a drawing by Saint' Aubin
or a lithograph by Gavarni, which Monsieur Ludovic Halevy has
contributed to a journal and in which he also praises the romance that
the _feuilletoniste_ of the _Debats_ has criticized with an authority so
discriminating and a benevolence so profound._

_It was very agreeable for me to observe that such a thorough Parisian
as the shrewd and witty author of _Les Petites Cardinal_ should find
that the Opera--which certainly plays a role in our politics--had been
sufficiently well portrayed by the author of _Monsieur le Ministre_. And
upon this, the first chapter of my book, Monsieur Ludovic Halevy adds,
moreover, some special and piquant details which are well worth
quoting:_

_"That which gave me very great pleasure in this tale of a man of
politics is that politics really have little, very little place in the
novel; it is love that dominates it and in the most despotic and
pleasant way possible. This great man of Grenoble who arrives at Paris
in order to reform everything, repair everything, elevate everything,
falls at once under the sway of a most charming Parisian adventuress.
See Sulpice Vaudrey the slave of Marianne. Marianne's gray eyes never
leave him--But she in her turn meets her master--and Marianne's master
is Adolphe Gochard, a horrid Parisian blackguard--who is so much her
master that, after all, the real hero of the romance is Adolphe Gochard.
Such is the secret philosophy of this brilliant and ingenious romance._

_"I have, however, a little quarrel on my own account with Monsieur
Jules Claretie. Nothing can be more brilliantly original than the
introductory chapter of _Monsieur le Ministre_. Sulpice Vaudrey makes
his first appearance behind the scenes of the Opera, and from the sides
of the stage, in the stage boxes, opera-glasses are turned upon him, and
he hears whispered:_

_"'It is the new Minister of the Interior.'_

_"'Nonsense! Monsieur Vaudrey?'_

_"'Yes, Monsieur Vaudrey--'_

_"In short, the appearance of his Excellency creates a sensation, and it
is against this statement that I protest. I go frequently to the Opera,
very frequently. During the last ten years I have seen defile before me
in the wings, at least fifty Ministers of State, all just freshly ground
out. Curiosity had brought them there and the desire to see the dancers
at close quarters, and also the vague hope that by exhibiting themselves
there in all their glory, they would create a sensation in this little
world._

_"Well, this hope of theirs was never realized. Nobody took the trouble
to look at them. A minister nowadays is nobody of importance. Formerly
to rise to such a position, to take in hand the reins of one of the
great departments, it was necessary to have a certain exterior, a
certain prominence, something of a past--to be a Monsieur Thiers,
Monsieur Guizot, Monsieur Mole, Monsieur de Remusat, Monsieur Villemain,
Monsieur Duchatel, Monsieur de Falloux or Monsieur de Broglie--that is
to say, an orator, an author, a historian, somebody in fact. But
nowadays, all that is necessary to be a minister is the votes of certain
little combinations of groups and subsidiary groups, who all expect a
share of the spoils. Therefore we are ruled by certain personages
illustrious perhaps at Gap or at Montelimar but who are quite unknown in
the genealogical records of the Boulevard Haussmann. Why should you
imagine that public attention would be attracted by news like this:_

_"'Look!--There is Monsieur X, or Monsieur Y, or Monsieur Z.'_

_"One person only during these last years ever succeeded in attracting
the attention of the songstresses and ballet-girls of the Opera. And
that was Gambetta. Ah! when he came to claim Monsieur Vaucorbeil's
hospitality, it was useless to crouch behind the cherry-colored silk
curtains of the manager's box, many glances were directed toward him,
and many prowling curiosities were awakened in the vicinity of the
manager's box. Little lassies of ten or twelve came and seized your
hand, saying:_

_"'Please, monsieur, point out Monsieur Gambetta to me--he is here--I
would so much like to see him.'_

_"And then Gambetta was pointed out to them during the entr'acte--after
which, delighted, they went off caracoling and pirouetting behind the
scenes:_

_"'You did not see Monsieur Gambetta, but I saw him!'_

_"This was popularity--and it must be confessed that only one man in
France to-day receives such marks of it. This man is Gambetta._

_"Meanwhile Claretie's minister continues his walk through the corridors
of the Opera house. He reaches the greenroom of the ballet at last and
exclaims:_

_"'And that is all!'_

_"Alas, yes, your Excellency, that is all!--"_

_And everything is only a _"that is all,"_ in this world. If one should
set himself carefully to weigh power or fame,--power, that force of
which Girardin said, however: "I would give fifty years of glory for one
hour of power,"--even if one tilted the scale, one would not find the
weight very considerable._

_It would be necessary to have the resounding renown of a personality
like that one who, if I am to believe Monsieur Halevy, alone enjoyed the
privilege of revolutionizing the foyer of the ballet, in order to boast
of having been someone, or of having accomplished something._

_A rather witty skeptic once said to a friend of his who had just been
appointed minister:_

_"My dear fellow, permit me as a practical man to ask you not to engage
in too many affairs. Events in this world are accomplished without much
meddling. If you attempt to do something to-day, everyone will cry out:
'What! he is going to demolish everything!' If you do nothing, they will
cry: 'What! he does not budge! If I were minister, which God forbid, I
would say nothing--and let others act--I would do nothing--and let
others talk.'"_

_Everybody, very fortunately--and all ministers do not reason like this
jester. But the truth is that it is very difficult for an honest man in
the midst of political entanglements as Vaudrey was, to realize his
dream. When opportunities arise--those opportunities that march only at
a snail's pace--one is not allowed to make use of them, they are
snatched from one. They arrive, only to take wings again. And in those
posts of daily combat, one has not only against one the enemies who
attack one openly, which would be but a slight matter, a touch with a
goad or a prick of the spur, at most--but one has to contend with
friends who compromise, and servants who serve one badly._

_Every man who occupies an office, whatever it may be, has for his
adversaries those who covet it, those who regret it, those who have once
filled it, and those who desire to fill it. What assaults too! Against a
successful rival, there is no infamy too base, no mine too deep, no
villainy too cruel, no lie too poisoned to be made use of--and the
minister, his Excellency, is like a hostage to Power._

_And yet one more point, it is not in his enemies or his calumniators
that his danger lies. The real, absolute evil is in the system of
routine and ill-will which attack the statesmen of probity. It will be
seen from these pages that there is a warning bell destined, alas! to
keep away from those in power the messengers who would bring them the
truth from outside, the unwelcome and much dreaded truth._

_The novel may sometimes be this stroke of the bell,--a stroke honest
and useful,--a disinterested _warner,_ and I have striven to make
_Monsieur le Ministre_ precisely that, in a small degree, for the
political world. I have essayed to paint this hell paved with some of
the good intentions. The success which greeted the appearance of this
book, might justify me in believing that I have succeeded in my task. I
trust that it will enjoy under its new form--so flattering to an author,
that an editor-artist is pleased to give it,--the success achieved under
its first form._

__Monsieur le Ministre_ is connected with more than one recollection of my
life. I was called upon one day to follow to his last resting-place--and
it is on an occasion like this that one discovers more readily and
perceives more clearly life's ironies--one of those men "who do nothing
but create other men," a journalist. It was bitterly cold and we stood
before the open grave, just in front of a railway embankment, in an out
of the way cemetery of Saint-Ouen,--the cemetery called _Cayenne,_
because the dead are "deported" thither. We were but four faithful
ones. Yes, four, but amongst these four must be included a young man,
bare-headed and wearing the uniform of an officer, who stood by the
deceased man's son._

_Whilst one of us bade the last farewell to the departed on the brink of
the grave, the scream of the railway engine cut short his words, and
seemed to hiss for the last time the fate of the vanquished man lying
there. As we were quitting the cemetery, a worthy man, a song-writer,
observed to me: "Well, if all those whom Leon Plee helped during his
lifetime had remembered him when he was dead, this little _Campo Santo_
of Saint-Ouen would not have been large enough to hold them all!"_

_Doubtless. But they did not remember him._

_And from the contrast between the shabby obsequies of the old
journalist and the solemn pomp of that of the funeral service of the
four days' minister came the idea of my book. It seemed to me that here
was an appropriate idea and a useful reparation. Art has nothing to
lose--rather the contrary, when it devotes itself to militant tasks._

_Ah! I forgot--When one mentions to-day the name of this illustrious
minister whose funeral convoy was in its day one of the great spectacles
of Paris, and one of the great surprises to those who know how difficult
it is for a minister to die in office--like the Spartan still grasping
his shield--those best informed, shaking their heads solemnly will say:_

_"Ricard?--Oh! he had great talent, Ricard--I saw lately a portrait of
Paul de Musset by him--It is superb!"_

_They confound him with the painter to whom no statue has been erected,
but whose works remain._

_Be, then, a Cabinet Minister!_

_JULES CLARETIE._

_Viroflay, September 1, 1886._




HIS EXCELLENCY THE MINISTER

PART FIRST

I


The third act of L'Africaine had just come to a close.

The minister, on leaving the manager's box, said smilingly, like a man
glad to be rid of the cares of State: "Let us go to the greenroom,
Granet, shall we?"

"Let us go to the greenroom, as your Excellency proposes!"

They were obliged to cross the immense stage where the stage carpenters
were busy with the stage accessories as sailors with the equipment of a
vessel; and men in evening dress, with white ties, looked natty without
their greatcoats, and with opera hats on their heads were going to and
fro, picking their way amongst the ropes and other impedimenta which
littered the stage, on their way to the greenroom of the ballet.

They had come here from all parts of the house, from the stalls and
boxes; most of them humming as they went the air from Nelusko's ballad,
walking lightly as habitues through the species of antechamber which
separates the body of the house from the stage.

A servant wearing a white cravat, was seated at a table writing down
upon a sheet of paper the names of those who came in. One side of this
sheet bore a headline reading: _Messieurs_, and the other _Medecin_, in
two columns. From time to time this man would get up from his chair to
bow respectfully to some official personage whom he recognized.

"Have you seen Monsieur Vaudrey come in yet, Louis?" asked a still young
man with a monocle in his eye, who seemed quite at home behind the
scenes.

"His Excellency is in the manager's box, monsieur!" answered the servant
civilly.

"Thank you, Louis!"

And as the visitor turned to go up the narrow stairway leading to the
greenroom, the servant wrote down in the running-hand of a clerk, upon
the printed sheet: _Monsieur Guy de Lissac_.

Upon the stage, Vaudrey, the Minister whom Lissac had been inquiring
for, stood arm in arm with his companion Granet, looking in astonishment
at the vast machinery of the opera, operated by this army of workmen,
whom he did not know. He was quite astonished at the sight, as he had
never beheld its like. His astonishment was so evident and artless that
Granet, his friend and colleague in the Chamber of Deputies, could not
help smiling at it from under his carefully waxed moustaches.

"I consider all this much more wonderful than the opera itself,"
observed his Excellency. The floor and wings were like great yellow
spots, and the whole immense stage resembled a great, sandy desert.
Vaudrey raised his head to gaze at the symmetrical arrangement of the
chandeliers, as bright as rows of gas-jets, amongst the hangings of the
friezes. A huge canvas at the back represented a sunlit Indian
landscape, and in the enormous space between the lowered curtain and the
scenery, some black spots seemed as if dancing, strange silhouettes of
the visitors in their dress clothes, standing out clearly against the
yellow background like the shadows of Chinese figures.

"It is very amusing; but let us see the greenroom," said the minister.
"You are familiar with the greenroom, Granet?"

"I am a Parisian," returned the deputy, without too great an emphasis;
but the ironical smile which accompanied his words made Vaudrey
understand that his colleague looked upon his Excellency as fresh from
the province and still smacking of its manners.

Sulpice hesitatingly crossed the stage in the midst of a hubbub like
that of a man-of-war getting ready for action, caused by the methodical
destruction and removal of the scenery comprising the huge ship used in
_L'Africaine_ by a swarm of workmen in blue vests, yelling and shoving
quickly before them, or carrying away sections of masts and parts of
ladders, hurrying out of sight by way of trap-doors and man-holes, this
carcass of a work of art; this spectacle of a great swarm of human ants,
running hither and thither, pulling and tugging at this immense piece of
stage decoration, in the vast frame capable of holding at one and the
same time, a cathedral and a factory, was rather awe-inspiring to the
statesman, who stopped short to look at it, while the tails of his coat
brushed against the fallen curtain.

From both sides of the stage, from the stage-boxes, opera-glasses were
turned upon him here and there and a murmur like a breeze came wafted
towards him.

"It is the new Minister of the Interior!"

"Nonsense! Monsieur Vaudrey?"

"Monsieur Vaudrey."

Vaudrey proudly drew himself up under the battery of opera-glasses
levelled at him, while Granet, smiling, said to the master of the chorus
who, dressed in a black coat, stood near him:

"It can be easily seen that this is his first visit here!"

Oh! yes, truly, it was the first time that the new minister had set his
foot in the wings of the Opera! He relished it with all the curiosity of
a youth and the gusto of a collegian. How fortunate that he had not
brought Madame Vaudrey, who was slightly indisposed. This rapid survey
of a world unknown to him, had the flavor of an escapade. There was a
little spice in this amusing adventure.

Behind the canvas in the rear, some musicians, costumed as Brahmins,
with spectacles on their noses, the better to decipher their score,
fingered their brass instruments with a weary air, rocking them like
infants in swaddling clothes. Actors in the garb of Indians, with
painted cheeks, and legs encased in chocolate-colored bandages, were
yawning, weary and flabby, and stretching themselves while awaiting the
time for them to present themselves upon the stage. Others, dressed like
soldiers, were sleeping on the wooden benches against the walls, their
mouths open, their helmets drawn down over their noses like visors.
Others, their pikes serving them for canes, had taken off their headgear
and placed it at their feet, the better to rest their heads against the
wall, where they leaned with their eyes shut.

Little girls, all of them thin, and in short skirts, were already
pirouetting, and humming airs. Older girls stood about with their legs
crossed, or, half-stooping, displayed their bosoms while retying the
laces of their pink shoes. Others, wearing a kind of Siamese headdress
with ornaments of gold, were laughing and clashing together their little
silver cymbals. Awkward fellows with false beards, dressed like high
priests in robes of yellow, striped with red, elbowed past and jostled
against the girls quite unceremoniously. An usher, dressed a la
Francaise, and wearing a chain around his neck, paced, grave and
melancholy, amongst these shameless young girls.

The greenroom at the end of the stage was entered through a large
vestibule hung with curtains of grayish velvet shot with violet, and at
the top of the steps where some men in dress-clothes were talking to
ballet-girls, Vaudrey could see in the great salon beyond, blazing with
light, groups of half-nude women surrounded by men, resembling, in their
black clothes, beetles crawling about roses, the whole company reflected
in a flood of light, in an immense mirror that covered one end of the
room. Little by little, Vaudrey could make out above the paintings
representing ancient dances, and the portraits by Camargo or Noverre, a
confusion of gaudy skirts, pink legs, white shoulders, with the
ubiquitous black coats sprinkled about here and there amongst these
bright colors like large blots of ink upon ball-dresses.

Sulpice had often heard the greenroom of the ballet spoken about, and he
was at once completely disillusioned. The glaring, brutal light
ruthlessly exposed the worn and faded hangings; and the pretty girls in
their full, short, gauzy petticoats, with their bare arms, smiling and
twisting about, their satin-shod feet resting upon gray velvet
footstools, seemed to him, as they occupied the slanting floor, to move
in a cloud of dust, and to be robbed of all naturalness and freshness.

"And is this all?" the minister exclaimed almost involuntarily.

"What!" answered Granet, "you seem hard to please!"

Amongst all these girls, there had been manifested an expression of
mingled curiosity, coquetry and banter on Vaudrey's appearance in their
midst. His presence in the manager's box had been noticed and his coming
to the greenroom expected. Every one had hurried thither. Sulpice was
pointed out. He was the cynosure of all eyes. On the divans beneath the
mirror, some young, well-dressed, bald men, surrounded--perhaps by
chance--by laughing ballet-girls, now half-concealed themselves behind
the voluminous skirts of the girls about them, and bent their heads,
thus rendering their baldness more visible, just as a woman buries her
nose in her bouquet to avoid recognizing an acquaintance.

Vaudrey, observing this ruse, smiled a slight, sarcastic smile. He
recognized behind the shielding petticoats, some of his prefects, those
from the environs of Paris, come from Versailles and Chartres, or from
some sub-prefectures, and gallantly administering the affairs of France
from the heart of the greenroom. Amiable functionaries of the Ministry
of Fine Arts also came here to study aestheticism between the acts.

All members of the different regimes seemed to be fraternizing in
ironical promiscuousness here, and Vaudrey in a whisper drew Granet's
attention to this. Old beaux of the time of the Empire, with dyed and
waxed moustaches, with dyed or grizzled hair flattened on their temples,
their flabby cheeks cut across by stiff collars as jelly is cut by a
knife, were hobnobbing, fat and lean, with young fops of the Republic,
who with their sharp eyes, wide-open nostrils, their cheeks covered with
brown or flaxen down, their hair carefully brushed, or already bald,
seemed quite surprised to find themselves in such a place, and chattered
and cackled among themselves like beardless conscripts, perverted and
immoral but with some scruples still remaining and less cunning than
these well-dressed old roues standing firmly at their posts like
veterans.

"The licentiates and the pensioners," whispered Vaudrey.

"You have a quickness of sight quite Parisian, your Excellency,"
returned Granet.

"There are Parisians in the Provinces, my dear Granet," replied Sulpice
with a heightened complexion, his blood flowing more rapidly than usual,
due to emotions at once novel and gay.

"Ah! your Excellency," exclaimed a fat, animated man with hair and
whiskers of quite snowy whiteness, and smiling as he spoke, "what in the
world brought you here?"

He approached Vaudrey, bowing but not at all obsequiously, with the air
of good humor due to a combination of wealth and embonpoint. Fat and
rich, in perfect health, and carrying his sixty years with the
lightness of forty, Molina--Molina the "Tumbler" as he was
nicknamed--spent his afternoons on the Bourse and his evenings in the
greenroom of the ballet.

He had a small interest in the theatre, but a large one in the
coryphees, in a paternal way, his white hair giving him the right to be
respected and his crowns the right to respect nothing. Beginning life
very low down, and now enjoying a lofty position, the fat Molina haunted
the Bourse and the greenroom of the Opera. He glutted himself with all
the earliest delicacies of the season, like a man who when young, has
not always had enough to satisfy hunger.

Pictures that were famous, women of fashion, statues of marble and fair
flesh, he must have them all. He collected, without any taste whatever,
costly paintings, rare objects; he bought without love, girls who were
not wholly mercenary. At a pinch he found them, taking pleasure in
parading in his coupe, around the lake or at the races, some recruit in
vice, and in watching the crowd that at once eagerly surrounded her,
simply because she had been the mistress of the fat Molina. He had in
his youth at Marseilles, in the Jewish quarter of the town, sold old
clothes to the Piedmontese and sailors in port. Now it was his delight
to behold the Parisians of the Boulevard or the clubs buy as sentimental
rags the cast-off garments of his passion.

"You in the greenroom of the ballet, your Excellency?" continued the
financier. "Ah! upon my word, I shall tell Madame Vaudrey."

Sulpice smiled, the mere name of his wife sounded strange to his ears in
a place like this. It seemed to him that in speaking of her, she was
being dragged into a strange circle, and one which did not belong to
her. He had felt the same only a few days before upon his entrance into
the cabinet, on seeing a report of his marriage, his dwelling minutely
described, and a pen portrait of that Adrienne, who was the passion of
his life.

"After all," continued Molina, "Madame Vaudrey must get used to it. The
Opera! Why, it is a part of politics! The key of many a situation is to
be found in the greenroom!"

The financier laughed merrily, a laugh that had the ring of the
Turcarets' jingling crowns.

He went on to explain to his Excellency all the little mysteries of the
greenroom, as a man quite at home in this little Parisian province, and
lightly, by a word, a gesture even, he gave the minister a rapid
biography of the young girls who were laughing, jesting, romping there
before them; flitting hither and thither lightly across the boards,
barely touching them with the tips of their pink satin-shod feet.

Sulpice was surprised at everything he saw. He did not even take the
pains to conceal his surprise. Evidently it was his first visit behind
the scenes.

"Ah! your Excellency," said Molina, delighted with his role of
cicerone, "it is necessary to be at home here! You should come here
often! Nothing in the world can be more amusing. Here behind the scenes
is a world by itself. One can see pretty little lasses springing up like
asparagus. One sees running hither and thither a tall, thin child who
nods to you saucily and crunches nuts like a squirrel. One takes a three
months' journey, and passes a season at Vichy or at Dieppe, and when one
returns, presto! see the transformation. The butterfly has burst forth
from its cocoon. No longer a little girl, but a woman. Those saucy eyes
of old now look at you with an expression which disturbs your heart. One
might have offered, six months before, two sous' worth of chestnuts to
the child; now, however, nothing less than a coupe will satisfy the
woman. It used to jump on your knee at that time, now every one is
throwing his arms around its pretty neck. Thus from generation to
generation, one assists at the mobilization of a whole army of recruits,
who first try their weapons here, pass from here into the regiment of
veterans, build themselves a hospital in cut-stone out of their savings,
and some of them mount very high through the tips of their toes if they
are not suddenly attacked by _the malady of the knee_."

"Malady of the knee?" inquired Vaudrey.

"A phrase not to be found in the _Dictionary of Political Economy_ by
Maurice Block. It is a way of saying that ill-luck has overtaken one. A
very interesting condition, this malady of the knee! It often not only
shortens the leg but the career!"

"Is this malady a frequent one at the Opera?"

"Ah! your Excellency, how can it be helped? There are so many slips in
this pirouetting business! It is as risky as politics!"

Fat Molina shouted with laughter at this clumsy jest, and placing a
binocle upon his huge nose, which was cleft down the middle like that of
a hunting-hound, he exclaimed suddenly, turning towards the door as he
spoke:

"Eh! Marie Launay? What is she holding in her hand?"

Light, nimble and graceful in her costume of a Hindoo dancing girl, a
young girl of sixteen or seventeen summers, already betraying her
womanhood in the ardent glances half-hidden in the depths of her large,
deep-blue eyes, tripped into the greenroom, humming an air and holding
in her hand a long sheet of paper.

She shook, as if embarrassed by it, the broad necklace of large
imitation pearls that danced on her fine neck and fell on her
undeveloped bosom; and looking in search of some one among the crowd of
girls, cried out from a distance to a plump little brunette who was
talking and laughing within a circle of dress-coats at the other end of
the room:

"Eh! Anna, you have not subscribed yet!"

The brunette, freeing herself unceremoniously enough from her living
madrigals, came running lightly up to Marie Launay, who held out towards
her an aluminum pencil-case and the sheet of paper.

"What the devil is that?" asked Molina.

"Let us go and see," said Granet.

"Would it not be an indiscretion on our part?" asked Vaudrey, half
seriously.

The financier, however, was by this time at the side of the two pretty
girls, and asked the blonde what the paper contained, the names on which
her companion was spelling out.

Marie Launay, a lovely girl with little ringlets of fair hair curling
low down upon her forehead, smiled like a pretty, innocent and still
timid child, under the luring glances of the fat man, and glancing with
an expression of virgin innocence at Sulpice and Granet, who were
standing beside him, replied:

"That--Oh! that is the subscription we are getting up for Mademoiselle
Legrand."

"Oh! that is so," said Molina. "You mean to make her a present of a
statuette?"

"On her taking her leave of us. Yes, every one has subscribed to
it--even the boxholders. Do you see?"

Marie Launay quickly snatched the paper from her friend; on it were
several names, some written in ink, others in pencil, the whole
presenting the peculiar appearance of schoolboys' pot-hooks or the
graceful lines traced by crawling flies, while the fantastic spelling
offered a strange medley. Molina burst out laughing, his ever-present
laugh that sounded like the shaking of a money-bag,--when he ran his eye
over the list and found accompanying the names of ballet-dancers and
members of the chorus, the distinguished particles of some habitues.

"Look! your Excellency--It is stupendous! Here: _Amelie Dunois_, 2
francs. _Jeanne Garnot_, 5 francs. _Bel-Enfant_--_Charles_--, 1 fr., 50
centimes. _Warnier I._, 2 francs. _Warnier II._, 2 francs. _Gigonnet_, 4
francs. _Baron Humann_, 100 francs. _The baron_!--the former prefect!
Humann writing his name down here with _Bel-Enfant_ and _Gigonnet_.
Humann inscribing above his signature--_I vill supscribe von
hundertfranc_! If one were to see it in a newspaper, one would not
believe it! If only a reporter were here now! For a choice _Paris echo_
what a rare one it would be!"

Granet examined little Marie Launay with sly glances, toying with his
black moustache the while, and the other young girl Anna, very much
confused at the coarse laughter of Molina the "Tumbler," kept turning
around in her slender fingers the aluminum pencil-case and looking at
Marie as much as to say:

"You know I can never muster up courage to write down my name before all
these people!"

"Lend me your pencil, my child," Molina said to her.

She held it out towards him timidly.

"Where the baron has led the way, Molina the Tumbler may certainly
follow!" said the financier.

He turned the screw of the pencil-case to extend the lead, and placing
one of his huge feet upon a divan to steady himself, wrote rapidly with
the paper on his knee, as a man used to scribbling notes at the Bourse:

"Solomon Molina, 500 francs."

"Ah! monsieur," exclaimed Marie Launay upon reading it, "that is
handsome, that is! It is kind, very kind! If everybody were as generous
as you, we could give a statue of Terpsichore in gold to Mademoiselle
Legrand."

"If you should ever want one of Carpeaux's groups for yourself, my
child," said Molina, "you may go to the studio in a cab to look at it,
and fetch it away with you in--your own coupe."

The girl grew as red as a cherry under her powder, even her graceful,
childish shoulders turned pink, enhancing her blonde and childlike
beauty.

Vaudrey was conscious of a strange and subtle charm in this intoxicating
circle,--a charm full of temptations which made him secretly uneasy.
There passed before his eyes visions of other days, he beheld the
phantoms of gay dresses, the apparitions of spring landscapes, he felt
the breezes of youth, laden with the scents of the upspringing grass,
the lilacs at Meudon, the violets of Ville-d'Avray, the souvenirs of the
escapades of his student days. Their short, full skirts reminded him of
white frocks that whisked gayly around the hazel-trees long ago, those
ballet-girls bore a striking resemblance to the pink and white grisettes
that he had flirted with when he was twenty.

He extended his hand in turn towards the sheet of paper to which Molina
had just signed his name, saying to Marie Launay as he did so:

"Let me have it, if you please, mademoiselle."

Granet began to laugh.

"Ah! ah!" he cried, "you are really going to write down under Monsieur
Gigonnet's signature the name of the Minister of the Interior?"

"Oh! bless me!" said Vaudrey, laughing, "that is true! You will believe
it or not as you please, but I quite forgot that I was a minister."

"It was the same with me when I was decorated," said Molina. "I would
not receive my great-coat from box-openers because I saw the morsel of
red ribbon hanging on it, and I was sure the garment was not mine. But
one grows used to it after a while! Now," and his laugh with the
hundred-sou piece ring grew louder than ever, "I am really quite
surprised not to find the rosette of red ribbon sticking to my flannel
waistcoats."

Vaudrey left Marie Launay, greatly to her surprise, and listened to
Molina's chronicles of the ballet.

Ah! if his Excellency had but the time, he would have seen the funniest
things. For instance, there was amongst the dancers a marble cutter, who
during the day sold and cut his gravestones and came here at night to
grin and caper in the ballet. He was on the scent of every funeral from
the Opera; he would get orders for tombstones between two dances at the
rehearsals. One day Molina had been present at one of these. It seems
incredible, but there was a bank clerk in a gray coat, a three-cornered
hat upon his head and a brass buckler on his arm, who sacrificed to
Venus in the interval between his two occupations, dancing with the
coryphees; a dancer by night and a receiver of money by day. A girl was
rehearsing beside him, in black bands and skirt. Then Molina,
astonished, inquired who she might be. He was told that it was a girl in
mourning, whose mother had just died. The Opera is a fine stage upon
which to behold the ironies and contrasts of life.

The financier might have related to Sulpice Vaudrey a description of a
journey to Timbuctoo and have found him less amused and less interested
than now. It was a world new and strange to him, attractive, and as
exciting as acid to this man, still young, whose success had been
achieved by unstinted labors, and who knew Paris only by what he had
learned of it years ago, when a law student: the pit of the Comedie
Francaise, the Luxembourg galleries and those of the Louvre, the Public
Libraries, the Hall of Archives, the balls in the Latin Quarter, the
holidays and the foyer of the Opera once or twice on the occasion of a
masked ball. And, besides that?--Nothing. That was all.

The great man from Grenoble arrived in Paris with his appetite whetted
for the life of the city, and now he was here, suddenly plunged into the
greenroom of the ballet, and all eyes were turned towards him, almost
frightened as he was, on catching a glimpse of his own image reflected
in the huge mirror glittering under the numerous lights, in the heart of
this strange salon and surrounded by half-clad dancing girls. Then, too,
everybody was looking at him, quizzing him, shrinking from him through
timidity or running after him through interest. The new Minister of
State! The chief of all the personnel of prefects, under-prefects, and
secretaries-general represented there, lolling on these velvet divans in
this vulgar greenroom.

All the glances, all the whisperings of the women, the frowns of his
enemies, the cringing attitudes of dandified hangers-on, were making
Vaudrey feel very uncomfortable, when to his great relief he suddenly
observed coming towards him, peering hither and thither through his
monocle, evidently in search of some one, Guy de Lissac, who immediately
on catching sight of Vaudrey came towards him, greeting him with evident
cordiality, tinged, however, with a proper reserve.

Sulpice was not long in breaking through this reserve. He hurried up to
Guy, and seizing him by the hand, cried gayly:

"Do you know that I have been expecting this visit! You are the only
one of my friends who has not yet congratulated me!"

"You know, my dear Minister," returned Guy in the same tone, "that it is
really not such a great piece of luck to be made Minister that every one
of your friends should be expected to fall upon your neck, crying bravo!
You have mounted up to the capitol, but after all, the capitol is not
such a very cheerful place, that I should illuminate _a giorno_. I am
happy, however, if you are. I congratulate you, if you wash your hands
of it, and that is all."

"You and my old friend Ramel," answered Sulpice, "are the two most
original men that I know."

"With this difference however, Ramel is a Puritan, an ancient, a man of
marble, and I am a _boulevardier_ and a skeptic. He is a man of
bronze--your Ramel! And your friend Lissac of _simili-bronze_! The proof
of it is that I have been seeking you for half the evening to ask you to
do me a favor."

"What favor, my dear fellow?" cried Vaudrey, his face lighting up with
joy. "Anything in the world to please you."

"I was in Madame Marsy's box,--you do not know Madame Marsy? She is a
great admirer of yours and makes a point to applaud you in the Chamber.
She has prayed for your advent. She saw you in the manager's box a while
ago, and she has asked me to present you to her, or rather, to present
her to you, for I presume for your Excellency the ceremony is
modified."

"Madame Marsy!" said Vaudrey. "Is she not an artist's widow? Her salon
is a political centre, is it not?"

"Exactly. A recent salon opened in opposition to that of Madame Evan. An
Athenian Republic! You do not object to that?"

"On the contrary! A republic cannot be founded without the aid of
women."

"Ah!" cried Lissac, laughing. "Politics and honors have not changed you,
I see."

"Changed me? With the exception that I have twenty years over my head,
and alas! not so much hair as I had then upon it, I am the same as I was
in 1860."

"_Hotel Racine! Rue Racine!_" said Lissac. "In those days, I dreamed of
being Musset, I a gourmand, and what have I become? A spectator, a
trifler, a Parisian, a rolling stone.--Nothing. And you who dreamed of
being a second Barnave, Vergniaud or Barbaroux, your dream is realized."

"Realized!" said Vaudrey.

He made an effort to shake his head deprecatingly as if his vanity were
not flattered by those honeyed words of his friend; but his glance
displayed such sincere delight and so strong a desire to be effusive and
in evidence, that he could not repress a smile upon hearing from the
companion of his youth, such a confirmation of his triumph. They are
our most severe critics, these friends of our youth, they who have
listened to the stammering of our hopes and dreams of the future. And
when at length we have conquered the future, these are often the very
ones to rob us of it! Lissac, however, was not one of these envious
ones.

"Let us go to Madame Marsy's box, my dear Guy," said Sulpice. "The more
so because if she at all resembles her portrait at the last Salon, she
must be lovely indeed."

He left the greenroom, leaning on the arm of Lissac, after throwing a
glance backward, however, at the girls whirling about there, and where
in the presence of their stiff, ancient superiors, the young
sub-prefects still hid their faces behind their opera hats. Granet with
Molina went to take leave of Vaudrey, leaving little Marie Launay
smiling artlessly because the financier, the _Tumbler_, had said to her,
in drawing down her eyelids with his coarse finger: "Will you close your
periwinkles--you _kid_?"

"Your Excellency," the banker had said, cajoling his Excellency with his
meaning glance, "I am always at your orders you know."

"To-morrow, at the Prisons' Commission, Monsieur le Ministre," said
Granet. And amid salutations on every side Vaudrey withdrew, smiling and
good-humored as usual.

In order to reach the box, Vaudrey had to cross the stage. The new scene
was set. Buddhist temples with their grotesque shapes and huge statues
stood out against a background of vivid blue sky, and on the canvas
beyond, great pink flowers glowed amid refreshing verdure. Over all fell
a soft fairy-like light from an electric lamp, casting on the floor a
fantastic gleam, soft and clear as the rays of the moon. Sulpice smiled
as he passed beneath this flood of light and saw his shadow projected
before him as upon the glassy waters of a lake. It seemed to him that
this sudden illumination, a sort of fantastic apotheosis as it were, was
like the fairy-like aureole that attended his progress.

At the very moment of leaving the greenroom, Sulpice had jostled
accidentally against a man of very grave aspect wearing a black coat
closely buttoned. He was almost bald save for some long, thin, gray
locks that hung about his huge ears, his cheeks had a hectic color and
his skull was yellow. He entered this salon in a hesitating, inquisitive
way, with wide-open eyes and a gourmand's movement of the nostrils, and
gazed about the room, warm with lights and heavy with perfume.

Sulpice glanced at him carelessly and recognized him as the man whom he
himself had superseded on Place Beauvau--a Puritan, a Huguenot, a
widower, the father of five or six daughters, and as solemn and proper
in his ordinary demeanor as a Sunday-school tract. Sulpice could not
refrain from crying out merrily: "Bless me! Monsieur Pichereau!"

The other shook his butter-colored skull as if he had suddenly received
a stinging blow on it with a switch, and his red face became
crimson-hued at the sight of Sulpice, his successor in office, standing
before him, politely holding out to him his two gloved hands.

Guy de Lissac was no longer laughing.

Their two Excellencies found themselves face to face at the foot of the
greenroom staircase, in the midst of a crowd of brahmins, dancers,
negresses, and female supernumeraries; two Excellencies meeting there;
one smiling, the other grimacing beneath the glance of this curious,
shrewd little world.

"Ah! I have caught you, my dear colleague," cried Sulpice, very much
amused at Pichereau's embarrassed air, his coat buttoned close like a
Quaker's and his little eyes blinking behind his spectacles, and looking
as sheepish as a sacristan caught napping.

"Me?" stammered Pichereau. "Me? But my dear Minister, it's you--yes, you
whom I came expressly to seek!"

"Here?" said Vaudrey.

"Yes, here!"

"Really?"

"I had something to say to you--I--yes, I wanted--"

The unlucky Pichereau mechanically pulled and jerked at his waistcoat,
then assuming a dignified, grave air, he whistled and hesitated, and
finally stammered:

"I wished to speak with you--yes--to consult with you upon a matter of
grave importance--concerning Protestant communities."

Sulpice could not restrain his laughter.

Pichereau, with his look of a Calvinistic preacher, was throwing from
behind his spectacles glowing looks in the direction where Marie Launay
stood listening to and laughing at the badinage of Molina. Some
newspaper reporters, scenting a handy paragraph, came sauntering up to
overhear some fragment of the conversation between the minister of
yesterday and him of to-day.

Guy de Lissac stood carelessly by, secretly very much amused at
Pichereau, who did not move, but rubbing his hands nervously together
was trying to appear at ease, yet by his sour smile at his successor
allowing it to be plainly seen how gladly he would have strangled
Vaudrey.

"My dear colleague," said Sulpice, gayly, "we will talk elsewhere about
your communities. This is hardly the place. _Non est hic locus!_
Good-bye!"

"Good-bye, your Excellency," replied Pichereau with forced politeness.

Vaudrey drew Lissac away, saying with a suppressed laugh:

"Oh! oh! the Quaker! He has laid down his portfolio, but he has kept the
key to the greenroom, it seems."

"It would appear," replied Guy, "that the door leading into the
greenroom may open to scenes of consolation for fallen greatness. The
blue eyes of Marie Launay always serve as a sparadrap to a fallen
minister!"

"Was the fat Molina right? To lose the votes of the majority is perhaps
the malady of the knee of ministers," said Vaudrey merrily.

He laughed again, very much amused at the irritable, peevish yet
cringing attitude of Pichereau, the Genevan doctrinaire, who sought
consolation in the greenroom of the ballet, whilst his five or six
daughters sat at home, probably reading some chaste English romance, or
practising sacred music within the range of the green spectacles of
their governess.

"But!" said he gayly, "to fall from power is nothing, provided one falls
into the arms of ballet-girls."


       *       *       *       *       *

_Molina burst out laughing ... when he ran his eye over the list and
found accompanying the names of ballet-dancers and members of the
chorus, the distinguished particles of some habitues._

[Illustration: IN THE GREENROOM OF THE OPERA]




II


Madame Marsy was awaiting Guy de Lissac's return from the greenroom.
From the moment she caught sight of Vaudrey standing within the range of
her opera-glasses, she was seized with the eager desire to make him an
habitue of her salon, the new salon that had just been launched. Madame
Marsy was bitten by that tarantula whose bite makes modern society move
as if afflicted with Saint Vitus's dance. A widow, rich and still
young, very much admired, she had set herself to play the role of a
leader in society to pass away the time. She was one of those women
forever passing before the reporters' note-book, as others pass in front
of a photographic apparatus. Of her inner life, however, very little was
known to the public. But the exact shade of her hair, the color of her
eyes, the cut of her gowns, the address of her tradesmen, the _menu_ of
her dinners, the programme of her concerts, the names of her guests, the
visitors to her salon, the address of her mansion, were all familiar to
every one, and Madame Marsy was daily reported by the chroniclers to the
letter, painted, dressed and undressed.

There was some romantic gossip whispered about her. It was said that she
had formerly led Philippe Marsy, the artist, a _hard life_. This artist
was the painter of _Charity_, the picture so much admired at the
Luxembourg, where it hangs between a Nymph by Henner and a Portrait of a
Lady by Carolus Duran. She was pretty, free, and sufficiently rich since
the sale of the contents of Philippe Marsy's studio. His slightest
sketches had fetched enormous sums under Monsieur Pillet's hammer at the
Hotel Drouot, and Sabine after an appropriate interval of mourning,
opened her salon.

Solitary, though surrounded by friends, she created no jealousy among
her admirers, whose homage she received with perfect equanimity, as if
become weary and desirous of a court but not of a favorite. She had a
son at college who was growing up; he, however, was rarely to be met
with in his mother's little hotel in the Boulevard Malesherbes. This
pale, slender youth in his student's uniform would sometimes steal
furtively up the staircase to pay his mother a visit as a stranger might
have done, never staying long, however, but hurrying off again to rejoin
an old woman who waited at the corner of the street and who would take
him by the arm and walk away with him--Madame Marsy, his grandmother.

It was the grandmother who was bringing up the boy. She and a
kind-hearted fellow, Francois Charriere, a sculptor, who as he said
himself, was nothing of a genius, but who, however, designed models and
advantageously sold them to the manufacturers of lamps in the Rue
Saint-Louis au Marais. It was Charriere who, in fulfilment of a vow made
to his friend Marsy, acted as guardian to the boy.

Nobody in Paris now remembered anything about Philippe Marsy. In the
course of time, all the little rumors are hushed in the roar and rattle
of Parisian life. Only some semi-flattering rumors were connected with
Sabine's name, together with some mysterious reminiscences. Moreover,
she had the special attraction of a hostess who imparts to her salon the
peculiar charm and flavor of unceremonious hospitality. One was only
obliged to wear a white cravat about his throat, he did not have to
starch his wits.

Only very recently had Sabine Marsy's salon acquired the reputation of
being an easy-going one, where one was sure of a welcome, a sort of
rendezvous where every one could be found as in the corridor of a
theatre on the night of a first appearance, or on the sidewalk of a
boulevard; a salon well-filled, that could rank with the semi-official
and very distinguished one presided over by Madame Evan, and those
others quieter, more sober--if a little Calvinistic--of the select
Alsatian colony.

Sabine Marsy must have had a great deal of tact, force of character and
perseverance in carrying out her plans, to have reached this point, more
difficult to her, moreover, than it would have been to any other, as she
had no political backing whatever. Her connection with society was
entirely through the world of artists. Many of these, however, had
brought to her salon some of the Athenians of the political world,
connoisseurs, good conversationalists, handsome men, who freely declared
with Vaudrey, that a republic could not exist without the assistance of
women, that to women Orleanism was due, and those charming fellows had
made Madame Marsy's hospitable salon the fashion.

Besides it is easy enough in Paris to have a salon if one knows how to
give dinners. Some squares of Bristol board engraved by Stern and posted
to good addresses, will attract with an almost disconcerting facility, a
crowd of visitors who will swarm around a festive board like bees around
a honeycomb.

Paris is a town of guests.

Then too, Madame Marsy was herself so captivating. She was always on the
watch for some new celebrity, as a game-keeper watches for a hare that
he means to shoot presently. One of her daily tasks was to read the
_Journal Officiel_ in order to discover in the orator of to-day the
Minister of State of to-morrow. She was always well informed beforehand
which artist or sculptor would be likely to win the medal of honor at
the Salon, and was the first to invite such a one and to let him know
that it was she who had discovered him. In literature, she encouraged
the new school, liking it for the attention it attracted. It was also
her aim to give to her salon a literary as well as a political color.
Artists and statesmen elbowed one another there.

For some days now, she had thought of giving a reception which was to be
a surprise to her friends. She had heard of Japanese exhibitions being
given at other houses. She herself was determined to give a _soiree
exotique_. It happened just then that a friend of Guy de Lissac,
Monsieur Jose de Rosas, a great lounger, had returned from a journey
around the world. What a piece of good fortune! She too had known De
Rosas formerly, and if she could only get him to consent, she could
announce a most attractive soiree: the travels of such a man as Monsieur
de Rosas: a rare treat!

"The Comtesse d'Horville gives literary matinees," said Sabine, quite on
fire with the idea; "Madame Evan has poems and tragedies read at her
receptions, I shall have lecturers and savants, since that is
fashionable."

And what a woman wishes, a grandee of Spain willed, it appeared.
Monsieur de Rosas decided, egged on a little by Guy de Lissac, to come
and relate to Madame Marsy's friends his adventures in strange lands.
The invitations to the soiree were already out.

Madame Marsy had also obtained a promise from three Ministers of State
that they would be present. She had spread the news far and wide. A
little more and she would have had their names printed on the programmes
for the evening. She had had a success quite unlooked for--a promise
from Monsieur Pichereau to be present--from Pichereau, that starched
Puritan, and all the newspapers had announced his intention. When
suddenly--stupidly--a cabinet crisis had arisen at the most unexpected
moment, a useless crisis. Granet had interpellated Pichereau with a view
to succeed him, and Pichereau fell without Granet succeeding him. A
Ministry had been hastily formed, with Collard at its head, and Sulpice
Vaudrey as Minister of the Interior in place of Pichereau! And all those
Ministers of State who had promised to be present to hear Monsieur de
Rosas at Madame Marsy's, fell from power with Pichereau.

"Such a Cabinet!" Sabine had exclaimed in a rage. "A Cabinet of
pasteboard capuchins."

"A Ministry of pasteboard, certainly," Guy had answered.

Madame Marsy was quite beside herself. Granet indeed! Why could he not
have waited a day or two longer before upsetting the whole
administration. It would have been quite as easy to have overthrown
Pichereau a day after her soiree as a few days before. Was Granet then,
in a great hurry to be made minister? Oh! her opinion of him had always
been a correct one! An ambitious schemer. He had triumphed, or at least
he had expected to triumph. And the consequence was that Sabine found
herself without a Minister to introduce to her guests. It was as if
Granet had purposely designed this.

No, she did not know a single member of the new Cabinet. She had spoken
once to the President of the council, Collard, a former advocate of
Nantes, at a reception at the Elysee. Collard had even, in passing by
her, torn off a morsel of the lace of her flounce. How charmingly, too,
he had excused himself! But this acquaintanceship with him would hardly
justify her in asking him brusquely to honor her with his presence at
this soiree upon which her social success depended.

Her intimate friend, pretty Madame Gerson, who assisted her in doing the
honors of her salon until the time when she herself would have a rival
salon and take Sabine's guests away from her, sought in vain to comfort
her by assuring her that Pichereau would be sure to come. He had
promised to do so. He was a sincere man, and his word could be relied
on. He would, moreover, bring his former colleagues from the
Departments of Public Instruction, and Post and Telegraph. He had
promised. Oh! yes, Pichereau! Pichereau, however, mattered very little
to Sabine now! _Ex_-ministers, indeed! she could always have enough of
them. It was not that kind that she wanted. She did not care about her
salon being called the _Invalides_ as that of a rival was called the
_Salon des Refusees_. No, certainly not, that was something she would
never consent to.

Granet's impatience had upset all her plans.

So Madame Marsy, side by side in her box with Madame Gerson, whose dark,
brilliant beauty set off her own fair beauty, had listened with a bored
and sulky manner to the first act of _L'Africaine_, while Monsieur
Gerson conversed timidly, half under his breath, with Guy de Lissac, who
made the fourth occupant of the box.

At the end of the second act, however, Lissac suddenly caught sight of
Vaudrey's smiling countenance beside Granet's waxed moustaches in the
manager's box.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "there is Vaudrey!"

Madame Marsy, however, had already caught sight of him. She turned her
opera-glass upon the new Cabinet Minister, whose carefully arranged
blonde beard was parted in the middle and spread out in two light tufts
over his white necktie, his silky moustaches turned jauntily upwards
against his fleshy cheeks. Sabine, continuing to look at the newcomer
through her glass, saw as he moved within the shadow of the box, this
man of forty, with a very agreeable and still youthful face, and as he
leaned over the edge of the box to look at the audience, she noted that
he had a slight bald spot on the top of his skull between the fair tufts
that adorned the sides of his head.

"Oh!" she exclaimed suddenly, "I thought that he was a dark man."

"No, no," answered Lissac, "on the contrary, he was a fair, handsome
youth when we both studied law here in Paris together."

Madame Marsy, as if she had been touched by an electric spark, turned
quickly round on her chair to look at Guy, displaying to him as she did
so, a lovely face, surmounting the most beautiful shoulders imaginable.

"What! you know the minister so intimately?"

"Very intimately."

"Then, my dear Lissac, you can do me the greatest favor. No, I do not
ask you to do it, I insist on it."

Over the pretty Andalusian features of Madame Gerson, a mocking smile
played.

"I have guessed it," she exclaimed.

"And so have I," said Lissac. "You wish me to present the new Minister
of the Interior to you? You have a friend you want appointed to a
prefecture."

"Not at all. I only want him to take Pichereau's place at my reception.
My dear Lissac, my kind Lissac," she continued in dulcet tones, and
clasping her little gloved hands entreatingly, like a child begging for
a toy, "persuade Monsieur Vaudrey to accept this invitation of mine and
you will be a love, you understand, Lissac, a love!"

But Guy had already risen and with a touch of his thumb snapping out his
crush hat, he opened the door of the box, saying to Sabine as he did so:

"Take notice that I ask nothing in return for this favor!"

Madame Marsy began to laugh.

"Ah!" she cried, "that is discreet, but I am willing to subscribe to any
condition!"

"Selika is cold beside you," said Lissac as he disappeared through the
open doorway, "I will bring you your minister in ten minutes."

Sabine waited nervously. The curtain had just fallen on the third act.
The manager's box was empty. Guy would doubtless be obliged to rejoin
Vaudrey, and neither the minister nor his friend would be seen again.
Just then some one knocked at the door of the box. Monsieur Gerson,
overcome by fatigue, and weary as only a man can be who is dragged
against his will night after night to some place of amusement, was
dozing in the rear of the box. At a word from his wife he got up and
hastened to open the door. It proved to be an artist, an old friend of
Philippe Marsy, who came to invite Sabine to his studio to "admire" _his
Envoy_ that he had just finished for the Salon. Sabine received him
graciously, and promised him somewhat stiffly that she would do so. She
tapped impatiently with her fan upon her fingers as the orchestra began
to play the prelude to the fourth act. It was quite certain that Lissac
had failed in his mission.

Suddenly, in the luminous space made by the open door, Guy's elegant
figure appeared for a moment, disappearing immediately to allow a man to
pass who entered, smiling pleasantly, and at whom a group of people,
standing in the lobby behind, were gazing. He bowed as Lissac said to
Sabine:

"Allow me, madame, to present to you His Excellency the Minister of the
Interior."

Sabine, suddenly beaming with joy, saw no one but Sulpice Vaudrey
amongst the group of men in dress-clothes who gave way to allow the
dignitary to pass. She had eyes only for him!

She arose, pushing back her chair instinctively, as the Minister
entered, Monsieur and Madame Gerson standing at one side and Sabine on
the other and bowing to him,--Sabine triumphant, Madame Gerson curious,
Monsieur Gerson flattered though sleepy.

Sulpice seated himself at Madame Marsy's side, with the amiable
condescension of a great man charmed to play the agreeable, and to
visit, at the solicitation of a friend, a fair woman whom all the world
delighted to honor. It seemed to him to put the finishing touch to that
success and power which had been his only a few days.

He went quite artlessly and by instinct wherever he might have the
chance to inhale admiring incense. It seemed to him as if he were
swimming in refreshing waters. Everything delighted him. He wished to be
obliging to every one. It seemed to him but natural that a woman of
fashion like Sabine should wish to meet him and offer him her
congratulations, as he himself, without knowing her, should desire to
listen to her felicitations. To speak in complimentary terms was as
natural to him as to listen to the compliments of others.

He delighted in the atmosphere of adulation which surrounded him, these
two pretty women who smiled upon him with a gratitude so impressive,
pleased him. Sabine appeared especially charming to him when, speaking
with the captivating grace of a Parisian, she said:

"I hardly know how to thank my friend Monsieur de Lissac for inducing
you to listen to the entreaties of one who solicits--"

"Solicits, madame?" said the minister with an eagerness which seemed
already to answer her prayer affirmatively.

"I hope your Excellency will consent to honor with your presence a
reunion of friends at my house--a reunion somewhat trivial, for this
occasion, but clever enough."

"A reunion?" replied Vaudrey, still smiling.

"Monsieur de Lissac has not told you then, what my hopes are?"

"We are too old friends, Lissac and I, for him not to allow me the
pleasure of hearing from your own lips, madame, in what way I may be of
service to you, or to any of your friends."

Sabine smiled at this well-turned phrase uttered in the most gallant
tone.

Who then, could have told her that Vaudrey was a provincial? An intimate
enemy or an intimate friend. But he was not at all provincial. On the
contrary, Vaudrey was quite charming.

"Monsieur de Rosas has had the kindness, your Excellency, to promise to
come to my house next Saturday and give a chatty account of his travels.
He will be, I am quite sure, most proud to know that in his audience--"

Sulpice neatly and half modestly turned aside the compliment that was
approaching.

He knew Monsieur de Rosas. He had read and greatly admired some
translations of the Persian poets by that lettered nobleman, which had
been printed for circulation only amongst the author's most intimate
friends. Vaudrey had first met Monsieur de Rosas at a meeting of a
scientific society. Rosas was an eminent man as well as a poet, and one
whom he would be greatly pleased to meet again. A hero of romance as
erudite as a Benedictine. Charming, too, and clever! Something like a
Cid who has become a boulevard lounger on returning from Central Asia.

This portrait of Rosas was a clever one indeed, and Sabine nodded
acquiescence again and again as each point was hit off by Vaudrey. He,
in his turn, basked comfortably in the light of her smiles, and listened
with pleasure to the sound of his own voice. He could catch glimpses
through the box curtains from between these two charming profiles--one a
brunette, the other a blonde--of the vast auditorium all crimson and
gold, blazing with lights and crowded with faces. From this well-dressed
crowd, from these boxes where one caught sight of white gleaming
shoulders, half-gloved arms, flower-decked heads, sparkling necklaces,
flashing glances, it seemed to Vaudrey as if a strange, subtle perfume
arose--the perfume of women, an intoxicating odor, in the midst of this
radiancy that rivaled the brilliant sun at its rising.

Upon the stage, amid the dazzling splendor of the ballet, in the milky
ray of the electric light, the swelling skirts whirled, the pink
slippers that he had seen but a moment before near by, and the gleaming,
silver helmets, the tinfoil and the spangles shone in the dance. A fairy
light enveloped all these stage splendors; and this luxurious ensemble,
as seen from the depths of the box, seemed to him to be the glory of an
unending apotheosis, a sort of fete given to celebrate his entrance on
his public career.

Then, in the unconcealed effusion of his delight, without any effort at
effect, speaking frankly to this woman, to Guy, and to Gerson, as if he
were communing with himself to the mocking accompaniment of this Hindoo
music, he revealed his joys, his prospects, and his dreams. He replied
to Sabine's congratulations by avowing his intention to devote himself
entirely to his country.

"In short, your Excellency," she said, "you are really going to do great
things?"

He gazed dreamily around the theatre, smiling as if he beheld some lucky
vision, and answered:

"Really, madame, I accepted office only because I felt it was my duty
and as a means of doing good. I intend to be just--to be honest. I
should like to discover some unappreciated genius and raise him from the
obscurity in which an unjust fate has shrouded him, to the height where
he belongs. If we are to do no better than those we have succeeded, it
was useless to turn them out!"

"Ah! _pardieu_," said Lissac, while Madame Marsy smiled and nodded
approval of Vaudrey's words, "you and your colleagues are just now in
the honeymoon of your power."

"We will endeavor to make this honeymoon of as long duration as
possible," laughingly replied Sulpice. "I believe in the case of power,
as in marriage, that the coming of the April moon is the fault of the
parties connected with it."

"It takes a shrewd person indeed to know why April moons rise at all!"
said Guy. Vaudrey's thoughts turned involuntarily toward Adrienne, his
own pretty wife, who was waiting for him in the great lonely apartments
at the Ministry which they had just taken possession of as they might
occupy rooms at a hotel.

He felt a sudden desire to return to her, to tell her of the incidents
of this evening. Yes, to tell her everything, even to his visit behind
the scenes--but he remained where he was, not knowing how to take leave
of Madame Marsy just yet, and she, in her turn, divined from the
slackened conversation that he was anxious to be off.

"I was waiting for that strain," said Madame Marsy to Guy, "now that it
is over, I will go."

Vaudrey did not reply, awaiting Sabine's departure, so as to conduct her
to her carriage.

People hurried out into the lobbies to see him pass by. Upon the
staircases, attendants and strangers saluted him. It seemed to Vaudrey
that he moved among those who were in sympathy with him. Lissac followed
him with Madame Gerson on his arm; her jaded husband sighed for a few
hours' sleep.

In the sharp, frosty air of a night in January, Sulpice, enveloped in
otter fur, stood with Madame Marsy on his arm, waiting for the
appearance of that lady's carriage, which was emerging from the luminous
depths of the Place, accompanied by another carriage without a monogram
or crest; it was that of the minister.

Sulpice gazed before him down the Avenue de l'Opera, brilliant with
light, and the bluish tints of the Jablockoff electric apparatus flooded
him with its bright rays; it seemed to him as if all this brilliancy
blazed for him, like the flattering apotheosis which had just before
fallen upon him as he crossed the stage of the Opera. It seemed like an
aureole lighted up especially to encircle him!

Sabine asked Vaudrey as he escorted her to her carriage:

"Madame Vaudrey will, I trust, do me the honor to accompany your
Excellency to my house? I will take the liberty to-morrow of calling on
her to invite her."

The Minister bowed a gracious acquiescence.

Sabine finally thanked him by a gracious smile: her small gloved hand
raised the window of the coupe, and the carriage was driven off rapidly,
amid the din of horses' hoofs.

"Good-bye," said Lissac to Vaudrey.

"Cannot I offer you a seat in my carriage?"

"Thank you, but I am not two steps away from the Rue d'Aumale."

Vaudrey turned towards Madame Gerson; she and her husband bowed low.

"May I not set you down at your house, madame?"

"Your Excellency is very kind, but we have our own carriage!"

"Au revoir," said Vaudrey to Lissac, "come and breakfast with me
to-morrow."

"With pleasure!"

"To the ministry!" said Vaudrey to the coachman as he stepped into his
carriage.

He sank back upon the cushions with a feeling of delight as if glad to
be alone. All the scenes of that evening floated again before his eyes.
He felt once more in his nostrils the subtle, penetrating perfume of the
greenroom, he saw again the blue eyes of the little danseuse. The
admiring looks, the respectful salutes, the smiles of the women, the
soft, caressing tones of Sabine, and Madame Gerson's pearly teeth, he
saw or heard all these again, and above all, this word clear as a
clarion, triumphant as a trumpet's blast: _Success!_ All this came back
again to him.

"You have succeeded!"

He heard Guy's voice again speaking this to him in joyous tones.
Succeeded! It was certainly true.

Minister! Was it possible! He had at his beck and call a whole host of
functionaries and servitors! He it was who had the power to make the
whole machine of government move--he, the lawyer from Grenoble--who ten
years ago would have thought it a great honor to have been appointed to
a place in the department of Isere!

All those people whom he could see in the shadow of the lighted
boulevards buying the newspapers at the kiosks, would read therein his
name and least gesture and action.

_"Monsieur le Ministre has taken up his residence on the Place Beauvau.
Monsieur Vaudrey this morning received the heads of the Bureaus and the
personnel of the Department of the Ministry of the Interior. Monsieur
Vaudrey, with the assistance of Monsieur Henri Jacquier of Oise,
undersecretary of State, is actively engaged in examining the reports of
prefects and under-prefects. Monsieur will doubtless make some needed
reforms in the administration of the prefectures."_ Everywhere, in all
the newspapers, Monsieur Vaudrey! The Minister of the Interior! He, his
name, his words, his projects, his deeds!

Success! Yes, it was his, it had come!

Never in his wildest visions had he dreamed of the success that he had
attained. Never had he expected to catch sight of such bright rays as
those which now shone down upon him from that star, which with the
superstition of an ambitious man, he had singled out. Success! Success!

And now all the world should see what he would do. Already in his own
little town, in his speeches, during the war, at the elections of 1871,
and especially at Versailles, during the years of struggle and political
intrigue, in the tribune, or as a commissioner or sub-commissioner, he
had given proofs of his qualifications as a statesman, but the
touchstone of man is power. Emerging from his semi-obscurity into the
sunshine of success, he would at last show the world what he was and
what he could do. Power! To command! To create! To impress his ideas
upon a whole nation! To have succeeded! succeeded! succeeded! Sulpice's
dreams were realized at last.

And whilst the ministerial carriage was driving at a gallop towards the
Place Beauvau, Sabine, muffled up in her furs, her fine skin caressed by
the blue-fox border of her pelisse, said to herself, quite indifferent
to the man himself, but delighted to have a minister's name to enroll
upon her list of guests:

"He is a simpleton--Vaudrey--but a very charming simpleton,
nevertheless."

The iron gates of the Place Beauvau were thrown back for his
Excellency's carriage to enter. The gravel creaked under the wheels, as
the coupe turning off to the left, stopped under the awning over the
door.

Sulpice alighted. The great door opened to admit him. Two
white-cravatted servants occupied a bench while awaiting the minister's
return.

Sulpice ran lightly up the great marble staircase leading to his private
apartments. Handing his hat and coat to a servant in the antechamber, he
gayly entered the little salon, where he found his wife sitting by a
table reading _La Revue_ by the light of a shaded lamp. At the sight of
her pretty, fresh young face extended to greet him, with her blue eyes
and smiling air, at the sound of her clear, sweet, but rather timid
voice asking a little anxiously: "Well?" Sulpice took the fair face in
both his hands and his burning lips imprinted a long kiss on the white
forehead, over which a few curls of golden hair strayed.

"Well, my dear Adrienne, I have been greatly interested. All the
kindness with which I was received, the evident delight with which the
new cabinet has been welcomed by the people, even the grimaces of
Pichereau whom I met,--if you only knew where--all gave me pleasure,
delighted me, and yet made me fear. Minister! Do you know what I have
been thinking of since I was made a minister?"

"Of what have you been thinking?" asked the young wife, who, with her
hands folded, gazed trustingly and sweetly into Sulpice's feverish eyes.

"I?--I have been telling myself that it is not enough to be a minister.
One must be a great minister! You understand, Adrienne, a great
minister!"

As he spoke he took Adrienne's hands in his, and the young wife glanced
up admiringly at this young man burning with hope, who stood there
before her, declaring: "I will be great!"

She had never dreamed of his reaching such heights as these on that day
when she felt the fingers of her fiance trembling in her hand, the day
that Sulpice had whispered the words in her ear which made her heart
leap with joy: "I love you, Adrienne, I shall always love you--Always!"




III


Sulpice Vaudrey had married Adrienne for love. She brought to him from
the convent at Grenoble where she had been educated, the charming
innocence of a young girl and the innate devotion of a woman. She was an
orphan with a considerable fortune, but although Sulpice had only
moderate resources, he had scarcely thought of her wealth, not even
inquiring of her guardian, Doctor Reboux, on the occasion of his formal
demand for her hand, about the dowry of Mademoiselle Gerard.

He had met her at more than one soiree at Grenoble, where she appeared
timid, dazzled and retiring, and quietly interrogating everything by her
sweet glance. Some few words exchanged carelessly, music which they had
listened to side by side, the ordinary everyday intercourse in society,
had made Sulpice acquainted with his wife; but the sight of the pretty
blonde--so sweet and gentle--the childlike timidity of this young girl,
something rather pensive in the confiding smile of this blooming
creature of eighteen summers, had won him completely. He was free, and
alone, for he had lost, but a short time before, the only creature he
loved in the world, his mother, of whom he was the son in the double
sense of flesh and spirit, by the nourishment of her breast and by the
patient teaching that she had implanted in his mind.

He remembered only his father's dreamy and refined face in the portrait
of a young, sad-looking man in a lawyer's black gown, before which he
had stood when quite small, and spelled out as he might have lisped a
prayer, the four letters: _papa_. Alone in this little town of Grenoble,
for which he had left his native village of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, he
had, just before meeting Adrienne, fallen a victim to a profound
melancholy and realized the necessity of deciding upon his career.

He was then thirty-four. Except the years spent in the study of law at
Paris amid the turmoil of the left bank of the Seine, he had always
lived in the province--his own province of Dauphine. He had grown up in
the old house at Saint-Laurent, where every nook and corner kept for him
its own sweet memory of his childhood and youth. The great white
drawing-room with its wainscotings of the time of Louis XVI., which
opened out upon a flight of steps leading down into a terraced garden;
the portraits of obscure ancestors: lawyers in powdered wigs and wearing
the robes of the members of the Third estate, fat and rosy with double
chins resting upon their broad cravats, amiable old ladies with oddly
arranged hair and flowered gowns, coquettish still as they smiled in
their oval, wooden frames, and then the old books in their old-fashioned
bindings slumbering in a great bookcase with glass doors, or piled up on
shelves below the fowling-pieces, the game-bags and the powder-horns.

With this dwelling of which he thought so often now, his whole past was
linked, about it still clung something of its past poetry, and it was
sacred through the memories it preserved, and as the scene of the
unforgotten joys of childhood. He could see again, the great
stone-flagged kitchen, where they sat up at nights telling stories, the
chamber above it, the bed with its heavy serge curtains, where he
lay--sometimes shaking with terror--all alone, adjoining the room once
occupied by his father, and the moonlight shining through the tall old
trees in the courtyard outside, that entering by the half-open blinds
cast shadows like trembling lace on the wall opposite to him. It seemed
to Sulpice then that he could hear the sounds of the weird demon's chase
as told by old Catherine, the cook, in bated tones during their vigils.

It was there that he went every year to pass his holidays with his
mother, who had had the courage to send him away,--just as during winter
she had plunged him into cold water--to the Lyceum at Grenoble, whence
he would return to Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, "so thin, poor child!" as his
mother said.

And how fat she would send him back again to school,--to make the
masters ashamed of their stinginess.

How pleasant were the reminiscences of those sunny days amongst the
mountains, the excursions to Grande Chartreuse, where the murmuring
brook trickled among the rocks, the halts at Guiers-Mort or under the
trees in the stillness of a drowsy day in summer; how delightful to
stretch one's self out at the foot of the cliffs or on a grassy slope
with a book, pausing now and then to indulge in day-dreams or glance up
at the fleecy clouds floating in the blue sky above his head and watch
them gathering, then vanishing and melting away like smoke wreaths! Ah!
how sweet were those long, idle days full of dreams, when the noise of
the waterfall dashing over the rocks lulled the senses like some merry
song, or a nurse's tender, crooning lullaby.

In those days Sulpice made no plans for his future, where he would go,
what he would do, or what would become of him; but he felt within
himself unbounded hope, a hope as limitless and bright as the azure sky
above him, the inspiration of devotion, love and poetry. He asked
himself whether he should be a missionary or a representative of the
people. It seemed to him that his heart was large enough to contain a
world, and as he grew up he began to ask himself the terrible question:
"Will a woman ever love me?"

To be loved! What a dream! One day he put this question to one of his
comrades at college, Guy de Lissac, the son of a country gentleman in
the neighborhood, who answered:

"Booby! every one is loved some day or other, and there are some who are
loved even too much!"

Sulpice had received a patriarchal and half-puritanical training, but
softened materially by his mother's almost excessive care, it had left,
as it were, a kind of poetic perfume that clung about him and never left
him.

Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of
political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at
Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his
father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing
again his mother's voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy
balusters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its
living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from
the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to
trample with bare feet the great clusters of grapes piled up in the
wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated! Even as a representative
or minister, musing over his past that seemed but yesterday, Sulpice
wandered again in thought to this quiet country spot, so loved by him,
so sweet, so still, reposing in the silence of provincial calm--far
away, removed from all the noise and bustle of Paris.

The farmers of Dauphine generally think of making their sons tillers of
the soil, sending them to school and to college, perhaps to begin later
the study of law or medicine, but welcoming them joyfully back again to
their native fields, to their farms, where the youths soon forget all
they may have learned of the Code or the Codex and lead the healthy,
hardy life of the country. Good, well-built fellows, their chests
enlarged by their daily exercise, their thighs strengthened by
mountain-climbing, gay young men, liking to hunt and drink on the banks
of the Isere and caring more for good harvests than for the songs of the
wind amongst the branches of the poplars upon the river-banks.

Sulpice had an old uncle on his father's side who proposed to his
sister-in-law to give up his broad acres--a fortune in themselves--to
Sulpice, if his nephew would consent to marry his daughter. Sulpice
refused. He would not marry for money.

"Fiddle-faddle!" cried his uncle. "Sickly sentimentality! If he
cultivates that _grain_, my brother's son will not make much headway."

"There is where you are mistaken, brother-in-law. What my poor Raymond
had not time to become, his child will be: a lawyer at once eloquent and
honest."

"Well, well," replied the uncle, "but he shall not have my girl."

Sulpice, after finishing his studies at Paris, returned to his mother at
Grenoble, took her away from the old house at Saint-Laurent and
installed her in the town with himself, where he began the practice of
law and attracted everybody's attention from the first. He made pleading
a sacred office and not a trade. Everyone was astonished that he had not
remained in Paris.

Why? He loved his native province, the banks of the Isere, the healthy,
poetic atmosphere hanging over the desert of the Chartreuse and the
snows of the Grand-Som. A talented man could make his way
anywhere,--moreover, it was his pleasure to consider it a duty not to
leave this secluded corner of the earth where he would cause freedom of
speech to be known. Sulpice, whose heart was open to every ardent and
generous manifestation of human thought, had imbibed from his mother, as
well as from his father's writings and books, and from the
_Encyclopaedia_ that Raymond Vaudrey had interlined with notes and
reflections, not merely traditional information, but also, so to speak,
the baptism of liberty. He had lived in the feverish days of the past
eighty years, through his reading of the _Gazette Nationale_ of those
stormy days. The speeches that he found in those pages--speeches that
still burned like uncooled lava--of Mirabeau, Barnave, and Condorcet, a
son of Grenoble, seemed to impart a glow to his fingers and fire to his
glance. Then, too, the magnificent dreams of freedom proclaimed from the
tribune inflamed his mind and made his heart beat fast. He saw as in a
vision applauding crowds, tricolors gleaming in the clear and golden
sunlight, processions moving, files marching past, and heard eternal
truths proclaimed and acclaimed.

His mother smiled at all this enthusiasm. She did not however try to
repress it. It would vanish at the touch of years, just as the leaves of
the trees fly before the winds of October. And besides, the dear woman
herself was in sympathy with his hopes, his dreams and visions,
remembering that her lost Raymond had loved what his son in his turn so
much adored.

The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a
popular man at Grenoble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how
generous he was, and by the middle-class who regarded him as a prudent
man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of
the National Assembly. He had just passed his thirty-fourth year.

His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by
this brilliant launch on his career.

With what deep emotion, even to-day, Vaudrey recalled that Sunday in
February, a foul, wet day, when he returned home in a closed carriage
with a friend, from an electioneering tour. The day before he had made a
speech in a wineshop to an audience of peasants, who listened,
open-mouthed, but withal suspicious, examining their candidate as they
would have handled a beast offered at the market, and who, step by step,
applauded his remarks, stretching out their rasp-like hands as he left
them, and crying out: "You are our man!"

That very morning he returned to Grenoble in the rain, passing through
villages where the posters bearing his name and those of his friends,
half-demolished by the rain, flapped dismally in the wind. Before the
mayor's office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme
paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare.
But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened
pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the
fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much
indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France,
and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in
the struggle.

Moreover, at night, with what feverish transport he watched the returns
of the election as they reached the Palais de Justice, black with the
crowd, and filled with uproar! With what a fearfully fast-beating heart
he saw the rapidly swelling number of ballots cast for him! Dispatches
came, and pedestrians hurried in from the country, waving their
bulletins above their heads, and Sulpice heard on every lip the same
cry: "Vaudrey leads!"

Some cried bravo, while others clapped their hands. A crowd quickly
gathered about Vaudrey. It already seemed to him that he was lifted up
by a great wave and carried to a new world.

A friend seized him by the arm and drew him into a corner of the hall,
away from the others, and hurriedly said: "You know I am not one to ask
much of you, to ask anything of you, in fact. I merely reckon on a
receivership. That is easily done, eh? A mere nothing?"

Sulpice, whose feelings were overcome by this great popular
consecration, felt a kind of anger stir his heart against this
solicitor, who, in the triumph of a great popular cause, saw only a
means of self-advancement, of securing an appointment. The deputy--for
he was a deputy now, each commune adding its total to the Vaudrey
vote--was moved by a feeling of disgust.

The crowd followed him home that evening, shouting in triumph.

Amid the joy of victory, Sulpice felt the burden of the anxiety caused
by duties to be done: a treaty of peace to be signed, and what a peace!
Must he, alas! append his signature to a document devoted to the
dismemberment of his country? Far into the night he stood in reverie in
his chamber, his brow resting against the cold window-pane.

He retired to rest very late, and arose with the gray dawn of February,
but without having slept.

He looked across the street to a convent garden, with its square and
lozenge-shaped beds regularly arranged, its bare trees and box-wood
borders, that he had often gazed upon. Some nuns in their black robes
passed slowly across this cold and calm horizon that for many years had
also been the range of his vision.

Henceforth this familiar spot, this sad garden, whose cloistral
associations charmed him, would be lost to his view. It was Paris now
that awaited him, feverish Paris, burning with anger and odorous of
saltpetre. Its very pavements must burn. Sulpice was in haste, however,
to see it once more, to pass with head aloft beneath the garrets where
he had once dreamed as a student, fagging and striving to get knowledge.
How often he would regret that convent garden, those familiar
flower-beds, the deep silence that enveloped him as he sat working by
the open window, the passage of a bird near him, as if to fan him with
its wing, and the vague murmur of the canticles of the sisters ascending
to his window like the echo of a prayer!

In the recess during one of the years following his election to the
Assembly, he married Mademoiselle Gerard. Doctor Reboux, her guardian,
charmed to give his ward to a man with a future like Vaudrey's, had not
hesitated long about consenting to the marriage. Adrienne delighted
Sulpice, and the young girl herself was quite happy to be chosen by this
good-natured, distinguished young man whom everybody at Grenoble, not
excepting his political adversaries, admired and spoke well of. With
large, brilliant, black eyes lighting up a thin, fair face, a full
beard, a high forehead with a deep furrow between the eyebrows, giving
to his usually wandering, keen and restless glance a somewhat
contemplative expression, Sulpice was a decidedly attractive man. He was
not a handsome or a charming fellow, but a good-natured, agreeable,
refined man, a fine conversationalist, persuasive, enthusiastic and
alert; learned without being pedantic, a man who could inspire in a
young girl a perfect passion. Adrienne joyfully married him, as he had
sought her from love.

And now all the poetry and romance of his youth blossomed again in his
heart, in the thick of the political struggle in which he was engaged;
he forgot, amid the idyllic scenes of domestic life, the storms of
Versailles, the political troubles, forebodings as to the future, all
anxieties of the present, the routine life of the Assembly into which he
plunged with all his mind, and the excitement of his labors, his debates
and his duties.

Sulpice thought again and again of the summer morning when he led his
wife to the altar, and compared it to a day's halt in the course of a
journey under the blaze of the sun; he recalled the old house full of
noisy stir, the crowd of relatives and friends in festive attire, the
stamping of the horses' feet before the great open gate, the neighbors
standing at the windows, and the little street-boys scuffling upon the
pavement, all the joyous bustle of that happy day. It seemed to Sulpice
that the sunlight came streaming in with Adrienne's entrance into the
vast salon, from the walls of which her pictured ancestresses in their
huge leg-of-mutton sleeves seemed to smile at her.

Beneath the orange wreath sent from Paris, her face expressed the happy,
surprised, and sweetly anxious look of a young communicant wrapped in
her veil.

Sulpice had never seen her look more beautiful. How prettily she came
towards him, blushing vividly, and holding out her two little white
gloved hands! He, somewhat bored by the company that surrounded them,
cast an involuntary glance at a mirror hanging opposite and decided that
he looked awkward and formal with his hair too carefully arranged. How
they had laughed since then and always with new pleasure at these
recollections, so sweet even now.

His happiness on that joyous day would have been complete had his mother
been present, when in the presence of the old priest who had instructed
Adrienne in her catechism, Sulpice stood forward and took by its velvet
shield the taper that seemed so light to him, and awkwardly held the
wafer that the priest extended to him. It was a great event in Grenoble
when the leader of the Liberal Party, who headed the list at the last
election, was seen being married like a believing bourgeois. The organ
pealed forth its tender vibrations, some Christmas anthem, mysterious
and tremulous, like an alleluia sounding through the aisles of
centuries; the light streamed through the windows in floods and rested
upon Adrienne, who was kneeling with her childlike head leaning on her
gloved hands, kissing her fair locks with sunlight and illumining the
gleaming satin of her dress with its long train spreading out over the
carpet.

Sulpice took away from this ceremony in the presence of a crowded
congregation an impression at once perfumed and dazzling: the perfumes
of flowers, the play of light, the greetings of the organ, and within
and about him, all the intoxication of love, singing a song of
happiness.

All that was now far away! nearly six years had elapsed since that day,
six years of bitter struggle, during which Vaudrey fought the harder,
defended his ideas of liberty with fervid eloquence, disputed step by
step, and through intense work came to the front, living at Paris just
as he did in the province, having his books brought from there to his
apartment in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, close to the railroad that
he took every morning when he regretfully left Adrienne, Adrienne to
whom he returned every evening that political meetings and protracted
sittings did not rob him of those happy evenings, which were in truth
the only evenings that he really lived.

Adrienne seldom went out, not caring to display herself and shunning the
bustle, living at Paris, as at Grenoble, in peaceful seclusion, caring
only for the existence of her husband, his work, and his speeches that
he prepared with so much courageous labor. She sat up with him until
very late, glancing over the books, the summaries of the laws and the
old parliamentary reports.

At times she was terrified at the ardor with which Sulpice devoted
himself to these occupations. She greatly desired to take her part and
was grieved at being unable to assist him by writing from his dictation,
or by examining these old books. She felt terribly anxious when Vaudrey
had to make a speech from the tribune. She dared not go to hear him,
but knowing that he was to speak, she had not the courage to remain at
home. Anxiously she ascended to the public gallery. She shuddered and
was almost ready to faint, when she heard the voice of the president
break what seemed to her an icy silence, with the words: _Monsieur
Vaudrey has the ear of the Assembly_.

The sound of Sulpice's voice seemed changed to her. Fearfully she asked
herself if fright was strangling him. She dared not look at him. It
seemed to her that the people were laughing, making a disturbance and
coughing, but not listening to him. Why had she come? She would never do
so again. An icy chill took possession of her. Then suddenly she heard a
storm of applause that seemed like an outburst of sympathy. Hands were
clapped, voices applauded. She half raised herself, and leaning upon the
rail of the gallery, saw Sulpice between the crowded heads, towering
above the immense audience, radiant and calm, standing with his arms
folded or his hands resting on the tribune, below the chair occupied by
a motionless, white-cravatted man, and throwing back his fair head,
hurling, as from a full heart, his words, his wishes and his faith. All
this she saw with supreme happiness and felt proud of the man whose name
she bore.

At that moment, she would fain have cried out to every one that she was
his, that she adored him, that he was her pride, even as she was his
joy! She would like to have folded him to her, to cling to his neck and
to repeat before all that crowd: _I love you!_

But she reserved all her tender effusions for the intimacy of their
home, in order to calm the enthusiasm, oftentimes desperate, of this
nervous man whom everything threw into a feverish excitement, this grand
man, as they called him at Grenoble, who was for her only a great child
whom she adored and kept in check by her girlish devotion combined with
her motherly, delicate attentions.

Vaudrey, however, more ambitious to do good than to obtain power, and
spending his life in the conflicts of the Chamber, saw the years
slipping away without realizing that he was making any progress, not a
single step forward in the direction of his goal. Since the war, the
years had passed for him as well as for those of his generation, with
confusing rapidity, and suddenly, all at once, after having been in some
sense slumbering, flattering himself that a man of thirty has a future
before him, he was rudely awakened to the astonishing truth that he was
forty.

Forty! Sulpice had experienced a certain melancholy in advancing the
figure by ten, and whatever position he had acquired within his party,
within the circle of his friends, his dream was to reach still higher,
he was tired of playing second-rate parts, and eager to stand before the
footlights in full blaze, in the first role.

In the snug interior that Adrienne furnished, he enjoyed all material
happiness. She soothed him, brought his dreams back to the region of the
real, terrified at times by his discouragements, his anger, and still
more by his illusions concerning men and things.

Sulpice often reproached her for having clipped the wings of his
ambition.

"I!" she would say, "it is rather the fans of your windmills that I
break, you Don Quixote!"

He would then smile at her, and look earnestly into the depths of the
timid creature's lovely blue eyes, causing her to blush as if ashamed of
having seemed to be witty.

Her chief aim was to be the devoted, loving friend of this man whom she
thought so superior to herself, and although she was totally ignorant of
political intrigues, she was by virtue of the mere instinct of love, his
best and most perspicacious adviser and felt delighted only when
Vaudrey, by chance, listened to her counsel.

"I love you so dearly!" she confessed with the unlimited candor of a
poor creature who has but a single affection, a single pretext for
loving.

He saw in the life he led, only the penumbra: his neglected youth, his
hopes fled, his fears, the disgust which at times filled him as he
thought of the never-ending recommencements and trickeries of political
life. So dearly cherished, so beloved, it seemed to him, nevertheless,
that his life lacked something. He would have liked a child, a son to
bring up, a domestic tie, since political conditions prevented him from
accomplishing a civic duty. Ah! yes, a son, a being to mould, a brow to
kiss, a soul to fashion after the image of his own, a child who would
not know all the sorrows of life that his own generation had laid on
him! Perhaps it was only a child that he needed. Something, however, he
evidently lacked.

Still he smiled, always in love with that young woman of twenty-four
years, delicate, slender, and full of the fears and artlessness of a
child. Accustomed to the quiet solitude of the house of her guardian,
she, when at Paris, in her husband's study, arranging his books, his
papers, his legislative plans and reports, sought to surround her dear
Sulpice with the comforting felicity of bourgeois happiness that was
enjoyed calmly, like a cordial sipped at the fireside.

Then suddenly one day, the news of a startling political change broke in
on this household.

Sulpice reached home one evening at one and the same time nervous,
anxious, and happy.

His name was on almost every lip, in connection with a ministerial
combination. His last speech on domestic policy had more than ever
brought him into prominence and he was considered to have boldly
contributed to the development of a fearful crisis.

A minister! he might, before the morning, be a minister! His policy was
triumphant.

The advocate Collard--of Nantes,--who was pointed out as the future head
of the Cabinet, was one of his intimate friends. It was
suggested--positively--that Sulpice should be intrusted with one of the
most _important portfolios_, that of the Interior or of Foreign Affairs,
the _lesser portfolios_ being considered those of Public Instruction and
of Agriculture and Commerce, the former of which concerns itself with
the spiritual welfare of the people, and the latter with their food
supply.

Sulpice told all this to Adrienne while eating his dinner mechanically
and without appetite.

There was to be a meeting of his coterie at eight o'clock. It was
already seven. He hurried.

Adrienne saw that he was very pale. She experienced a strange sensation,
evidently a joyful one although mingled with anxiety. Politics drew him
away from his wife so frequently, and for so long a time, that she was
already compelled to live in such solitude that the secluded creature
wondered if in future she would not be condemned to still greater
isolation. But all anxiety disappeared under the influence of Sulpice's
manifest joy. He was feverishly impatient. It seemed to him that never
had he known so decisive a moment in his life.

The sound of the bell, suddenly ringing out its clear note in the
silence, caused him to start.

The dining-room door was opened by a servant, who handed a letter to
Vaudrey, bearing on one corner of the envelope the word: _Urgent_.

Sulpice recognized the writing.

It was from Collard of Nantes.

Adrienne saw her husband's cheek flush as he read this letter, which
Sulpice promptly handed her, while his eyes sparkled with delight.

"It is done! Read!"

Adrienne turned pale.

Collard notified his "colleague" that the ministerial combination of
which he was the head had succeeded. The President awaited at the Elysee
the arrival of the new ministers. He tendered Vaudrey the portfolio of
the Interior.

"A minister!" said Adrienne, now overcome with delight.

Vaudrey had risen and, a little uneasy, was mechanically searching for
something, still holding his napkin in his hand.

"My hat," he said. "My overcoat. A carriage."

Adrienne, with her hands clasped in a sort of childish admiration,
looked at him as if he had become suddenly transformed. All his being,
in fact, expressed complete satisfaction. He embraced Adrienne almost
frantically, kissed her again and again, and left her, then descended
the staircase with the speed of a lover hastening to a rendezvous.

This political honeymoon was still at its height at the moment when the
delighted Vaudrey, seeing everything rosy-hued, was satisfying his
astonished curiosity in the greenroom of the ballet. He entered office,
animated by all the good purposes inspired by absolute faith. It seemed
to him that he was about to save the world, to regenerate the
government, and to destroy abuses.

"It is very difficult to become a minister," he said, smiling, "but
nothing is easier than to be a great minister. It only demands a
determination to do good!"

"And the power to do it," replied his friend Granet, somewhat
ironically.

What! power? Nothing was more simple, since Vaudrey held the reins of
power!--If others wrecked the hopes of their friends, it was because
they had not dared, because they had not the will!

They would now see what he would do himself! Not to-morrow either, nor
in a month--but at once.

He entered the ministry boldly, like a good-natured despot, determined
to reform, study and rearrange everything; and a victim to the feverish
and glorious zeal of a neophyte, he was a little surprised to encounter,
at the very outset, the obstinate resistance of routine, ignorance, and
the unyielding mechanism of that vast machine, more eternal than
empires: Ad-min-is-tra-tion.

Bah! he would have satisfaction! Patience would overcome all. After all,
time is on one's side.

"Time? Already!" replied Granet, who was a perpetual scoffer.

Adrienne, overwhelmed with surprise, enjoyed the reflections from the
golden aurora of power that so sweetly tinted Sulpice's life. She
shared her husband's triumphs without haughtiness, and now, however she
might love her domestic life, it was incumbent upon her to pass more of
her time in society than formerly, _to show herself_, as Sulpice said,
and, surrounded by the success and flattery she enjoyed, she felt that
that obligation was only an added joy, whose contentment she reflected
on her husband.

When she entered a salon, she was greeted with a flattering murmur of
admiration and good-natured curiosity. The women looked at her and the
men surrounded her.

"Madame Vaudrey?"

"The minister's wife!"

"Charming!"

"Quite young!"

"Somewhat provincial!"

"So much the more attractive!"

"That is true, as fresh as a peach!"

She endeavored to atone by a gracious, very sincere modesty, for the
enviable position in which chance had suddenly placed her. It was said
of her that she accepted a compliment as timidly as a boarding-school
miss receives a prize. They forgave her for retaining her rosy cheeks
because of her white and exquisitely shaped hands. She was not
considered to be "_trop de Grenoble_." Witty people called her the
pretty _Dauphinoise_, and the flatterers the little Dauphine.

In short, her _success_ was great! So said the chroniclers; the entrance
of a fashionable woman into a salon being daily compared with that of an
actress on the stage.

It was especially because Vaudrey appeared to be so happy, that his
young wife was so contented. She felt none of the vainglory of power.
Generally alone in the vast, deserted apartments of the ministry, with
all their commonplace, luxurious appointments, she more than once
regretted the home in the Chaussee-d'Antin, where they enjoyed--but too
rarely--a renewal of the cherished solitude of the first months of their
union, the familiar chats of the Grenoble days, the prolonged
conversations, exchanges of thoughts, hopes and reminiscences--already!
only recollections,--and she sometimes said to Sulpice, who was
feverishly excited and glowed with delight at having reached the summit
of power:

"Do you know what this place suggests to me? Why, living in a hotel!"

"And you are right," Vaudrey gaily answered; "we are at a hotel, but it
is the hotel in which the will of France lodges!"

"You understand, my dear, that if you are happy--"

"Very happy! it is only now that I can show what I am made of. You shall
see, Adrienne, you shall see what I will do and become within a year."

Within a year!




IV


Guy de Lissac occupied a small summer-house forming a residence situated
at the end of a court on Rue D'Aumale. He had given carte-blanche for
the arrangement of this bachelor's nest,--a nest in which sitting-hens
without eggs succeeded each other rapidly,--to one of those upholsterers
who installed, in regulation style, the knickknacks so much in vogue,
and who sell at very high prices to Bourse operators and courtesans the
spurious Clodions and imitation Boulles that they pick up by chance at
auction sales.

Lissac, who had sufficient taste to discover artistic nuggets in the
gutters of Paris, had found it very convenient to wake up one fine
morning in a little mansion crowded with Japanese bric-a-brac, Chinese
satin draperies, tapestries, Renaissance chests and terra-cotta figures
writhing upon their sculptured bases. The upholsterer had taste, Lissac
had money. The knickknacks were genuine. There was a coquettish
attractiveness about the abode that made itself evident in every detail.

This bachelor's suite lacked, however, something personal, something
living, some cherished object, the mark of some particular taste, some
passion for a period, for a thing, or pictures or books. In this jumble
of ill-matched curiosities, where ivory _netzkes_ on tables surrounded
Barye bronzes and Dresden figures, there lacked some evidence of an
individual character that would give a dominant tone, an original key,
to the collection. This worldly dwelling, with its white lacquered bed
and Louis XV. canopy and its heads of birds carved in wood like the
queen's bed at Trianon, vaguely resembled the apartments of a
fashionable woman.

But Guy had hung around here and there a Samourai sabre, Malay krises,
Oriental daggers in purple velvet sheaths, and upon the green tapestry
background of the antechamber a panoply on which keen-bladed swords with
steel guards were mingled with Scotch claymores with silver hilts, thus
giving a masculine character to this hotel of a fashionable lounger,
steeped with the odor of ylang-ylang like the little house of a pretty
courtesan.

This Guy enjoyed in Paris a free and easy life, leaving to Vaudrey, his
old college-comrade at Grenoble, the pursuit of the pleasures of
political life, and, as Lissac said in that bantering tone which is
peculiar to Parisian gossip, the relish of the "sweets of power"; for
himself, what kept him in Paris was Paris itself, just that and nothing
more:--its pleasures, its first nights, its surprises, its women, that
flavor of scandal and perfume of refined immorality that seemed peculiar
to his time and surroundings.

He had squandered two fortunes, one after the other, without feeling any
regret; he had made a brush at journalism, tried finance, won at the
Bourse, lost at the clubs, knew everybody and was known by all, had a
smiling lip, was sound of tooth, loved the girls, was dreaded by the
men, was of fine appearance, and was unquestionably noble, which
permitted him to enjoy all the frolics of Bohemian life without sullying
himself, having always discovered a forgotten uncle or met some
considerate friend to pay his gambling debts and adjust his differences
on the Bourse speculations at the very nick of time; just now he was
well in the saddle and decidedly attractive, with a sound heart and a
well-lined pocket, enjoying, not disliking life, which seemed to him a
term of imprisonment to be passed merrily--a Parisian to the finger-tips
and to the bottom of his soul, worse than a Parisian in fact, a
Parisianized provincial inoculated with _Parisine_, just as certain sick
persons are with morphine, judging men by their wit, actions by their
results, women by the size of their gloves; as sceptical as the devil,
wicked in speech and considerate in thought, still agile at forty,
claiming even that this is man's best time--the period of fortune and
gallantry--sliding along in life and taking things as he found them,
wisely considering that a day's snow or rain lasts no longer than a
day's sunshine, and that, after all, a wretched night is soon over.

On leaving Vaudrey the previous night, Lissac had passed part of the
night at his club on Place Vendome. He had played and won. He had gone
to sleep over a fashionable novel, very faithfully written, but
wearisome in the extreme, and he had awakened late and somewhat
heavy-headed. There were fringes of snow upon the window-sills and upon
the house facing his little mansion. The roofs were hidden under a large
white sheet and half lost in the grayish-white background of the sky.

"Detestable weather! So much the better," thought Lissac, "I shall have
no visitors."

"I will see no one," he said to his servant. "In such weather no one but
borrowers will come."

He had just finished his dejeuner, plunging a Russian enamelled silver
spoon into his egg, his tea smoking at his side in a burnished silver
teapot with Japanese designs, when, notwithstanding his orders, the
servant handed him a card written in pencil on a scrap of paper torn
from a note-book.

"It is not a borrower, monsieur!"

Guy seized the paper disdainfully, thinking, in spite of the servant's
opinion, that he would find the name of a beggar who had not even had
his name printed on a piece of Bristol-board, and, adjusting his glass,
he deciphered the fine writing on the paper; then after involuntarily
exclaiming: _Ah! bah_! and _well! well!_ greatly astonished, he said as
he rose:

"Show her in!"

He had thrown on a chair his damask napkin of Muscovite pattern, and
instinctively glanced at himself in the mirror, just as a coquette might
do before a rendezvous, smoothing out his flannel vest and spreading out
his cravat that only half-fastened the blue foulard collar of his
dressing-gown.

At the moment that he was examining the folds made on his red leather
slippers by his ample flannel trousers, a woman half-raised the satin
portiere, and, standing within a frame formed by the folds of yellow
satin, looked at the young man, displaying her brilliant teeth as she
smilingly said:

"Good-morning, Guy!"

Lissac went straight toward her with outstretched hands.

She allowed the large satin portiere to fall behind her, and after
having permitted her little suede gloved hands to be raised for a
moment, she boldly abandoned them to Guy, laughing the while, as they
looked at each other face to face. He betrayed some little astonishment,
gazing at her as a person examines one whom one has not seen for a long
time, and the young woman raised her head unabashed, displaying her
features in full light, as if submitting to an inspection with
confidence.

"You did not expect me, eh?"

"I confess--"

"Doubtless it is a considerable time since you thought of me."

Guy was inclined to bow and, as his only reply, to kiss the tips of her
fingers; but he reflected that, since they last met, the parting of his
brown locks had been devilishly widened, and he remained standing,
answering with the conceit of a handsome man:

"You are mistaken, I often think of you."

She had, with, a sweeping glance around the room, examined the furniture
of the apartment, the framed pictures, the designs and the gilding, and,
on sitting down near the fire with her little feet crossed, she
expressed her opinion:

"Very stylishly ensconced! You always had good taste, I know, my dear
Guy."

"I have less now than formerly, my dear Marianne," he said, giving to
this airy remark the turn of a compliment.

Marianne shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

"Do you find me very much altered?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes, rejuvenated."

"I don't believe a word of it."

"Upon my honor. You look like a communicant."

"Good heavens! what kind?" said Marianne, laughing in a clear, ringing,
but slightly convulsive tone.

He was still looking at her curiously, seated thus near the fireplace.

The bright and sparkling fire cast its reflections on the gold frames in
waving and rosy tints that brightened the somewhat pale complexion of
this young woman and imparted a warm tone to her small and brilliant
gray eyes. She half turned her fair face toward him, her retrousse nose
was tiny, spirituelle and mobile, her large sensuous mouth was provoking
and seductive, and suggested by its upturned corners, encouragement or a
challenge.

She had allowed her cloak, whose fur trimming was well-worn, to slip
from her shoulders, exposing her form to the waist; she trembled
slightly in her tight-fitting dress, and golden tints played on her bare
neck, which was almost hidden under the waves of her copper-colored
hair.

She had just taken off her suede gloves with a jerky movement and was
abstractedly twisting them between her fingers.

In spite of the somewhat depressing effect of her worn garments, she
displayed a natural elegance, a perfect form and graceful movements, and
Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition
of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he
had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a
life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now
burned out like an exploded rocket.

Marianne Kayser!

Of all the women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most
sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad.
She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of
restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too
rebellious to accept the humiliations of destiny.

She was an orphan, and had been brought up by her uncle, Simon Kayser, a
serious painter, indifferent to all that did not concern his art,--its
morality, its dignity, its superiority--who had, under cover of his own
ignorance, allowed the ardent dreams of his niece and her wayward fits
to develop freely like poisonous plants; near this man, in the vicious
atmosphere of an old bachelor's disorderly household, Marianne had lived
the bitter life of a young woman out of her element, poor, but with
every instinct unswervingly leaning towards the enjoyments of luxury.

She had grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and,
as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she
served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed
her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the
child lighted his stove and filled his pipe.

The studio was littered with books. As chance offered, she read them all
eagerly and examined with curiosity the pictures drawn by an Eisen or a
Moreau, depicting passionate kisses exchanged under arbors, where
behind curtains, short silk skirts appeared in a rumpled state. She had
rapidly reached womanhood without Kayser's perceiving that she could
comprehend and judge for herself.

This falsely inspired man, entirely devoted to mystical compositions,
vaguely painted--philosophical and critical, as he said--this thinker,
whose brush painted obscure subjects as it might have produced signs,
did not dream that the girl growing up beside him was also in love with
chimeras, and drawn toward the abyss, not however to learn the mysteries
hidden by the clouds, but the mystery of life, the secret of the visions
that haunted her, of the disquieting temptations that filled her with
such feverish excitement.

If Uncle Kayser could for one moment have descended from the nebulous
regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor
in the depth of Marianne's glance, and something feverish and restless
in her movements. But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his
rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, aesthetic dignity,
and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission
for it, an end, an idea--_art the educator, art the moralizer_,--and
allowed this feverish, wearied, impulsive creature, moulded by vice, who
bore his name, to wander around his studio like a stray dog.

Isolated, forgotten, the young girl sometimes passed whole days bending
over a book, her lips dry, her face pale, but with a burning light in
her gray eyes, while her fingers were thrust through her hair, or she
rested upon a window-sill, following afar off, some imaginary picture in
the depths of the clouds.

The studio overlooked a silent, gloomy street in which no sound was
heard save the slow footfalls of weary and exhausted pedestrians. It was
stifling behind this window and Marianne's gloomy horizon was this frame
of stones against which her wandering thoughts bruised themselves as a
bird might break its wings.

Ah! to fly away, to escape from the solemn egotism and the theories of
Simon Kayser, and to live the passionate life of those who are free,
loved, rich and happy! Such was the dream upon which Marianne nourished
herself.

She had perpetually before her eyes, as well as before her life, the
gray wall of that high house opposite the painter's studio, pierced with
its many eyes, and whether on summer's stifling evenings, the shutters
closed--the whole street being deserted, the neighbors having gone into
the country--or in winter, with its gray sky, the roofs covered with the
snow that was stained all too soon, when the brilliant lights behind the
curtains looked like red spots on the varnished paper, Marianne ever
felt in her inmost being the bitter void of Parisian melancholy, the
overwhelming sadness of black loneliness, of hollow dreams, gnawing like
incurable sorrows.

She grew up thus, her mind and body poisoned by this dwelling which she
never left except to drag her feet wearily through the galleries of the
Louvre, leaning on the arm of her uncle, who invariably repeated before
the same pictures, in the loud and bombastic tone of a _comediante_, the
same opinions, and grew enthusiastic and excited according as the
pictures of the masters agreed with his _style_, his _system_, his
_creed_. One should hear him run the gamut of all his great phrases: My
_sys-tem!_ Marianne knew when the expression was coming. All these
Flemish painters! Painters of snuff-boxes, without any ideal, without
grasp! "And the Titian, look at this Titian! Where is _thought_
expressed in this Titian? And _mo-ral-i-ty?_ Titian! A vendor of pink
flesh! Art should have a majesty, a dignity, a purity, an ideality very
different."

Ah! these words in _ty_, solemn, bombastic, pedantic, with a false ring,
they entered Marianne's ears like burning injections.

These visits to the museum impressed her with a gloom such as a ramble
in a cemetery would create, she returned to the house with depressing
headaches and muttering wrathful imprecations against destiny. She even
preferred that studio with its worn-out divans and its worm-eaten
tapestries that were slowly shredding away.

There, at least, she was all alone, face to face with herself, consumed
by a cowardly fear--the fear of the future--this young girl who had read
everything, learned everything, understood everything, knew everything,
sullied by all the jokes of the Kayser studio, which, in spite of the
exalted, sacrosanct, aesthetic discussions which took place therein,
sometimes shockingly resembled a smoking-room--this physical virgin
without any virginity of mind, could there take refuge in herself, and
there in the solitude to which she was condemned, she questioned herself
as to the end to which her present life would lead her.

Of dowry she had none. Her father had left her nothing. Kayser was poor
and in debt. She had no occupation. To run about giving private lessons
on the piano, seemed to Marianne to degrade her almost to the level of
domestic service. Those who wished to pose for the Montyon prize might
do so! She never would!

Ah! what sufferings! what would be the end of such a life? Marriage? But
who desired her? One of those talentless painters, who ventilated at
Kayser's house, not merely their contemptuous theories, but also their
down-at-the-heel shoes? To fall from one Bohemian condition to another,
from exigency to want, to be the wife of one of these greasy-haired
dreamers? Her whole nature shuddered in revolt at this idea. Through the
open window, the tepid breath of nature wafted toward her the odor of
the rising sap in gentle, warm whiffs that filled her with a feverish
astonishment. Stretched on the patched divan, her eyes closed and her
lovely form kissed by the tepid breeze, she dreamed, dreamed, dreamed--

The awakening was folly, a rash act, an elopement.

In the house on Rue de Navarin there happened to be one fellow more
daring than the rest, he was an artist who, in the jostling daily life,
kindled his love at the strange flame that burned in the lustful
virgin's eyes. A glance revealed all.

The meeting with a rake determined the life of this girl. She fell, not
through ignorance or curiosity, but moved by anger and, as it were, out
of bravado. Since she was without social position, motherless and
isolated, having no family, without a prop and unloved, well, she threw
off the yoke absolutely. She broke through her shackles at one bound.
She rebelled!--

She eloped with this man.

He was a handsome fellow, who thirsted for pleasure, and took his prize
boldly about, plunging Marianne into the ranks of vulgar mistresses, and
had not the mad woman's superior intelligence, will, and even her
disgust, ruled at once over this first lover and the equivocal
surroundings into which he had thrust her, she would have become a mere
courtesan.

Kayser had experienced only astonishment at the flight of his niece. How
was it that he had never suspected the cause that disturbed her
thoughts? "These diabolical women, nobody knows them, not even those who
made them. A father even would not have detected anything. The more
excuse therefore for an uncle!" So he resumed his musing on elevated
art, quieting his displeasure--for his comrades jeered him--by the
fumes of his pipe.

Moreover, all things considered, the painter added, Marianne had
followed the natural law. Full liberty for everybody, was still one of
Simon Kayser's pet theories. Marianne was of age and could dispose of
her lot without the necessity of submitting to a strict endorsement of
her conduct. When she had "sounded all the depths of the abyss,"--and
Kayser pronounced these words while puffing his tobacco--she would
return. Uncle Kayser would always keep a place for her at what he called
_his fireside_.

"The fireside of your pipe," Marianne once remarked to him.

So Kayser consoled himself for this escapade by the sacredness of art,
the only sacredness he recognized. On that indeed he yielded nothing.
What mattered it to the world, if a girl went astray, even if that girl
were his niece? Public morality was not hurt thereby. Ah! if he, Kayser,
had exhibited to the world a lewd picture, it would have been "a horse
of a different color"! The dignity, seriousness, purity of art, that was
right enough!--But a woman! Pshaw! a woman!--Nor was he heard once to
express any uneasiness as to what might become of Marianne.

In the course of her perilous career, which, however, was not that of a
courtesan, but that of a freed woman avenging herself, Marianne had met
Guy de Lissac and loved him as completely as her nature allowed her to
love. Guy entertained her. With him she talked over everything, she gave
herself up to him, and made plans for the future. Why should they ever
separate? They adored each other. Guy was rich, or at any rate he lived
sumptuously. Marianne was a lovely mistress, clever, in fact, ten women
in one. Guy became madly attached to her and he felt himself drawn
closer to her day by day. She often repeated with perfect sincerity that
she had never loved any one before.

The first lover, then? She did not even know his name now!

There was no reason why they should not live together for ever, a life
of mutual joy and happiness, led by the same fancies, stirred by the
same desires. Why ever leave each other, even once? But it was just this
that induced Guy to abandon this pretty girl. He was afraid. He saw no
end to such a union as theirs. The little love-affair that enticed him
assumed another name: _The Chain_. He sometimes debated with himself
seriously about marrying this Marianne, whose adventures he knew, but
who so intoxicated him that he forgot all the past.

Uncle Kayser, entirely engrossed in the "dignity of art," and occupied
with the composition of an allegorical production entitled _The Modern
Family_,--a page of pure, mystic, social, regenerative art,--had
certainly forgotten his niece; nevertheless, Lissac at times felt
somewhat tempted to restore her to him. He was grieved at the thought
of abandoning Marianne to another. His dread of marriage triumphed over
his jealousy. One fine day, Guy suddenly brought about a separation.
Feeling ill, he took to his bed, when one morning Marianne came to him
and said in passionate tones:

"Now I will never leave you again! You are in danger, and I am here to
save you!"

Guy now felt himself lost. His rapid perception, whose operation was as
sudden as a blow of the fist, warned him that if he allowed this woman
to install herself in his house, he might say good-by to liberty, and
probably also to his life. This Parisian had laid down as a principle,
that a man should always be _unfettered_. He held in horror this
shameful half-marriage that the language of slang had baptized, as with
a stain: _Collage_. He therefore decided to play his life against his
liberty, and during the temporary absence of this nurse established at
his bedside, he packed his clothes in his trunk at random, shivering as
he was with fever, threw himself into a hack, and, with chattering teeth
and a morbid shudder creeping over his entire body, had himself driven
to the railroad station and departed for Italy.

Marianne was heartbroken anew at this unexpected departure. A hope had
vanished. She loved Guy very sincerely, and she vainly hoped that she
would hold him. He fled from her! Whither had he gone? For a moment,
she was tempted to rejoin him when she received his letters. She
surmised, however, that Guy, desiring to avoid her, caused his brief
notes to be sent by some friend from towns that he had left. To play
there the absurd part of a woman chasing her lover would have been
ridiculous. She remained, therefore, disgusted, heartbroken for a moment
like a widow in despair, then she retraced her steps to the Rue de
Navarin, and returned to the fold, where she found Uncle Kayser still
quite unruffled, with the almost finished picture of _The Modern
Family_.

"That is, I verily believe, the best I have done, the most moral," said
Kayser to her. "In art, morality before everything, my girl! Come, sit
down and tell me your little adventures."

It was five years--five whole years--since Lissac had seen Marianne.
Their passion had subsided little by little into friendship,--expressed
though by letters. Marianne wrote, Guy replied. All the bitter reproofs
had been exchanged through the post, yet, in spite of this
correspondence, neither had sought the opportunity nor felt the desire
to meet. The fancy was dead! Nevertheless, they had loved each other
well!

Suddenly, without overtures, on this bitingly cold morning, Marianne
arrived, half shivering, in the new apartment, warmed her tiny feet at
the fire and raised to him the rosy tip of her cold nose.

Guy was somewhat surprised.

He looked with a curiosity not unmixed with pain at that woman whom he
had loved truly enough to suffer love's pangs,--the innocents say to die
of it. He tried to find again in the depths of those gray eyes,
sparkling and malicious, the old burning passion, extinguished without
leaving even a fragment of its embers. To think that he had risked his
life for that woman; that he should have sacrificed his name; that he
should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he
should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he
had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and
forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love
of this blase Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again
looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had
flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had
agreeably affected him.

Marianne evidently understood what was passing in Guy's mind. She smiled
strangely. Buried in the armchair, whose back supported her own, and
half-bending her fair neck that reclined on the lace-covered head-rest,
she looked at Lissac fixedly with an odd expression, the sidelong glance
of a woman, that seems to be her keenest scrutiny.

Through her half-closed lashes he seemed to feel that a malicious glance
embraced him. The mobile nostrils of her delicate nose dilated with a
nervous trembling that intensified the mocking smile betrayed by her
curling lips. Her hands were resting upon her plump arms, and with a
trembling motion of the fingers beat a feverish little march as if she
were playing a scale on a keyboard.

Guy sought to evoke from the well-set, gracefully reclining form, from
the half-sly and half-concealed glance, from the palpitating nostrils,
something that reminded him of his former ecstasies. Again he saw,
shadowed by the chin, that part of her neck where he loved to bury his
brow and to rest his lips, greedily, lingeringly, as when one sips a
liqueur. A strange emotion seized him. All that had not yet been
gratified of his shattered, but not wholly destroyed love, surged within
him.

Were it fancy or reminiscence, beside this woman he still felt as of
old, a feeling that oppressed his heart and caused him that delightful
sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection
with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet
odor floated around Marianne, reminding Lissac of the intoxicating
perfume of vanished days, an irritating odor as of new-mown hay.

He said nothing, while she awaited his remarks with curiosity. Guy's
mute interrogation possibly embarrassed her, for she suddenly shook her
head and rose to her feet.

"May one smoke here?" she said, as she opened a Russia leather
cigarette-case bearing her monogram.

"What next?" said Guy, lighting a sponge steeped in alcohol that stood
in a silver holder and offering it to Marianne.

She quickly closed her fine teeth on the end of the paper cigarette that
she had rolled between her fingers and lighted it at the flame. The
gleam of the alcohol brightened her eyes and slightly flushed her pale
cheeks, which Guy regarded with strange feelings.

"Your invention is an odd one!" she said, as she returned him the little
sponge upon which a tongue of blue flame played.

He extinguished it, and abandoning himself to the disturbing charm of
reminiscences, watched Marianne who was already half-enveloped in a
light cloud of smoke.

"There is one thing you do not know," he said. "More than once--on my
honor--at the corner of the street, at some chance meeting, my old
Parisian heart has beaten wildly on seeing in some coquettish outline,
or in some fair hair falling loosely over an otter-skin cloak, or in
some fair, vanishing profile with a pearl set in the lobe of the ear,
something that resembled you. Those fur toques with little feathers that
everybody wears now, you wore before any one else, on your fair head.
Whenever I see one, I follow it. On my word, though, not for her. The
fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch
of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her
under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the
journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been
scattered. It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the
streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only one, Marianne,
who has felt the anguish and heart-fluttering that I have experienced.
Often have I found my eyes moist after such an experience; but if it
were winter, I attributed my tears simply to a cold. Tell me, Marianne,
was it really the cold that moistened my eyes?"

Marianne laughed.

"Come, but you are idyllic, my dear Guy," said she, looking at Lissac.

"Melancholy, nothing more."

"Let us say elegiac. Those little fits have come upon you rather late in
the day, have they not? A little valerian and quinine, made up into
silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy."

"You are making fun of me."

"No," she said. "But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection
of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot
along for such a distance behind plumed toques--it was so easy not to
take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a
creditor."

Guy could not refrain from smiling.

"Ah! it is because--I loved you too dearly!"

"I know that!" exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her
elegance, of an artist's model giving a pupil a retort. "A madrigal that
has not answered, no; does it rain?"

"I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?" said Lissac.

"Do not doubt it, my dear friend. It is always stupid to deprive one's
self of the woman who adores one. Such rarities are not common."

"You remember, dear Marianne," said Guy, "the day when you boldly wrote
upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly: 'To him I love
more than every one else in the world?'"

"Yes," said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward. "Such things as
that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity."

"And you were sincere?"

"On the faith of an honest man," she answered laughingly.

"And yet I have been assured since that time, that you adored another
before that one."

"It is possible," said Marianne with sudden bitterness; "but, in the
life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been
more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have
derived."

In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke
of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and
hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.

Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and
unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of
the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to
enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger
who had come there to tempt him. In her languishing and, as it were,
abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming
in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely
clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost
mistress, the forgotten one, assumed in his eyes the relish of a caprice
and an adventure. And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of
their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and
awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a passion formerly suddenly
severed.

He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young
woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that
nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace
that his feelings prompted.

Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone
of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for
the future:

"Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?"

Lissac smiled.

"Come," she said, "nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have
already often turned over."

"The romance of my life," whispered Lissac in Marianne's ear.

"The more reason that it should not be read again. It is true there are
books one never reads but once. And for that reason, probably, one never
forgets them."

She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and
looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac's surprised eyes.

"Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly--we have
both heartily laughed at it--of the 'caprices of Marianne.' Do you know
what I am, my dear Guy? Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly
your mistress? Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable _ennui_, I yawn
my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of
dislocating my jaw. The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books
insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools. It is to have
the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless
objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible. A
thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add. The pure, fresh spring that
should slake my thirst has not yet gushed."

She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way
to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were
attacked with a fit of coughing. From time to time, she blew away a
cloud of smoke that escaped from her lips, for she had resumed her
cigarette, or with the tip of her nail struck her papelito, knocking the
ashes on the carpet.

Moved and greatly puzzled, but no longer thinking of the temptation of a
moment before, Guy looked at her and nodded his head gravely, like a
physician who finds a patient's illness more serious than the latter is
willing to acknowledge.

"You are very unhappy, Marianne!" he remarked.

"I? Nonsense! Weary, disgusted, bored, yes; but not unhappy. There is
still something great in misery. That can be battled against. It is like
thunder. But the rain, the eternal rain, incessantly falling, with its
liquid mud, that--ah! that, ugh! that is crushing. And in my life it
rains, it rains with terrible constancy."

As she uttered these words, she stretched her arms out with a movement
that expressed boundless weariness and disclosed to Guy the dull
dejection that followed a great deception and a hopeless fall.

"Life? My life? A mere millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual
round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you
understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is
mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I
abandon to others--whom I have abandoned, thank God! for I am satiated
at length and have now no lover, nor do I desire one. I desire to be my
own mistress, in short, and not the mistress of any person. I have but
one desire, hear--"

"What?" asked Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and
suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his
feelings vacillating between doubt and pity.

"My pleasure," Marianne replied, "is to shut myself up alone in a little
room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the
Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage
saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not
what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name,
whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves,
everything, in fact, a secret. I shall cloister myself. I shall stretch
myself out on a reclining-chair and think that if, by chance,--as
happens sometimes--an aneurism, a congestion, or I don't know what,
should strike me down in that solitude, no one would know who I am,
nobody, nobody, and my body would be taken to the Morgue, or to the
grave, it matters little to me, that body of which the little
otter-trimmed toques recall to you the graceful, serpentine line. Ah!
those plans are not very lively, are they? Well, my dear, such are my
good moments. Judge of the others, then."

Lissac was profoundly stirred and very greatly puzzled. To call on him:
that implied a need of him. But there was no attempt to find the marker
at the place where the romance had been interrupted: therefore the visit
was not to renew the relations that had been severed, yet not broken.

What, then, brought this creature, still charming and giddy, whose heart
was gnawed and wrung with grief? And was she the woman--Guy knew her so
well!--to return thus, only to conjure up the vanished recollections, to
communicate the secret of her present sorrows and to permit Lissac to
inhale the odor of a departed perfume, more airy than the blue
smoke-wreaths that escaped from her cigarette?

After entrusting Guy with the secret of her yearning for solitude, she
again indulged in her sickly smile, and still looking at Guy:

"You are, I am told, a constant guest at Sabine Marsy's receptions?" she
said abruptly.

"Yes," replied Lissac. "But I have no great liking for political
salons."

"It is a political centre, and yet not, seemingly. It is about to become
a scientific one, if one may believe the reporters--Monsieur de Rosas is
announced.--By the way, my dear Guy, you still see Monsieur de Rosas!"

While Marianne uttered this name with an indifferent tone, she slightly
bent her head in order to scrutinize Guy.

He did not reply at once, seeking first to discover what object
Marianne had in speaking to him about De Rosas. In a vague way he
surmised that the great Castilian noble counted for something in
Marianne's visit.

"I always see him when he is in Paris," he said after a moment's pause.

"Then you will see him very soon, for he will arrive to-morrow."

"Who told you that?"

"The newspapers. You don't read the newspapers, then?--He is returning
from the East. Madame Marsy is bent on his narrating his travels, on the
occasion of a special soiree. A lecture! Our Rosas must have altered
immensely. He was wild enough of old."

"A shy fellow, which is quite different. But," asked Lissac after a
moment, "what about Rosas?"

"Tell me, in the first place, that you know perfectly well that he will
arrive to-morrow."

"I know it through the reporters, as you say. To-day, it is through the
reporters that one learns news of one's friends."

"The important fact is that you know him, and it is because I am
particularly anxious to hear Monsieur de Rosas that I come to ask you to
present me at Madame Marsy's."

"Oh! that is it?" Guy began.

"Yes, that is it. I am weary. I am crazy over the Orient. You remember
Felicien David's _Desert_ that I used to play for you on the piano? I
would like to hear this story of travel. It would make me forget Paris."

"You shall hear it, my dear Marianne. Madame Marsy asked me to introduce
Vaudrey to her the other evening. You ask me to present you to Madame
Marsy. I am both crimp and introducer; but I am delighted to introduce
you to a salon that you will, I trust, find less gloomy than your little
room of the Jardin des Plantes. In fact, I thought you were one of
Sabine Marsy's friends. Did I dream so?"

"I have occasionally met her, and have found her very agreeable. She
invited me to call on her, but I have not dared--my hunger for
solitude--my den yonder--"

"Is the little room forbidden ground, is one absolutely prohibited from
seeing it?" said Guy with a smile.

"It is not forbidden, but it is difficult. Moreover, I have nothing
hidden from my friends," said Marianne, "on one condition, which is,
that they are my friends--"

She emphasized the words: "Nothing but my friends."

"Friendship," said Guy, "is all very well, it is very good, very
agreeable, but--"

"But--?"

"Love--"

"Do not mention that to me! That takes wings, b-r-r! Like swallows. It
flits. It leaves for Italy. But friendship--"

She extended her small firm hand as rigid as steel.

"When you desire to visit me over there, I shall be at home. I will give
you the address. But it is not Guy who will come, but Monsieur de
Lissac, remember. Is that understood?"

"I should be very silly if I answered _yes_."

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

"Compliments! How foolish you are! Keep that sort of talk for others. It
is a long time since they were addressed to me."

She took that man's face between her hands and kissed his cheeks in a
frank, friendly way. Guy became somewhat pale.

"I have loved you, and truly, that is enough. Do not complain or ask
aught besides."

Ah! what an eager desire now prompted him to possess her again, to find
in her his mistress once more, to restrain her from leaving until she
had become his, as of old.

She had already thrown her cloak over her shoulders, and said, as she
gently pushed open the door:

"So it is agreed? I am to go to Madame Marsy's?"

"To Madame Marsy's. I will have an invitation sent you."

"And I will call for you and take you. Yes, I, here, like a jolly
companion. Or I'll go with my uncle. You will present me to Rosas. We
shall see if he recognizes me."

She burst out laughing. "You will also introduce me--since that is your
occupation--" and here her smile disclosed her pretty, almost
mischievous-looking teeth--"to Monsieur Vaudrey, your comrade. A
minister! Such people are always useful for something. _Addio, caro!_"

Guy de Lissac had hardly taken two steps toward Marianne before she had
vanished behind the heavy folds of the Japanese portiere that fell in
its place behind her. He opened the door. Mademoiselle Kayser was
already in the hall, with her hand on the handle of the door.

"At nine o'clock I shall be with you," she said to Lissac as she
disappeared.

She waved a salutation, the valet de chambre hastened to open the door,
and her outline, that for a moment stood out in the light of the
staircase, vanished. Guy was almost angry, and returned to his room.

Now that she had left, he opened his window quickly. It seemed to him
that a little blue smoke escaped from the room, the cloud emitted by
Marianne's cigarette. And with this bluish vapor also disappeared the
odor of new-mown hay, bearing with it the passing intoxication that for
a moment threatened to ensnare this disabused man.

The cold outside air, the bright sunshine, entered in quivering rays.
Without, the snow-covered roofs stood out clearly against a soft blue
sky, limpid and springlike. Light wreaths of smoke floated upward in the
bracing atmosphere.

Guy freely inhaled this buoyant atmosphere that chased away the blended
odor of tobacco and that exhaled from the woman. It seemed to him that a
sort of band had been torn from his brow which, but a moment ago, felt
compressed. The fresh breeze bore away all trace of Marianne's kisses.

"Must I always be a child?" he thought. "It is not on my account that
she came here, but on Rosas's. Our friends' friends are our lovers.
Egad! on my word, I was almost taken in again, nevertheless! Compelled,
in order to cut adrift again, to make another journey to Italy,--at my
age."

Then, feeling chilly, he closed the window, laughing as he did so.




V


On the pavement of the Boulevard Malesherbes, two policemen, wrapped in
their hooded coats, restrained the crowd that gathered in front of the
huge double-door of the house occupied by Madame Marsy. A double row of
curious idlers stood motionless, braving benumbed fingers while
watching the carriages that rolled under the archway, which, after
quickly depositing at the foot of the brilliantly lighted perron women
enveloped in burnooses and men in white gloves, their faces half-hidden
by fur collars, turned and crossed the row of approaching coupes.

For an hour past there had been a double file of carriages, and a
continuous stream of guests arriving on foot, who threw their cigars at
the foot of the perron, chatting as they ascended the steps, which were
protected by a covering of glass. The curious pointed out the faces of
well-known persons. It was said in the neighborhood that the greater
part of the ministers had accepted invitations.

Madame Marsy's salons were brilliant under the blazing lights. Guests
jostled each other in the lobbies. Overcoats and mantles were thrown in
heaps or strung up in haste, the gloved hands reaching out as in the
lobby of a theatre to receive the piece of numbered pasteboard.

"You have No. 113," said Monsieur de Lissac to Marianne, who had just
entered, wearing a pale blue cloak, and leaning on his arm.

She smiled as she slipped the tiny card into her pocket.

"Oh! I am not superstitious!"

She beamed with satisfaction.

People in the hall stood aside in order to allow this pretty creature
to pass by; her fair hair fell over her plump, though slender, white
shoulders, and the folds of her satin skirt, falling over her
magnificent hips, rustled as she walked.

Lissac, with his eyeglass fixed, and ceremoniously carrying his
flattened opera-hat, advanced toward the salon, amid the greedy
curiosity of the guests who contemplated the exquisite grace of the
lovely girl as if they were inhaling its charm.

Madame Marsy stood at the entrance of the salon, looking attractive in a
toilet of black silk which heightened her fair beauty, and, with
extended hands, smilingly greeted all her guests, while the charming
Madame Gerson, refined and tactful, aided her in receiving.

Sabine appeared perfectly charmed on perceiving Marianne. She had felt
the influence formerly of this ready, keen and daring intelligence. She
troubled herself but little about Marianne's past. Kayser's niece was
received everywhere, and had not Kayser decided to accompany her? He
followed in the rear of the young girl. People had not observed him. He
chatted with a man about sixty years old, with a white beard and very
gentle eyes who listened to him good-naturedly while thinking perhaps of
something else.

"Ah! my old Ramel, how glad I am to see you!" he said with theatrical
effusion.

"It is a fact that we rarely see each other. What has become of you,
Kayser?"

"I? I work. I protest, you know, I have never compromised--Never--The
dignity of art--"

Their voices were drowned by the hubbub of the first salon, already
filled with guests; Sabine meanwhile took Marianne, whom Lissac
surrendered, and led her toward a larger salon with red decorations,
wherein the chairs were drawn up in lines before an empty space,
forming, thanks to the voluminous folds of the curtains, a sort of stage
on which, doubtless, some looked-for actor was about to appear.

Nearly all these chairs were already occupied. The lovely faces of the
women were illuminated by the dazzling light. Everybody turned toward
Marianne as she entered the room, under the guidance of Sabine, who led
her quickly toward one of the unoccupied seats, close to the improvised
stage on which, evidently, Monsieur de Rosas was going to speak.

Madame Gerson had taken her seat near Marianne, who searched her black,
bright eyes with a penetrating glance in order to interrogate the
thoughts of this friend of the family. Madame Gerson was delighted.
Sabine, dear Sabine, had achieved a success, yes, a success! Monsieur
Vaudrey was there! And Madame Vaudrey, too! And Monsieur Collard--of
Nantes--the President of the Council! And Monsieur Pichereau, who, after
all, had been a minister!

"That makes almost three ministers, one of whom is President of the
Council! Sabine is overcome with joy, yes, absolutely crazy! Think of
it: Madame Hertzfield, Sabine's rival, never had more than two ministers
at a time in her salon."

She added, prattling in soft, linnet-like tones, that Madame
Hertzfield's salon was losing its prestige. Only sub-prefects were
created there. But Sabine's salon was the antechamber to the
prefectures!

"And if you knew how charming Monsieur Vaudrey is--a delightful
conversationalist--he has dined excellently--he was twice served with
an entree!"

Marianne listened, but her mind was wandering far away. She was debating
with herself as to when Monsieur de Rosas would appear on that narrow
strip of waxed floor before her.

Guy had correctly surmised: it was Rosas and Rosas only whom this woman
was seeking in Sabine's salon. She wished to see him again, to talk to
him, to tempt destiny. A fancy.--A final caprice. Why not?

Marianne thought that she played a leading part there. She remembered
this Jose very well, having met him more than once in former days with
Guy. A Parisian Castilian, more Parisian than Spanish, he spoke with
exquisite finish the classic tongue, and with the free-and-easy manner
of a frequenter of the boulevards, chatted in the slang of the pavement
or of the greenroom; he was an eminent virtuoso and collector, an author
when the desire seized him, but only in his own interest, liberal in
his opinions, lavish in his disposition, attractive in his manners; an
eager traveller, he had, at thirty years of age, seen all that was to be
seen, he had visited India and Japan, drunk camel's milk under the tents
of the Kirgheez, and eaten dates with the Kabyles, and narrated with a
sort of appetizing irony, love adventures which might have seemed
romantic brag, if it were not that he lessened their improbability by
his raillery. He was a kind of belated Byron, who might have been cured
of his romantic tastes by the wounds and contact of reality.

She especially recalled a visit in Guy's company to Jose at an apartment
that the duke had furnished in Rue de Laval. He occupied a painter's
large studio, draping it with Oriental tapestry, crowding it with
knickknacks and panoplies of weapons: an extravagant luxury,--something
like the embarrassment of riches in a plundered caravansary. It was
there that Jose had regaled Marianne and Guy with coffee served in
Turkish fashion, and while they chatted, they had smoked that pale
Oriental tobacco, that the Spaniard, quoting some Persian poets,
gallantly compared to the perfumed locks of Mademoiselle Kayser.

During her years of hardship, she had many a time recalled that
auburn-haired, handsome fellow, with his blue eye, pensive and
searching, and lower lip curled disdainfully over his tawny beard
trimmed in Charles V. style, as he reclined there, stretched on Hindoo
rugs, chanting some monotonous song as slow as the movement of a
caravan.

"Isn't my friend Rosas a delightful fellow?" Guy had asked her.

"Delightful!"

"And clever! and learned! and entertaining! and, what is not amiss, a
multi-millionaire!"

Marianne thought of the absolute power, satisfied desires, whims and
possible dreams that were linked with that man. He was a mass of
perambulating gold. How many times she had dreamed, in the mists of her
recollection, of that somewhat haughty smile that curled his delicate
mustache, and those keen-edged teeth gleaming though his reddish beard,
as if greedy to bury themselves deep in flesh!

But where was the duke now? Among the Kabyles or the Mormons? At Tahiti,
Greenland, or gone to the devil? The papers had once announced that he
was organizing an expedition to the North Pole. Perhaps he was lost
among the icebergs in the Arctic Seas! She smiled at that, sighing
involuntarily with sincere emotion, but prompted by selfish regret.

It had seemed to her that Jose had more than once permitted himself to
express his affection for her. Politely, correctly, of course, as a
gallant man addresses a friend's mistress, but manifesting in his
reserve a host of understood sentiments and tender restraint that
suggested hidden or implied declarations. Marianne had pretended not to
understand him. At that time, she loved Guy or thought that she loved
him, which amounts to the same thing. She contented herself with smiling
at the flirtation of Monsieur de Rosas.

"I have perhaps been very stupid," she said to herself. "Pshaw! he might
have been as silly as I, if occasion demanded. The obligations of
friendship! The phantom of Guy!"

She suddenly stopped and this name escaped her lips: _Jose_--_Joseph!_

Nevertheless, this was one of the vexations of this girl: she was angry
because she had acted rightly. Others suffer remorse for their ill
deeds, but she suffered for her virtue. She often thought of the Duc de
Rosas, as her mother Eve must have thought of Paradise lost. She would
have stirred, astonished, conquered, crushed Paris, if she had been the
mistress of Rosas.

"What then! Whose fault was it? How foolish of one not to dare
everything!"

Now see how suddenly and unexpectedly, just as an adversary might offer
an opportunity for revenge, chance, at the turning-point of her life,
had brought back to Paris this Jose whom she had never forgotten, and
who perhaps remembered her, and by whom she would be recognized most
assuredly, in any case. It was an unhoped, unlooked-for opportunity that
restored Marianne's faith in herself, superstitious as she was, like all
successful gamblers.

She had fallen, but how she could raise herself by the arms of the duke!
One must be determined.

Guy and Sabine were met on the way, like two helpers. She profited by
this circumstance, using the one to reach the other and to gain Rosas
from the latter. She bore a grudge, nevertheless, against Guy de Lissac,
the insolent and silly fellow who had formerly left her. Bah! before
taking vengeance on him, it was most important to make use of him, and,
after all, revenge is so wearisome and useless.

Now Kayser's niece, Guy's mistress, a woman who had given herself or who
had been taken, who had sold herself or who had been purchased, a young
girl who remained so in features, gracefulness and the virgin charms
that clothed her courtesan's body--her smile a virgin's, her glance full
of frolic--Marianne was now within a few feet of him whom she expected,
wishing for him as a seducer desires a woman.

"If he has loved me one moment, one single moment, Rosas will love me,"
she thought.

The salon was stiflingly hot, but Marianne was determined to keep
herself in the first row, to be directly under the eye of the duke.

She felt the waves of over-heated air rise to her temples, and at times
she feared that she would faint, half-stifled as she was and
unaccustomed now to attend soirees. She remained, however, looking
anxiously toward the door, watching for the appearance of the traveller
and wondering when the pale face of the Spaniard would show itself.

At a short distance from her there was a young woman of twenty-three or
twenty-four, courted like a queen and somewhat confused by the many
questions addressed to her; robed in a white gown, she was extremely
pretty, fair, and wore natural roses in her ash-colored hair, her eyes
had a wondering expression, her cheeks were flushed, and in her amiable,
gracious manner, she disclosed a touch of provincialism, modesty and
hesitation--Marianne heard Madame Gerson say to her neighbors:

"It is the minister's wife."

"Madame Vaudrey?"

"Yes! Very charming, isn't she?"

"Ravishingly pretty! Fresh-looking!"

Then in lowered tone:

"Too fresh!"

"Rather provincial!"

And one voice replied, in an ironical, apologetic tone:

"Bless me, my dear, nothing dashing! Hair and complexion peculiarly her
own! So much the better."

Notwithstanding the low tone of this conversation, Marianne heard it
all. One by one, every one looked at this young woman who borrowed her
golden tints from the rising sun. She bore the popular name of the new
minister. She entered into prominence with him, accepting gracefully and
unaffectedly the weight of his fame. Her timid, almost restless,
uncertain smile, seemed to crave from the other women pardon for her own
success, and there, surrounded by a group of men seated near the window,
were two persons for whom chairs had just been placed, one of whom was a
young, happy man, who exhaled an atmosphere of joy, and looked from time
to time toward Adrienne and Marianne as if to see if the young wife were
annoyed.

"Where is Monsieur Vaudrey then?" Marianne asked Madame Gerson.

"Why, he is just opposite to you! There on your right, beside Monsieur
Collard, and he is devouring you with his glances."

"Ah, bah!" said Marianne with an indifferent smile.

And she looked in her turn.

She had, in fact, already noticed this very elegant man who had been
watching her for some time.

But how could she know that he was Monsieur Vaudrey? He was delightful,
moreover, sprightly in manner and of keen intelligence. A few moments
before, she had heard him, as she passed by him under Sabine's guidance,
utter some flattering remarks which had charmed her and made her smile.

Ah! that was Vaudrey?

She had often heard him spoken of. She had read of his speeches. She had
even frequently seen his photograph in the stationers' windows.

The determined air of this young man, whom she knew to be eloquent, had
pleased her. She ought then to have recognized him. He was exactly as
his photographs represented him.

Of all the glances bestowed on the minister, Marianne's especially
attracted Sulpice. A moment previously he had felt a singular charm at
the appearance of this woman, threading her way directly between the
rows of men by whom she was so crowded as to be in danger of having her
garments pulled from her body. In his love of definitions and analyses,
Vaudrey had never pictured the Parisian woman otherwise, with her
piquant and instantaneous seductiveness, as penetrating as a subtle
essence.

Marianne, smiling restlessly, looked at him and allowed him to look at
her.

Her cheeks, which were extremely pale, suddenly became flushed as if
their color were heightened by some feverish attack, when, amid the stir
caused by the curiosity of the guests, and a greeting manifested by the
shuffling of feet and the murmuring of voices, Monsieur de Rosas
appeared; his air was somewhat embarrassed, he offered his arm to Madame
Marsy, who conducted him to the narrow stage as if to present him.

"At last! ah! it is he!"

"It is really the Duc de Rosas, is it not?"

"Yes, yes, it is he!"

"He is charming!"

The name of Rosas, although only repeated in an undertone by the lips
of these women, rung in Marianne's ears, sounding like a quickstep
played on a clarion. It seemed to her that a decisive moment in her life
was announced fantastically in those utterances. Even now, while burning
with the very fever of her eagerness, she felt the gambler's
superstition. As soon as she saw Jose, she said to herself at once that
if he saw her and recognized her first glance, then he had not forgotten
her and she could hope for everything. Everything! "Men happily forget
less quickly than women," she thought. "Through egotism, or from regret,
some abandon themselves to their reminiscences with complacency, like
this Guy, and recognize on our countenances the lines of their own
youth. Others, perhaps, mourn over the lost opportunity, and the duke is
sentimental enough to be of that class."

She thought that Rosas must look at her, yes, at any cost; and with body
inclined, her chin resting on her gloved right hand, while the other
handled her fan with the skill peculiar to the Spanish women, she darted
at the duke a rapid glance, a glance burning with desire and in which
she expressed her whole will. The human eye has within it all the power
of attraction possessed by a magnetic needle. As if he had experienced
the actual effect of that glance fixed on his countenance, the duke
raised his head after a polite but somewhat curtly elegant bow, to look
at the audience of lovely women whom Sabine had gathered to greet him,
and, as if only Marianne had been present, he at once saw the
motionless young woman silently contemplating him.

Rosas, as he appeared within the frame formed by the red curtains, his
thin, regular and ruddy face looking pale against the white of his
cravat and the bosom of his shirt, looked like a portrait of a Castilian
of the time of Philip II., clothed in modern costume, his fashionable
black clothes relieved only by a touch of vermilion, a red rosette. But
however fashionable the cut of his clothes might be, on this man with
the vague blue eyes, and looking contemplative and sad with his upturned
moustache, the black coat assumed the appearance of a _doublet_ of old,
on which the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor looked like a diminutive
cross of Calatrava upon a velvet cloak.

In fixing, to some extent, his wandering glance on the fervent look of
Marianne, this melancholy Spanish face was instinctively lighted up with
a fleeting smile that immediately passed and was followed by a slight,
respectful bow, quite sufficient, however, to surround the young woman
with an atmosphere that seemed to glow.

"He has recognized me! at once! come!--I am not forgotten."

As in the glorious moment of victory, her bloodless face was overspread
with a dazzling expression of joy. Boldly raising her head and inviting
his glances as she had braved them, she listened, with glowing eyes,
drinking each word that flowed from his lips, her nostrils distended as
if to scent the approach of an Oriental perfume, to the recital of the
narrative commenced by the duke in a measured, cajoling tone, which grew
animated and louder.

Everybody listened to Rosas. Only the slight fluttering of fans was
heard like a beating of wings. Without changing the tone of his
discourse, and recounting his travels to his audience as if he were
addressing only Marianne, he told in a voice more Italian than Spanish,
in musical, non-guttural cadences, of his experiences on the borders of
the Nile, of the weariness of the caravans, of the nights passed under
star-strewn skies, of the songs of the camel-driver, slowly intoned like
prayers, of the gloom of solitary wastes and of the poetic associations
of the ruins slumbering amid the red sands of the desert. At times he
recited a translation of an Arabian song or remarked in passing, on some
mournful ballad, refined as a Sennett, deep as the infinite, in which
the eternal words of love, tender and affecting in all languages,
assumed an intensely poetic character under the influence of their
Semitic nature; songs in which passers-by, strangers, lovers dead for
centuries, who had strewed, as it were, their joys and their sobs over
the sands of the desert, told the color of the hair and of the eyes of
their dear ones, pleaded with their betrothed dead for the alms of love,
and promised to spectres of women rose-colored garments and flowers that
time would never wither.

These songs of Arabs dying for Nazarenes, of sons of Mohammed
sacrificing themselves for the daughters of Aissa were so translated by
this Castilian that the exquisite charm of the original, filtered
through his rendering, lost none,--even in French,--of the special
characteristics of his own nation, a half-daughter of the Orient. And
inevitably, with its melancholy repetition, the poetry he spoke of dwelt
on wounded, suffering love, on the anguish of timid hearts, and the sobs
of unknown despairing Arabs, buried for ages under the sands of the
desert.

The duke seemed to take pleasure in dwelling on these poetic quotations
rather than on the reminiscences of his travels. His individuality, his
own impressions vanished before this passionate legacy bequeathed by one
human race to another. Marianne trembled, believing that she could see
even in Rosas's thoughts a desire to speak especially for her and to
her. Was it not thus that he spoke in his own house in the presence of
Lissac, squatting on his divan like an Arab story-teller?

She felt her youth renewed by the memory of all those past years. She
thought herself back once more in the studio on Rue de Laval. Sabine
Marsy's salon disappeared, Rosas was whispering in her ear, looking at
her, and allowing the love that he felt to be perceived, in spite of
Guy.

Guy! who was Guy? Marianne troubled herself about no one but De Rosas.
Only the duke existed now. Had Guy been blended with her life but for a
single moment? She embraced Rosas with her burning glance.

She no longer saw Sulpice, but he never looked away from Mademoiselle
Kayser. He thought her a most charming woman. A magnetic fluid, as it
were, flowed from her to this man, and he, with wandering mind, did not
hear one word of Monsieur de Rosas's narrative, but concentrated his
thoughts upon that pretty, enticing woman, whom he could not refrain
from comparing with his wife, sitting so near her at this moment.

Adrienne was very pretty, her beauty was more regular than the other's.
Her smooth, blond hair was in contrast with the tumbled, auburn locks of
Marianne, and yet, extraordinary as it was--Adrienne had never seemed to
be so cold as on that evening, as she sat there motionless, watching,
while a timid habitual smile played over her lips.

Sulpice suffered somewhat in consequence of this awkwardness on
Adrienne's part, contrasted as it was with the clever freedom of manner,
graceful attitude, and flowing outlines of that disturbing neighbor,
with her dull white countenance, half-closed mouth, strange curl of her
lips, which seemed turned up as if in challenge. She was decidedly a
Parisian, with all her intoxicating charms, that alluring, if vicious
attraction that flows from the eyes of even modest girls. Some words
spoken by Monsieur de Rosas reaching Vaudrey's ears--a description of
the somewhat fantastical preparation of poison by the Indians,
explained by the duke by way of parenthesis--suggested to Sulpice that
the most subtle, the gentlest and most certainly deadly poison was,
after all, the filtering of a woman's glance through the very flesh of a
man, and he thirsted for that longed-for poison, intoxicating and
delicious--

He was anxious for the duke to finish his remarks. What interest had he
in all those travels, those Arabic translations, that Oriental poetry,
or that poison from America? He was seized with the desire to know what
such a charming creature as Marianne thought. Ah! what a pretty girl! He
had already inquired her name; he happened to know Uncle Kayser; the
painter had formerly sent him a printed memoir _On the Method of
Moralizing Art through the Mind_.

The minister experienced on hearing Rosas the feeling of enervation that
attacked him in the Chamber when, near the dinner-hour, an orator became
too long-winded in his speech. He was unable to resist remarking in a
whisper to the President of the Council, who was near him:

"Suppose we call for the cloture?"

Monsieur Collard in a diplomatic way expressed his approval of Rosas by
a look that at the same time rebuked his colleague Vaudrey for his lack
of sufficient gravity.

The duke did not tire any one except Sulpice. He was listened to with
delight. The sentimental exterior of this man concealed a jester's
nature, and the sober appearance of this Castilian wore all the
characteristics of a polished lounger. The least smile that animated his
passive countenance became at once attractive. Marianne thought him most
delightful, or rather, she found him just what she had formerly believed
him to be, a refined, delicate and very simple man in spite of his
graciously haughty manner. When he concluded, the room echoed with the
thunder of the applause. Even in the adjoining rooms the people
applauded, for silence had been secured so as to hear his remarks. With
a wave of his gloved hand, Rosas seemed to disclaim that his discourse
merited the applause, and he received the greetings as a man of the
world receives a salutation, not as a tenor acknowledging the homage
paid to him. He strove to make his way through the group of young men
who were stationed behind him.

"At last!" said Vaudrey, in a half-whisper.

It was the moment for which he had been waiting. He would be able now to
address himself to Mademoiselle Kayser!

He hastened to offer his arm to Marianne.

Madame Marsy, eagerly and quickly, had already appropriated Monsieur de
Rosas, who was moreover surrounded and escorted by a crowd who
congratulated him noisily. Except for that, Marianne would have gone
direct to him in obedience to her desires.

Vaudrey's arm, however, was not to be despised. The new minister was
the leading figure in the assembly. She looked at Sulpice full in the
face as if to inquire the cause of his eagerness in placing himself at
her side, and observing that this somewhat mocking interrogation
disconcerted him, she smiled at him graciously.

She passed on smiling, amid the double row of guests who bowed as she
passed. She suddenly felt a sort of bewilderment, it seemed to her that
all these salutations were for her benefit. She believed herself created
for adoration. Inwardly she felt well-disposed towards Sulpice now,
because he had so gallantly chosen and distinguished her among all these
women.

After all, she would easily find Rosas again. And who knows? It would
perhaps be better that the duke should seek her. Meanwhile, she crossed
the salons, leaning on the arm of the minister. It was a kind of
triumph.

Good-naturedly and politely, but without pride, the minister received
all these attentions, becoming as they were to him in his official
capacity, and as he moved on he uttered from time to time some
commonplace compliment to Marianne, reserving his more intimate remarks
for the immediate future.

Before the buffet, brilliant with light and the gleaming of crystal, the
golden-tinted champagne sparkling in the goblets, the ruddy tone of the
punch, the many fruits, the bright-colored _granite_ and the ices,
Vaudrey stopped, releasing the arm of the young girl but remaining
beside her and passing her the sherbet which a lackey handed him over
the piled-up plates.

Groups were always encircling him; searching, half-anxious glances
greeted his. An eager hunt after smiles and greetings accompanied the
hunt for _tutti frutti_. But the minister confined his attentions to
Marianne, chafing under the eagerness of his desires, though bearing
them with good grace, as if he were really the lover of the pretty girl.

Marianne stood stirring the sherbet with the point of a silver-plated
spoon, examining this statesman, as seductive as a fashionable man, with
that womanly curiosity that divines a silent declaration. A gold weigher
does not balance more keenly in his scales an unfamiliar coin than a
woman estimates and gauges _the value_ of a stranger.

Marianne readily understood that she had fascinated Vaudrey. This
Vaudrey! Notwithstanding that he possessed a charming wife, he still
permitted himself to recognize beauty in other women, and to tell them
so, for he so informed Marianne! He declared it by his smile, his
sparkling eyes, and the protecting bearing that he instinctively
manifested in the presence of this creature who glanced at him with
perfect composure.

In the confusion attending the attack on the buffet and in the presence
of the crowd that formed a half-circle round the minister, it was not
possible for him to commit himself too much; and the conversation,
half-drowned by the noise of voices, was carried on by fits and starts;
but in order to make themselves understood, Vaudrey and Marianne drew
nearer each other and found themselves occasionally almost pressed
against each other, so that the light breath of this woman and the scent
of new-mown hay that she exhaled, wafted over Sulpice's face. He looked
at her so admiringly that it was noticeable. She was laced in a light
blue satin gown that showed her rosy arms to the elbows, and her
shoulders gleamed with a rosy tint that suggested the rays of a winter
sun lighting up the pure snow. A singular animation, half-feverish,
beamed in her small, piercing, restless eyes, and her delicate ears with
their well-marked rims were quite red. The light that fell from the wax
candles imparted to her hair a Titian red tint as if she had bound her
locks with henna during the night. She was visibly assured of her power
and smiled with a strange and provoking air.

Vaudrey felt really much disturbed, he was attracted and half-angered by
this pretty girl with dilating nostrils who calmly swallowed her glass
of sherbet. He thought her at once exquisite and lovely, doubly charming
with her Parisian grace and in her ball costume, her bare flesh as
lustrous as mother-of-pearl under the brilliant light.

Her corsage was ornamented on the left side by an embroidered black
butterfly, with outstretched wings of a brownish, brilliant tint, and
Vaudrey, with a smile, asked her, without quite understanding what he
said, if it were an emblematic crest.

She smiled.

"Precisely," she replied. "What I wear in my corsage I have in my mind.
Black butterflies--or _blue devils_, as you choose."

"You are not exceptional," said Sulpice. "All women are such."

"All women in your opinion then, are a little--what is it called? a
little out of the perpendicular--or to speak more to the point, a little
queer, Monsieur le Ministre?"

The minister smiled in his turn, and looked at Marianne, whose eyes,
seen between the blinking lids, gleamed as the electric eyes of a cat
shine between its long lashes.

"No," he said, "no, but I blame them somewhat for loving the blue only
in the butterflies of which you speak, the _blue devils_ that penetrate
their brain! They are born for blue, however, for that which the
provincial poets style 'the azure', and they shun it as if blue were
detestable. _Blue!_ Nonsense! Good for men, those simpletons, who in the
present age, are the only partisans of _blue_ in passion and in life."

Whether he desired it or not, he had drawn still closer to this creature
who studied him like a strategist while he fawned on her with his
glances, losing himself in that "blue" of which he spoke with a certain
elegance, in which he desired to express mockery, but which was
nevertheless sincere. In the same jesting tone, pointing to the light
blue of her gown, she said:

"You see, your Excellency, that all women do not dislike blue."

"If it is fashionable, _parbleu!_ And if it becomes their beauty as well
as this stuff of yours, they would adore it, most assuredly."

"They love it otherwise, too--In passion and in life. That depends on
the women--and on men," she added, showing her white teeth while smiling
graciously.

She dropped her spoon in the saucer and handed the sherbet to a servant.
With an involuntary movement--or perhaps, after all, it was a shrewdly
calculated one--she almost grazed Sulpice's cheek and lips when she
extended her round and firm arm, and Sulpice, who was somewhat
bewildered, was severely tempted, like some collegian, to kiss it in
passage.

He closed his eyes and a moment after, on reopening them, the disturbing
element having passed, he saw Marianne before him with her fan in her
hand, and as if the image of which he spoke only now recurred to his
memory, he said:

"Mademoiselle, it seems to me that in this very costume and as charming
as you are at this moment, I have seen your portrait at the Salon; is it
not so?"

"Yes," she said. "It is the very best painting that my uncle has
produced."

"I thought it excellent before seeing you," said Sulpice, "but now--"

She did not feel satisfied with the smile that accompanied the
compliment. She wished to hear the entire phrase.

"Now--?" said she, as a most seductive smile played on her lips.

"Now, I find it inferior to the original!"

"One always says so, your Excellency, except perhaps to the artist; but
I was greatly afraid that you would not think me so, arrayed in
this--this famous blue--this sky-blue that you love so much."

"And that I love a hundred times more from this evening forward," said
he, in a changed and genuinely affected tone.

She did not reply, but looked at him full in the face as if to inform
him that she understood him. He was quite pale.

"Would you not like to be one of the bright ornaments of my salon, as
you are of that of Madame Marsy?" said he, in a whisper.

"With the greatest happiness, your Excellency."

What Sulpice said was not heard by the others; but Marianne felt that
she was observed, envied already, and manifested her complete
satisfaction with a toss of her head. In this atmosphere of flattery,
oppressive as with the heavy odor of incense, she experienced a
sensation of omnipotence, the intoxication of that power with which
Vaudrey was invested, whose envied reflection was cast on her by that
simple aside spoken in the midst of the crowd.

She was delighted and exceedingly proud. She almost forgot that her
visit had been made on Rosas's account.

Vaudrey was about to add something, when Madame Marsy in passing to
greet her guests, noticed Marianne and grasping her hand:

"I beg your pardon, your Excellency," she said, "but I must take her
away from you. I have been asked for her."

"By whom?" said Vaudrey.

"Monsieur de Rosas!"

Vaudrey looked at Marianne. He observed distinctly a flash of joy
illuminate her pale face and he felt a sudden and singular discontent,
amounting almost to physical anguish. And why, great heavens?

Marianne smiled a salutation; he half-bowed and watched her as she went
away, with a sort of angry regret, as if he had something further to say
to this woman who was almost a stranger to him, and who, guided by
Sabine, now disappeared amid the crowd of black coats and bright
toilets. And then, almost immediately and suddenly, he was surrounded
and besieged by his colleagues of the Chamber, men either indifferent or
seeking favors, who only awaited the conclusion of the conversation with
Mademoiselle Kayser, which they would certainly have precipitated,
except for the fear of acting indiscreetly, in order to precipitate
themselves on him. Amid all those unknown persons who approached him,
Vaudrey sought a friend as he felt himself lost and taken by assault by
this rabble.

The sight of the face of a friend, older than himself, a spare man with
a white beard very carefully trimmed, caused him a feeling of pleasure,
and he joyfully exclaimed:

"Eh! _pardieu!_ why, here is Ramel!"

He immediately extended both hands in warm greeting to this man of sixty
years, wearing a white cravat twisted round his neck, like a neckerchief
in the old-fashioned style, and whose black waistcoat with its standing
collar of ancient pattern was conspicuous amid the open waistcoats of
the fashionably-dressed young men who had been very eagerly surrounding
the minister for the last few moments.

"Good day, Ramel!--How delighted I am to see you!"--

"And I also," said Ramel in a friendly and affectionate tone, while his
face, that seemed severe, but was only good-natured and masculine,
suddenly beamed. "It is not a little on your account that I came here."

"Really?"

"Really. I was anxious to shake hands with you. It is so long since I
saw you. How much has happened since then!"

"Ah! Ramel, who the devil would have said that I should be minister when
I took you my first article for the _Nation Francaise_!" said Vaudrey.
"Bah! who is not a minister?" said Ramel. "You are. Remember what
Napoleon said to Bourrienne as he entered the Tuileries: 'Here we are,
Bourrienne! now we must stay here!'"

"That is exactly what Granet said to me when he told me of the new
combination."

"Granet expressed in that more of an after-thought than your old Ramel."

"My best friend," said Sulpice with emotion, grasping this man's hands
in his.

"It is so much more meritorious on your part to tell me that," said
Ramel, "seeing that now you do not lack friendships."

"You are still a pessimist, Ramel?"

"I--A wild optimist, seeing that I believe everything and everybody! But
I must necessarily believe in the stupidity of my fellows, and upon this
point I am hardly mistaken."

"But what brings you to Madame Marsy's, you who are a perfect savage?"

"Tamed!--Because, I repeat to you, I knew that you were coming and that
Monsieur de Rosas was to speak on the subject of savages, and these
please me. If I had been rich or if I only had enough to live on, I
should have passed my life in travelling. And in the end, I shall have
lived between Montmartre and Batignolles: a tortoise dreaming that he is
a swallow--"

"Ramel, my dear fellow," said the minister, "would you wish me to give
you a mission where you could go and study whatever seemed good to you?"

"With my rheumatism? Thanks, your Excellency!" said Ramel, smiling. "No,
I am too old, and never having asked any one for anything, I am not
going to begin at my age."

"You do not ask, it is offered you."

"Well, I have no desire for that. I am at the hour of the _far niente_
that precedes the final slumber. It is a pleasant condition. One has
seen so many things and persons that one has no further desires."

"The fact is," said the minister, "that if all the people you have
obligated in your life had solicited an invitation from Madame Marsy,
these salons would not be large enough to contain them."

"Bah! they have all forgotten as I have, myself," said Ramel, with a
shake of his head and smiling pleasantly.

Vaudrey felt intense pleasure in meeting, in the midst of this crowd of
indifferent or admiring persons, the man who had formerly seen him
arrive in Paris, and with whom he had corresponded from the heart of his
province, as with a kinsman. There was, in fact, between them, a
relationship of mind and soul that united this veteran of the press with
this young statesman.

The ideal sought was the same, but the temperaments were different.
Ramel, although he had known them, had for a long time avoided those
excitements of struggle and power that inflamed Vaudrey's blood.

"It was a glorious day when my pulse became regulated," he said.
"Experience brought me the needed tonic."

Denis Ramel was a wise man. He took life as he found it, without
enthusiasm as without bitterness. He was not wealthy. More than sixty
years old, he found himself, after a life of hard, rough and continuous
struggle, as badly off as when he started out on his career, full of
burning hopes. He had passed his life honorably as a journalist--a
journalist of the good old times, of the school of thought, not of
news-tellers,--he had loyally and conscientiously exercised a profession
in which he took pleasure; he had read much, written much, consumed much
midnight oil, touched upon everything; put his fingers into every kind
of pie without soiling them, and after having valiantly turned the heavy
millstone of daily labor incessantly renewed for forty years, he had
reached the end of his journey, the brink of the grave, almost
penniless, after having skirted Fortune and seen Opportunity float
toward him her perfumed and intoxicating locks more than a hundred
times. Bent, weary, almost forgotten, and unknown and misunderstood by
the new generation, that styled this enthusiasm, more eager, moreover,
than that of juvenile faith, "old"--he saw the newcomers rise as he
might have beheld the descent of La Courtille.

"It amuses me."

Ramel had, in the course of his career as a publicist, as a dealer in
fame, assisted without taking part therein, in the formation of
syndicates, allotments of shares and financial intrigues; and putting
his shoulder to the wheel of enterprises that appeared to him to be
solid, while seeking to strike out those which appeared to be doubtful,
he had created millionaires without asking a cent from them, just as he
had made ministers without accepting even a thread of ribbon at their
hands.

This infatuating craft of a maker of men pleased him. All those pioneers
in the great human comedy, he had seen on their entrance, hesitating and
crying to him for assistance. This statesman, swelling out with his
importance in the tribune, had received the benefit of his correction of
his earlier harangues. He had encouraged, during his competition for the
Prix de Rome, this member of the Institute who to-day represented
national art at the Villa Medicis; he had seen this composer, now a
millionaire, beg for a private rehearsal as he might ask alms, and slip
into one's hands concert tickets for the Herz hall. He was the first to
point out the verses of the poet who now wore _l'habit vert_. He had
first heralded the fame of the actor now in vogue, of the tenor who
to-day had his villas at Nice, yes, Ramel was the first to say: "He is
one of the chosen few!"

Old, weary and knowing, very gentle and refined in his banter, and
refusing to be blinded or irritated by the trickeries of destiny, Denis
Ramel, when asked why, at his age and with his talents, he was neither a
deputy, nor a millionaire, nor a member of the Institute, but only a
Warwick living like a poor devil, smiled and said, with the tone of a
man who has probed to the bottom the affairs of life:

"Bah! what is the use? All that is not so very desirable. Ministers,
academicians, millionaires, prefects, men of power, I know all about
them. I have made them all my life. The majority of those who strut
about at this very time, well! well! it is I who made them!"

And, like a philosopher allowing the rabble to pass him, who might have
been their chief, but preferred to be their judge, he locked himself in
his apartments with his books, his pictures, his engravings, his little
collection slowly gathered year by year, article by article, smoking his
pipe tranquilly, and at times reviewing the pages of his life, just as
he might have fingered the leaves of a portfolio of engravings, thinking
when he chanced to meet some notable person of the day who shunned him
or merely saluted him curtly and stiffly:

"You were not so proud when you came to ask me to certify your pay-slip
for the cashier of the journal."

Ramel had always greatly esteemed Sulpice Vaudrey. This man seemed to
him to be more refined and less forgetful than others. Vaudrey had never
"posed." As a minister, he recalled with deep emotion the period of his
struggles. Ramel, the former manager of the _Nation Francaise_, was one
of the objects of his affection and admiration. He would have been
delighted to snatch this man from his seclusion and place him in the
first rank, to make this sexagenarian who had created and moulded so
many others, noteworthy by a sudden stroke.

Amid the tumultuous throng, and feeling overjoyed to find once more one
whom he could trust, to whom he could abandon himself entirely, he
repeated to him in all sincerity:

"Come, Ramel! Would you consent to be my secretary general?"

"No! your Excellency," Ramel answered, as a kindly smile played beneath
his white moustaches.

"To oblige me?--To help me?"

"No--Why, I am an egotist, my dear Vaudrey. Truly, that would make me
too jealous. Take Navarrot," he added, as he pointed to a fashionable
man, elegantly cravatted, carrying his head high, who had just greeted
Vaudrey, using the same phrase eight times: "My dear minister--your
Excellency--my minister--"

"Navarrot?"

"He appears to be very much attached to you!"

"You are very wicked, Ramel. He holds to the office and not to the man.
He is not the friend of the minister, but of ministers. He is one of the
ordinary touters of the ministry. He applauds everything that their
Excellencies choose to say."

"Oh! I know those touters," said the old journalist. "When a minister is
in power, they cheer him to the echo; when he is down, they belabor
him."

Vaudrey looked at him and laughingly said: "Begone, journalist!"

"But at any rate,"--and here he extended his hand to Ramel,--"you will
see me this evening?"

"Certainly."

"And you still live at--?"

"Rue Boursault, Boulevard des Batignolles."

"Till then, my dear Ramel! If occasion require, you will not refuse to
give me your advice?"

"Nor my devotion. But without office, remember without office," said
Ramel, still smiling.

Vaudrey took great delight in chatting with his old friend, but for a
moment he had been seized with an eager desire to find amid the
increasing crowd that thronged the salons, the pretty girl who had
appeared to him like a statue of Desire, whetted desire, but even in her
charms somewhat unwholesome, yet disturbing and appetizing.

He had come to Sabine Marsy's only by chance and as if to display in
public the joy of his triumph, just as a newly decorated man willingly
accepts invitations in order to show off his new ribbon, but he now felt
happy for having done so. He had promised himself only to put himself in
evidence and then disappear with Adrienne to the enjoyment of their
usual chats, to taste that intimacy that was so dear to him, but which,
since his establishment on Place Beauvau, had vanished.

He habitually disliked such receptions as that in which he now took
part, those soirees as fatiguing as those crowds where one packs six
hundred persons in salons capable of holding only sixty: commonplace
receptions, where the master of the house is as happy when he refuses
invitations as a theatre-manager when his play is the rage; where one is
stifled, crushed, and where one can only reach the salon after a
pugilistic encounter, and where the capture of a glass of syrup entails
an assault, and the securing of an overcoat demands a battle. He held in
horror those salons where there is no conversation, where no one is
acquainted, where, because of the hubbub of the crowd or the stifling
silence attending a concert, one cannot exchange either ideas or
phrases, not even a furtive handshake, because of the packing and
crushing of the guests. It was a miracle that he had just been able to
exchange a few words with Mademoiselle Kayser and Ramel. The vulgarity
of the place had at once impressed him,--the more so because he was the
object of attraction for all those crowded faces.

All that gathering of insignificant, grave and pretentious young men,
who, while they crowded, made their progress in the ranks of the
sub-prefects, councillors of prefectures, picking up nominations under
the feet of the influential guests as they would cigar stumps, disgusted
him; men of twenty years, born, as it were, with white cravats,
pretentious and pensive, creatures of office and not of work, haunting
the Chambers and the antechambers, mere collectors of ideas, repeaters
of serious commonplaces, salon democrats who would not offer their
ungloved hand to a workman on the street; staff-majors ambitious of
honors and not of devotion, whom he felt crowding around him, with
smiles on their lips and applications in their pockets. How he preferred
the quiet pleasure of reading at the fireside, a chat with a friend, or
listening to one of Beethoven's sonatas, or a selection from Mendelssohn
played by Adrienne, whose companionship made the unmarked flight of the
hours pass more sweetly.

It was for that that he was created. At least he thought so and believed
it. And now this salon that he had simply desired to traverse, at once
seemed altogether delightful to him. And all this was due to his meeting
a divine creature in the midst of this crowd. He was eager to find
Marianne, to see her again. She aroused his curiosity as some enigma
might.

What, then, was this woman, was she virtuous or of questionable status?
Ah! she was a woman, or rather ten women in one, at the very least! A
woman from head to foot! A woman to her finger tips, a refined, Parisian
woman, perverse even in her virginity, and a virgin perhaps in her
perversity. A problem in fair flesh.

As Vaudrey hurriedly left the buffet, every one made way for him, and he
crossed the salons, eagerly looking out for Marianne. As he passed
along, he saw Guy de Lissac sitting on a chair upholstered in garnet
satin, his right hand resting on the gilded back and chatting with
Adrienne who was fanning herself leisurely. On noticing Sulpice, the
young woman smiled at him even at a distance, the happy smile of a
loving woman, and she embraced him with a pure glance, asking a question
without uttering a word, knowing well that he habitually left in great
haste.

"Do you wish to return?" was the meaning of her questioning glance.

He passed before her, replying with a smile, but without appearing to
have understood her, and disappeared in another salon, while Lissac said
to Adrienne:

"What about the ministry, madame?"

"Oh! don't speak to me of it!--it frightens me. In those rooms, it seems
to me that I am not at home. Do you know just what I feel? I fancy
myself travelling, never, however, leaving the house. Ministers
certainly should be bachelors. Men have all the honor, but their wives
endure all the weariness."

"There must, however, be at the bottom of this weariness, some pleasure,
since they so bitterly regret to take leave of it."

"Ah! _Dieu!_" said Adrienne. "Already I believe that I should regret
nothing. No, I assure you, nothing whatever."

She, too, might have desired,--as Vaudrey did formerly--to leave the
soiree, to be with her husband again, and she thought that Sulpice found
it necessary to remain longer, since he had not definitely decided on
going away.

The new salon that he entered, communicated with a smaller, circular
one, hung with Japanese silk draperies, and lighted by a Venetian
chandelier that cast a subdued light over the divans upon which some of
the guests sat chatting. Sulpice immediately divined, as if by instinct,
that Marianne was there. He went straight in that direction, and as he
entered the doorway, through the opening framed by two pale blue
portieres, he saw in front of him, sitting side by side, the pretty girl
and the Duc de Rosas to whom she had listened so attentively, almost
devotedly, a little earlier; he recalled this now.

The light fell directly on Mademoiselle Kayser's shoulders and played
over her fair hair. The duke was looking at her.

Vaudrey took but a single step forward.

He experienced an altogether curious and inexplicable sensation. This
tete-a-tete displeased him.

At that moment, on half-turning round,--perhaps by chance--she perceived
the minister and greeting him with a sweet smile, she rose and beckoned
to him to approach her.

The sky-blue satin hangings, on which the light fell, seemed like a
natural framework for the beautiful blonde creature.

"Your Excellency," she said, "permit me to introduce my friend, the Duc
de Rosas, he is too accomplished not to appreciate eloquence and he
entertains the greatest admiration for you."

Rosas had risen in his turn, and greeted the minister with a very
peculiar half-inclination, not as a suitor in the presence of a powerful
man, but as a nobleman greeting a man of talent.

Vaudrey sought to discover an agreeable word in the remarks of this man
but he failed to do so. He had, nevertheless, just before applauded
Rosas's remarks, either out of condescension or from politeness. But it
seemed to him that here the duke was no longer the same man. He gave him
the impression of an intruder who had thrust himself in the way that led
to some possible opportunity. He nevertheless concealed all trace of the
ill-humor that he himself could not define or explain, and ended by
uttering a commonplace phrase in praise of the duke, but which really
meant nothing.

As he was about to move away, Marianne detained him by a gesture:

"Well, your Excellency," she remarked, with a charming play of her lips
as she smiled, "you see,"--and she pointed to the blue draperies of the
little salon, as dainty as a boudoir--"you see that there are some women
who like blue."

"Yes, Madame Marsy!--" Vaudrey answered, with an entirely misplaced
irony that naturally occurred to him, as a reproach.

"So do I," said Marianne. "We have only chatted together five minutes,
but I have found that time enough to discover that you and I have many
tastes in common. I am greatly flattered thereby."

"And I am very happy," replied Vaudrey, who was disturbed by her direct
glances that pierced him like a blade.

She had resumed her place on the divan, but Vaudrey had already forgiven
her tete-a-tete with Rosas--and in truth, what had he to forgive?--This
burning glance had effaced everything. He bore it away like a bright ray
and still shuddered at the sensation he experienced.

He was in a hurry to leave. He now felt a sudden attack of nervousness.
He was at the same moment charmed and bored. Again he resumed--amid the
throng that made way for him, humbly performing its duty as a crowd--his
role of minister, raising his head, and greeting with his official
smile, but, at the bottom of his heart, really consumed by an entirely
different thought. His brain was full of blue, of floating clouds, and
he still heard Marianne's voice ringing in his ears with an insinuating
tone, whispering: "We have many tastes in common," together with all
kinds of mutual understandings which, as it were, burned like a fire in
his heart.

He saw Adrienne still seated in the same place and smiling sweetly at
him,--a smile of ardent devotion, but which seemed to him to be
lukewarm. He leaned toward her, reached his hands out and said to De
Lissac, hurriedly, as he grasped his hand: "We meet later, do we not,
Guy?" Then he disappeared in the antechamber, while the servants
hurried toward Madame Vaudrey, bearing her cloak, and as Vaudrey put on
his overcoat, a voice called out:

"His Excellency's carriage."

"I am exhausted," said Adrienne, when she had taken her place in the
carriage. "What about yourself?"

"I? not at all! I am not at all tired. It was very entertaining! One
must show one's self now--"

"I know that very well," the young wife replied.

Like a child who is anxious to go to sleep, she gently rested her
hood-covered head on Sulpice's shoulder. Her tiny hands sought her
husband's hand, to press it beneath her cloak, as warm as a nest; and
after she had closed her eyes, overcome as she was by weariness, her
breathing seemed to become gradually almost as regular as in slumber,
and Sulpice Vaudrey recalled once more, beneath the light of the
chandeliers, that pretty blonde, with her half-bare arms and shoulders,
and strange eyes, who moistened her dry lips and smiled as she swallowed
her sherbet.




VI


In the pretty little Japanese salon, with its panels of sky-blue satin,
framed with gilded bamboo, Marianne was seated on the divan, half-facing
the duke as if to penetrate his inward thoughts, and she seemed to the
Castilian as she did to Vaudrey, to be a most charming creature amid
all those surroundings that might have been made expressly to match her
fair beauty. Moreover, with Rosas, her freedom of manner was entirely
different from that which she manifested to Sulpice, and she embraced
the young man with a passionate, fervent glance.

Jose felt himself grow pale in the presence of this exquisite creature
whose image, treasured in the depths of his heart, he had borne with him
wherever his fancy had led him to travel. He gazed at her as a man looks
at a woman whom he has long desired, but whom some urgent necessity has
kept out of his way, and who by chance is suddenly brought near him,
fate putting within our reach the dream--

She was prettier than ever, graceful and blooming, "more matured," like
a fruit whose color is more tempting to the appetite. Sabine had just
before very naturally brought these two together and instinctively, as
if they had to exchange many confidences, they had immediately sought a
retired spot away from that crowd and were seated there in that salon
where Vaudrey, already half-jealous, guessed that Marianne would be.

Yes, indeed, she had many confidences to impart to that man who had
suddenly entered the sphere of her life and had suddenly disappeared,
remaining during several years as if dead to her. It seemed to her as
they sat face to face that this flight of wasted time had made her still
younger, and Rosas, notwithstanding his cold demeanor, allowed his
former passion to be divined: the women one loves unmask one's secret
before a man can himself explain what he feels.

She felt a profound, sincere joy. She recalled a similar conversation
with Jose in his studio, that Oriental corner hidden in the Rue de
Laval. The Japanese satin enhanced the illusion.

"Do you know that it seems to me," she said, "that I have been dreaming,
and that I am not a whit older?"

"You are not altered, in fact," said Rosas. "I am mistaken--"

"Yes, I know. I have grown lovelier. That is a compliment that I am used
to--Lissac has told me that already, only the other morning."

She bit her lips almost imperceptibly, as if to blame herself for her
imprudence, but had she mentioned Guy's name designedly, she could not
have been better satisfied with the result. Monsieur de Rosas, usually
very pale, became pallid, and a slight curl of his lip, although
immediately suppressed, gave an upward turn to his reddish moustache.

"Ah!" he said, "You still see Guy."

"I!--I had not spoken a single word to him until I asked him to have an
invitation sent me for this soiree, and then it was merely because I
knew you would be here."

"Ah!" said Jose again, without adding a word.

Marianne was satisfied. She knew now that the duke still loved her,
since the mention of Lissac's name had made him tremble. Well! she had
shrewdly understood her Rosas.

"And what have you been doing, my dear duke, for such an age?" she said.

She looked at him as she had looked at Vaudrey, with her sweet and
shrewd smile, which moved him profoundly, and her glance penetrated to
the inmost depths of his being.

"You know the old saying: 'I have lived.' It is great folly, perhaps,
but it is the truth."

"And I wager," boldly said Marianne, "that you have never thought of
me."

"Of you?"

"Of me. Of that mad Marianne, who is the maddest creature of all those
you have met in your travels from the North Pole to Cambodia, but who
has by no means a wicked heart, although a sufficiently unhappy one, and
that has never ceased to beat a little too rapidly at certain
reminiscences which you do not recall, perhaps--who knows?"

"I remember everything," replied the duke in a grave voice.

Marianne looked at him and commenced to laugh.

"Oh! how you say that, _mon Dieu!_ Do you remember I used to call you
Don Carlos? Well, you have just reminded me of Philip II. 'I remember
everything!' B-r-r! what a funereal tone. Our reminiscences are not,
however, very dramatic."

"That depends on the good or ill effects that they cause," said Rosas
very seriously.

"Ah! God forgive me if I have ever willingly done you the least harm, my
dear Rosas. Give me your hand. I have always loved you dearly, my
friend."

She drew him gently toward her, half bending her face under the cold
glance of the young man:

"Look at me closely and see if I lie."

The duke actually endeavored to read the gray-blue eyes of Marianne; but
so strange a flash darted from them, that he recoiled, withdrawing his
hands from the pressure of those fingers.

"Come, come!" she said, "I see that my cat-like eyes still make you
afraid. Are they, then, very dreadful?"

She changed their expression to one of sweetness, humility, timidity and
winsomeness.

"After all, that is something to be proud of, my dear duke. It is very
flattering to make a man tremble who has killed tigers as our sportsmen
kill partridges."

"You know very well why I am still sufficiently a child to tremble
before you, Marianne," murmured Jose. "At my age, it is folly; but I am
as superstitious as gamblers--or sailors, those other gamblers, who
stake their lives, and I have never met you without feeling that I was
about to suffer."

"To suffer from what?"

"To suffer through you," said the duke. "Do you know that if I had
never met you, it is probable that I should never have seen all those
countries of which I spoke just now, and that I should have been married
long ago, at Madrid or at Toledo?"

"And I prevented you?--"

Rosas interrupted Marianne, saying abruptly, and smiling almost sadly:

"Ah! my dear one, if you only knew--you have prevented many things."

"If I have prevented you from being unhappy, I am delighted. Besides, it
is evident that you have never had a very determined inclination for
marriage, seeing that you have preferred to trot around the world."

"Like Don Quixote, eh? Do you know, moreover, since we are talking of
all these things, that you have saved me from dying in the corner like
an abandoned dog?"

"I?" said Marianne.

"You or your songs, as you please. Yes, in Egypt I suffered from fever
something like typhus. They left me for dead, as after a battle, in the
most wretched and frightful of native villages. No doctors, who might,
perhaps, have cured me, not a bed, not even a mattress. My servants,
believing me past hope, abandoned me--or rather, for I prefer your
Parisian word--cast me adrift--there is no other expression. There I
was, stretched out on a heap of damp straw--in short, on a dunghill--"

"You, Rosas?"

"In all conscience, I correctly portrayed Job there; lean, with a three
months' old beard, and with the death-rattle in my throat; in the open
air--don't alarm yourself, the nights were warm. In the evening the
fellah-women gathered round me, while I watched the sun that tinted
their cheeks with bronze--there were some pretty ones among them, I have
painted them in water-colors from memory--they poured out their insults
upon me in guttural tones, which I unfortunately understood, as I am an
Orientalist,"--he smiled--"and in addition to those insults they threw
mud at me, a fetid mass of filth. The women were charming, although they
took part in it. These people did not like the _roumi_, the shivering
Christian. Besides, women do not like men who have fallen. They do not
like feeble creatures.--"

"Bah!--and where were the hospitals, the Sisters of Charity?"

"Are you quite sure that the Sisters of Charity are women, my dear
Marianne?--In a word, I swear that I asked only one thing, as I lay on
that devilish, poisonous dunghill, and that was, to end the matter in
the quickest possible way, that I might be no longer thought of,
when--don't know why, or, rather, I know very well--in my fever, a
certain voice reached me--whence?--from far away it commenced
humming,--I should proclaim it yours among a thousand--a ridiculously
absurd refrain that we heard together one evening at the Varietes, at
an anniversary celebration. And this Boulevard chant recurred to me
there in the heart of that desert, and transported me at a single bound
to Paris, and I saw you again and these fair locks that I now look at, I
saw them, too, casting upon your forehead the light shadow that they do
now. I heard your laugh. I actually felt that I had you beside me in one
of the stage-boxes at the theatre, listening to the now forgotten singer
humming the refrain that had so highly amused you, Guy and myself--"

It seemed to Marianne that the duke hesitated for a moment before
pronouncing Guy's name. It was an almost imperceptible hesitation,
rather felt than seen.

Rosas quickly recovered:

"On my word, you will see directly that the Boulevard lounger was hidden
under your gloomy Castilian,--that refrain took such a hold on my poor
wandering brain, such an entire possession, that I clung to it when the
fever was at its height--I hummed it again and again, and on my honor,
it banished the fever, perhaps by some homeopathic process, for at any
other time, this deuced refrain would have aroused a fever in me."

"Why?--Because it was I who formerly hummed it?"

"Yes," said Rosas in a lowered tone. "Well! yes, just for that
reason!--"

He drew closer to her on the divan, and she said to him, laughingly:

"How fortunate it is that Faure is singing yonder! He attracts
everybody and so leaves us quite alone in this salon. It is very
pleasant. Would you like to go and applaud Faure? It is some years since
I heard him."

"You are very malicious, Marianne," said the duke. "Let me steal this
happy, fleeting hour. I am very happy."

"You are happy?"

"Profoundly happy, and simply because I am near you, listening to you
and looking at you--"

"My poor Job," she said, still laughing, "would you like me to sing you
the refrain that we heard at the Varietes?"

De Rosas did not reply, but simply looked at her.

He felt as if he were surrounded with all the perfume of youth. On a
console beside Marianne, stood a vase of inlaid enamel containing sprigs
of white lilacs which as she leaned forward, surrounded her fair head as
with an aureole of spring. Her locks were encircled with milk-white
flowers and bright green leaves, transparent and clear, like the limpid
green of water; and at times these sprigs were gently shaken, dropping a
white bud on Marianne's hair, that looked like a drop of milk amid a
heap of ruddy gold.

Ah! how at this moment, all the poetry, all the past with its
unacknowledged love swelled Rosas's heart and rushed to his lips. In
this brilliantly-lighted salon, under the blaze of the lights, amid the
shimmering reflections of the satin draperies, he forgot everything in
his rapture at the presence of this woman, lovely to adoration, whose
glance penetrated his very veins and filled him with restless thoughts.

The distant music, gentle, penetrating and languishing, some soothing
air from Gounod, reached them like a gentle breeze wafted into the room.

Jose believed himself to be in a dream.

"Ah! if you only knew, madame," he said, becoming more passionate with
each word that he spoke, as if he had been gulping down some liqueur,
"if you only knew how you have travelled with me everywhere, in thought,
there, carried with me like a scapular--"

"My portrait?" said Marianne. "I remember it. I was very slender then,
prettier, a young girl, in fact."

"No! no! not your portrait. I tore that up in a fit of frenzy."

"Tore it up?"

"Yes, as I thought that those eyes, those lips and that brow belonged to
another."

Marianne's cheeks became pallid.

"But I have taken with me something better than that portrait: I
preserved you, you were always present, and pretty, so pretty--as you
are now, Marianne--Look at yourself! No one could be lovelier!"

"And why," she said slowly, speaking in a deep, endearing tone, "why did
you not speak to me thus, of old?"

"Ah! of old!" said the duke angrily.

She allowed her head to fall on the back of the divan; looking at this
man as she well knew how, and insensibly creeping closer to him, she
breathed in his ears these burning words:

"Formerly, one who was your friend was beside me, is that not so?"

"Do not speak to me of him," Jose said abruptly.

"On the contrary, I am determined to tell you that even if I had loved
him, I should not have hesitated for a moment to leave him and follow
you. But I did not love him."

"Marianne!"

"You won't believe me? I never loved him. I have never been his
mistress."

"I do not ask your secret. I do not speak of him," said the duke, who
had now become deadly pale.

"And I am determined to speak to you of him. Never, you understand,
never was Guy de Lissac my lover. No, in spite of appearances; he has
never even kissed my lips. I thought I loved him, but before yielding, I
had time to discover that I did not love him! And I waited, I swear to
you, expecting that you would say to me: 'I love you!'"

"I?"

"You," said Marianne, in a feeble tone. "You never guessed then?"

And she crept with an exquisitely undulating movement still closer to
Rosas, who, as if drawn by some magnetic fluid, surrendered his face to
this woman with the wandering eyes, half-open lips, from which a gentle
sigh escaped and died away in the duke's hair.

He said nothing, but hastily seizing Marianne's hand, he drew her face
close to his lips, her pink nostrils dilated as if the better to breathe
the incense of love; and wild, distracted, intoxicated, he pressed his
feverish, burning lips upon that fresh mouth that he felt exhaled the
perfume of a flower that opens to the morning dew.

"I love you now, I loved you then!--" Marianne said to him, after that
kiss that paled his cheeks.

Rosas had risen: a thunder of applause greeted the termination of a song
in the other salon and the throng was pouring into the smaller salon.
Marianne saw Uncle Kayser, who was arguing with Ramel, whose kindly,
lean face wore an expression of weariness. She also rose, grasped the
duke's hands with a nervous pressure and said as she still gazed at him:

"There is my uncle. We shall see each other again, shall we not?"

She crushed Rosas with her electric glance.

Preceding the duke, she went straight to Kayser and took his arm,
leaning on it as if to show that she was not alone, that she had a
natural protector, and was not, as Rosas might have supposed, a girl
without any position.

Kayser was almost astonished at the eagerness of his niece.

"Let us go!" she said to him.

"What! leave? Why, there is to be a supper."

"Well! we will sup at the studio," she replied nervously. "We will
discuss the morality of art."

She had now attained her end. She realized that anything she might add
would cool the impression already made on the duke. She wished to leave
him under the intoxication of that kiss.

"Let us go!" said Kayser, drawing himself up in an ill-humored way.
"Since you wish it--what a funny idea!--Ramel," he said, extending his
hand to the old journalist, "if your feelings prompt you, I should like
to show you some canvases."

"I go out so rarely," said Ramel.

"Huron!" said the painter.

"Puritan!" said Marianne, also offering her hand to Denis Ramel.

Rosas looked after her and saw her disappear amongst the guests in the
other salon, under the bright flood of light shed by the chandeliers;
and when she was gone, it seemed to him that the little Japanese salon
was positively empty and that night had fallen on it. Profound ennui at
once overcame him, while Marianne, in a happy frame of mind, on
returning to Kayser's studio, reviewed the incidents of that evening,
recalling Vaudrey's restless smile, and seeming again to hear Rosas's
confidences, while she thought: "He spoke to me of the past almost in
the same terms as Lissac. Is human nature at the bottom merely
commonplace, that two men of entirely different characters make almost
identical confessions?" While she was recalling that passionate moment,
the duke was experiencing a feeling of disappointment because of their
interrupted conversation, and he reproached himself for not having
followed Marianne, for having allowed her to escape without telling
her--

But what had he to tell her?

He had said everything. He had entirely surrendered, had opened his
soul, as transparent as crystal. And this notwithstanding that he had
vowed in past days that he would keep his secret locked within him. He
had smothered his love under his frigid Castilian demeanor. And now,
suddenly, like a child, on the first chance meeting with that woman, he
had allowed himself to be drawn into a confession that he had been
rigidly withholding!

Ah! it was because he loved her, and had always loved her. There was
only one woman in the whole world for him,--this one. He did not lie.
Marianne's smile haunted him, wherever he was. In her glance was a
poison that he had drunk, which set his blood on fire. He was hers.
Except for the image of Lissac, he would most certainly have returned
long since to Paris to seek Mademoiselle Kayser.

But Lissac was there. He recalled how much Guy had loved her. He had
more than once made the third in their company. He had often accompanied
Lissac to Marianne's door. How then had she dared to say just now that
she had never been his mistress?

But how was he to believe her?

And why, after all, should she have lied? What interest had she?--

In proportion as Rosas considered the matter, he grew more angry with
himself, and in the very midst of the crowd, he was seized with a
violent attack of frenzy, such as at times suddenly determined him to
seek absolute solitude. He was eager to escape.

In order to avoid Madame Marsy, who was perhaps seeking him, he slipped
through the groups of people and reached the door without being seen,
leaving without formal salutation, as the English do.

He was in the hall, putting on his overcoat, while a servant turned up
its otter-fur collar, when he heard Guy say:

"You are going, my dear duke? Shall we bear each other company?"

The idea was not distasteful to Rosas. Involuntarily, perhaps, he
thought that a conversation with Lissac was, in some way, a _chat_ with
Marianne. These two beings were coupled in his recollections and
preoccupations; besides, he really liked Guy. The Parisian was the
complement of the Castilian. They had so many reminiscences in common:
fetes, suppers, sorrows, Parisian sadnesses, girls who sobbed to the
measure of a waltz. Then they had not seen each other for so long.

Rosas experienced a certain degree of pleasure in finding himself once
more on the boulevard with Guy. It made him feel young again. Every
whiff of smoke that ascended from his cigar in the fresh air, seemed to
breathe so many exhalations of youth. They had formerly ground out so
many paradoxes as they strolled thus arm in arm, taking their recreation
through Paris.

In a very little time, and after the exchange of a few words, they had
bridged the long gap of years, of travel and separation. They expressed
so much in so few words. Rosas, as if invincibly attracted by the name
of Marianne, was the first to pronounce it, while Guy listened with an
impassive air to the duke's interrogations.

In this way they went toward the boulevard, along which the rows of
gas-jets flamed like some grand illumination.

"Paris!" said Rosas, "has a singular effect on one. It resumes its
dominion over one at once on seeing it again, and it seems as if one had
never left it. I have hardly unpacked my trunks, and here I am again
transformed into a Parisian."

"Paris is like absinthe!" said Guy. "As soon as one uncorks the bottle,
one commences to drink it again."

"Absinthe! there you are indeed, you Frenchmen, who everlastingly
calumniate your country. What an idea, comparing Paris with absinthe!"

"A Parisian's idea, _parbleu!_ You have not been here two days and you
are already intoxicated with _Parisine_, you said so yourself. The
hasheesh of the boulevard."

"Perhaps it is not _Parisine_ only that has, in fact, affected my
brain," said Rosas.

"No doubt, it is also the _Parisienne_. Madame Marsy is very pretty."

"Charming," said Rosas coldly.

"Less charming than Mademoiselle Kayser!"

Guy sent a whiff of smoke from his cigar floating on the night breeze,
while awaiting the duke's reply; but Jose pursued his way beside his
friend, without uttering a word, as if he were suddenly absorbed, and
Lissac, who had allowed the conversation to lapse, sought to reopen it:
"Then," he said suddenly,--dropping the name of Mademoiselle
Kayser:--"You will be in Paris for some time, Rosas?"

"I do not in the least know."

"You will not, I hope, set out again for the East?"

"Oh! you know what a strange fellow I am. It won't do to challenge me
to!"

Lissac laughed.

"I don't challenge you at all, I only ask you not to leave the
fortifications hereafter. We shall gain everything. You are not a
Spaniard, you are a born Parisian, as I have already told you a hundred
times. If I were in your place, I would set myself up here and stick to
Paris. Since it is the best place in the world, why look for another?"

"My dear Guy," interrupted the duke, who had not listened, "will you
promise to answer me, with all frankness, a delicate, an absurd
question, if you will, one of those questions that is not generally put,
but which I am going to ask you, nevertheless, without preface,
point-blank?"

"To it and to any others that you put me, my dear duke, I will answer as
an honest man and a friend should."

"Have you been much in love with Mademoiselle Kayser?"

"Very much."

"And has she loved you--a little?"

"Not at all."

"That is not what she has just told me."

"Ah!" said Lissac, as he threw away his cigar. "You spoke of me, then?"

"She told me that she believed she loved you sincerely."

"That is just what I had the pleasure of telling you."

"And--Marianne?--"

"Marianne?" repeated Lissac, who perfectly understood the question from
De Rosas's hesitation.

"My dear friend, when a man feels sufficiently anxious, or sufficiently
weak, or sufficiently smitten, whichever you please, to stake his life
on the throw of the dice, he is permitted to put one of those misplaced
questions to which I have just referred. Well! you can tell me what,
perhaps, none other than I would dare to ask you: Have you been
Marianne's lover?"

Before replying, Guy took the arm of the duke in a friendly way, and,
leaning upon it, felt that it trembled nervously. Then, touching his
hand by chance, he observed that Rosas was in a burning fever.

"My dear fellow, it is the everlasting question of honor between men and
of duty to a woman that you put before me. Had I been Marianne's lover,
I should be bound to tell you that Marianne had never been my mistress.
These falsehoods are necessary. No; I have not been Marianne's lover,
but I advise you, if you do not wish to be perfectly miserable, not to
seek to become so. You are one of those men who throw their hearts open
as wide as a gateway. She is a calculating creature, who pursues, madly
enough I admit, without consistency or constancy in her ideas, any plan
that she may have in view. She might be flattered to have you as a
suitor, as I was, or as a lover, as I have been assured others were. I
do not affirm this, remember; but she will never be moved by your
affection. She is a pure Parisian, and is incapable of loving you as
you deserve, but you could not deceive her, as they say she has been."

"Deceived?" asked Rosas, in a tone of pity that struck Lissac.

"Deceived! yes! deceit is the complementary school of love."

"Then--if I loved Marianne?" asked Rosas.

"I would advise you to tell it to her at first, and prove it afterward,
and finally to catalogue it in that album whose ashes are sprinkled at
the bottom of the marriage gifts."

"You speak of Mademoiselle Kayser as you would speak of a courtesan,"
said the duke, in a choking voice.

"Ah! I give you my word," said Lissac, "that I should speak very
differently of Mademoiselle Alice Aubry, or of Mademoiselle Cora
Touchard. I would say to you quite frankly: They are pretty creatures;
there is no danger."

"And Marianne, on the contrary, is dangerous."

"Oh! perfectly, for you."

"And why is she not dangerous for you?"

"Why, simply, my dear duke, because I am satisfied to love her as you
have hitherto done and because I had, as I told you, the good fortune
not to be her lover."

"But you brought her to Madame Marsy's this evening?"

"Oh! her uncle accompanied us, but I was there."

"You offer your arm then to a woman whom, as you have just told me, you
consider dangerous?"

"Not for Sabine!--and then, that is a drop of the absinthe, a little of
the hasheesh of which I spoke to you. One sees only concessions in
Paris, and even when one is dead, one needs a further concession, but in
perpetuity. One only becomes one's self"--and Guy's jesting tone became
serious,--"when a worthy fellow like you puts one a question that seems
terribly like asking advice. Then one answers him, as I have just
answered you, and cries out to him: 'Beware!'"

"I thank you," said Rosas, suddenly stopping short on the pavement. "You
treat me like a true friend."

"And if I seem to you to be too severe," added Lissac, smiling, "charge
that to the account of bitterness. A man that has loved a woman is never
altogether just toward her. If he has ceased to love her, he slights
her, if he still loves her, he slanders her. I have perhaps, traduced
Marianne, but I have not slighted you, that is certain. Now, take
advantage of this gossip. But when?"

"I don't know," replied the duke. "I will write you. I shall perhaps
leave Paris!"

"What is that?"

"Just what I say."

"The deuce!" said Lissac. "Do you know that if you were to fly from the
danger in question, I should be very uneasy? It would be very serious."

"That would not be a flight. At the most, a caprice," the duke replied.

They separated, less pleased with each other than they were at the
commencement of their interview. Lissac felt that in some fashion or
other, he had wounded Rosas even in adopting the flippant tone of the
lounger, without any malice, and the Spaniard with his somewhat morose
nature, retired within himself, almost gloomy, and reproached Guy for
the first time for smiling or jesting on so serious a matter.

Discontented with himself, he entered his house. His servant was waiting
for him. He brought him a blue envelope on a card-tray.

"A telegram for monsieur le duc."

Rosas tore it open in a mechanical way. It was from one of his London
friends, Lord Lindsay, who having learned of Rosas's return, sent him a
pressing invitation. If he did not hasten to Paris to welcome him, it
was simply because grave political affairs demanded his presence in
London.

The duke, while taking off his gloves, looked at the crumpled despatch
lying under the lamp. He was, like most travellers, superstitious.
Perhaps this despatch had arrived in the nick of time to prevent him
from committing some act of folly.

But what folly?

He still felt Marianne's kiss on his lips, burning like ice.
To-morrow,--in a few hours,--his first thought, his only thought would
be to find that woman again, to experience that voluptuous impression,
that dream that had penetrated his heart. A danger, Lissac had said. The
feline eyes of Marianne had a dangerous ardor; but it was their charm,
their strength and their adorable seductiveness, that filtered like a
flame through her long, fair lashes.

He closed his eyes to picture Mademoiselle Kayser, to inhale the
atmosphere, to enjoy something of the perfume surrounding her.

A danger!

Guy was perhaps right. The best love is that which is never gathered,
which remains immature, like a blossom in spring that never becomes a
fruit. Lord Lindsay's despatch arrived seasonably. It was a chance or a
warning.

In any case, what would Rosas risk by passing a few days in London, and
losing the burning of that kiss? The sea-breezes would perhaps efface
it.

"I am certainly feverish," the duke thought. "It was assuredly necessary
to speak to Lissac. It was also necessary to speak to her," he added, in
a dissatisfied, anxious, almost angry tone.

A danger!

Lissac had acted imprudently in uttering that word, which addressed to
such a man as Rosas, had something alluring about it. What irritated the
duke was Guy's reply, asserting that he had not been Marianne's lover,
but that Marianne had had other lovers. Others? What did Lissac know of
this? A species of jealous frenzy was blended with the feverish desire
that Marianne's kiss had injected into Rosas's veins. He would have
liked to know the truth, to see Marianne again, to urge Guy to further
confidences. And, then, he felt that he would rather not have come, not
have seen her again, not have gone to Sabine's.

"Well, so be it! Lord Lindsay is right, I will go."

The following morning, Guy de Lissac found in his mail a brief note,
sealed with the arms of the duke, with the motto: _Hasta la muerte_.

Jose wrote to him as he was leaving Paris:

     "You are perhaps right. I am a little intoxicated with
     _Parisine_. I am going to London to visit a friend and if I
     ever recount my voyages there, it will only be to the
     serious-minded members of the Geographical Society. There, at
     least, there is no 'danger.' With many thanks and until we meet
     again.

         "Your friend,
             "J. DE R----"

"Plague on it," said Lissac, who read the letter three times, "but our
dear duke is badly bitten! _Ohime!_ Marianne Kayser has had a firm and
sure tooth this time!--We shall see!--" he added, as he broke the seal
of another letter, containing a request for a loan on the part of
someone richer than himself.




VII


The soiree at Sabine Marsy's had caused Vaudrey to feel something like
the enervation that follows intoxication. The next morning he awoke with
his head heavy, after a night of feverish sleep, interrupted by sudden
starts, wherein he saw that pretty, fair girl standing before him
devouring sherbet and smiling gayly.

Every morning since he had been at the ministry, Sulpice had experienced
a joyous sensation at finding himself again on his feet and rejoicing in
life. He paced about his apartments, feeling a sort of physical delight,
opening his window and looking out on the commonplace garden through
which so many ministers had passed and which he called, as so many
before him had done: _My garden_. His thoughts took him back then to
that little convent garden at Grenoble. What a distance he had travelled
since then! and how good it was to live!

That morning, on the contrary, the black and bare trees in the garden
appeared to him to be very gloomy. He felt morose. He had been awakened
early so that the despatches from the provinces might be laid before
him. The information in them was quite insignificant. But then his
spirit was not present. Once again he was at Sabine's, beside Marianne,
so lovely in her sky-blue gown, and with her wavy locks.

If he had been free, he would have gladly sought the opportunity to see
that woman again as soon as the morning commenced. He felt a kind of
infantile joy in being thus perturbed and haunted. It seemed to him that
this emotion made him feel younger. Formerly, on awakening, the dream of
the night had followed him like some intoxication.

Formerly! but "formerly" he was not the important man, the distinguished
personage of to-day.--He had not the charge of power as some others have
the charge of souls. A minister has something else to do than to be
under the sway of a vision. Sulpice dressed hurriedly, went down to his
office, where a huge log-fire flamed behind an antique screen. He sat
down in front of his large mahogany bureau, covered with papers, and on
which was lying a huge black portfolio stuffed with documents bearing
this title in stamped letters: _Monsieur le Ministre de l'Interieur_. In
the centre of the bureau had been placed a leather portfolio filled with
sheets of paper bearing the title: _Documents to be signed by Monsieur
le Ministre_. Beside this were spread out various reports, bearing upon
one corner of the sheet a printed headline: _Office of the Prefect of
Police_ and _Director-General of the Press_.

Vaudrey settled down in his chair with the profound satisfaction of a
man who has not grown weary of an acquired possession. This huge salon
with its blackened pictures, cold marbles, and large, severe-looking
bookcases, presented a sober bourgeois harmony that pleased him. It was
like the salon of a well-to-do notary, with its tall windows overlooking
the courtyard, already full of the shadows of importunate callers and
favor seekers whom the secretary-general received in a room adjoining
the ministerial cabinet. The minister inhaled once more the atmosphere
of his new domicile before settling down to work. Every morning it was
his custom to read the reports of the Director of the Press and of the
Prefect of Police before all else.

He took up the report of the Prefect. Nothing serious. A slight accident
on the Vincennes line near the fortifications of Paris. A train
derailed. A few injured. In the Passage de l'Opera, the previous
evening, the early speech of the Minister of the Interior upon general
policy, and that of the Finance Minister, who was to reply to the rumor,
falsely or prematurely announcing the conversion of the five per cents,
had caused an upward movement in value. All was satisfactory, all was
quiet. The new minister enjoyed public confidence. Perfect.

Sulpice was delighted and passed on to the report of the Director of the
Press. Except a small number of disgruntled and irreconcilable party
journals, all the French and foreign papers warmly praised and supported
the newly-created ministry. The _Times_ declared that the coalition
perfectly met the requirements of the existing situation. The Berlin
papers did not take umbrage at it, although Monsieur Vaudrey had more
than once declared his militant patriotism from the tribune. "In short,"
the daily report concluded, "there is a concert of praise, and public
opinion is delighted to have finally secured a legitimate satisfaction
through the choice of a homogeneous ministry, such as has long been
desired."

"What strange literature," muttered Sulpice, almost audibly, as he threw
the report with the other documents.

He recalled how, on that morning when Sulpice Vaudrey sat there for the
first time, the morning following Pichereau's sudden dismissal from
office, the editor of this daily press bulletin, like an automaton,
mechanically and indifferently laid on the table of the minister a
report wherein he said in full:

"Public opinion, by the mouth of the accepted journals, has for too long
a time reposed confidence in the Pichereau administration, for the
ministry to be troubled about the approaching and useless interpellation
announced some days ago by Monsieur Vaudrey--of Isere--."

And it was to Vaudrey, the elected successor of Pichereau, that the
report was handed naturally and as was due.

"The compilers of these little chronicles are very optimistic," thought
Sulpice. "After all, probably, it is the office that is responsible for
this, as, doubtless, ministers do not like to know the truth. I will
see, however, that I get it."

He had, this time, a burdensome morning. Prefects were arriving by the
main entrance to the ministry, the vast antechambers on the left; and
friends, more intimate suitors, waited on the right, elbowing the
ushers, in order to have their cards handed to the secretary-general or
to the minister. There were some who, in an airy sort of way, said:
"Monsieur Vaudrey," in order to appear to be on familiar terms.

Sulpice felt himself attacked on both sides at once; blockaded in his
office; and he despatched the petitioners with all haste, extending his
hand to them, smiling, cheerfully making them promises, happy to promise
them, but grieved in principle to see humbug depicted on the human face.
From time to time, in the midst of his ministerial preoccupations and
conversations, the disturbing smile of Marianne suddenly appeared like a
flash of lightning in a storm; and though shaking his head, to give the
appearance of listening and understanding, the minister was in reality
far away, near a brilliant buffet and watching a silver spoon glide
between two rosy lips.

In that procession, which was to be a daily one, of petitioners, of
deputies urging appointments in favor of their constituents, asking the
removal of mayors, the decoration of election agents, harassing the
minister with recommendations and petitions which, although couched in
a humble tone, always veiled a threat, Vaudrey did not often have to do
with his friends. It was a wearisome succession of lukewarm friends or
recognized enemies, who rallied around a successful man. This man,
although a minister for so short a time, had already a vague,
disquieting impression that the administration was the property of a
great number of clients, always the same, frequenters of these
corridors, guests in these antechambers, well known to the ushers, and
who, whoever the minister might be, had the same access and the same
influence with the ministry.

There were some whom the clerks saluted in a familiar way, as if they
were old acquaintances: intrepid office-seekers, unmoved by any changes
in ministerial combinations. Such entered Vaudrey's cabinet in a
deliberate, familiar manner, and as if feeling at home. Sulpice had once
heard one of them greet an usher by his first name: "Good-morning,
Gustave."

The minister asked Gustave: "Who is that gentleman?" The usher replied,
with a tinge of respect in his tone: "It is one of our visitors,
Monsieur le Ministre, Monsieur Eugene Renaudin. We call him only
Monsieur _Eugene_. We have known him a long time."

This "Monsieur Eugene" had already petitioned for a prefecture, or a
sub-prefecture, or--it mattered little--whatever place the minister
might choose to give him.

His claims? None: he was an office-seeker.

The minister was already overwhelmed by this vulgar procession of
petitioners and intermediaries, when an usher brought him a card bearing
this name: _Lucien Granet_.

In the Chamber it was thought that Granet did not like Vaudrey too well,
and Sulpice vaguely scented in him a candidate for his office. The more
reason, then, that he should make himself agreeable.

"What does he want?" the minister thought.

This Granet was, moreover, a typical politician; by the side of the
minister of to-day, he was the inevitable minister of to-morrow, the
positive reformer, the man appointed to cleanse the Augean stables,
whose coming, it was said, would immediately mark the end of all abuses,
great and small.

"Ah! when Granet is minister!"

The artist without a commission consoled himself with the prospect of
the Granet ministry. He would decorate the monuments when Granet became
minister. The actress who looked with longing eyes toward the Comedie
Francaise, and dreamed of playing in Moliere, had her hopes centered in
Granet. Granet promised to every actress an engagement at the Rue de
Richelieu. _I am waiting for the Granet ministry!_ was the consolatory
reflection, interrupted by sighs, of the licentiates in law. Meanwhile
those office-seekers danced attendance on Granet, and their smile was
worth to the future Excellency all the sweets of office.

Granet had thus everywhere a host of clients, women and men, sighing for
his success, working to bring about his ministry, intriguing in advance
for his advent, and working together for his glory.

"Ah! if Granet were in power!"

"Such abuses would not exist under a Granet ministry!"

"All will be changed when Granet becomes minister!"

"That dear Granet! that good Granet! Long live Granet!"

Vaudrey was not ignorant of the fact that for some time past, Lucien
Granet had been manoeuvring for his appointment to any office whatever,
the most important obtainable. He was within an ace of becoming a member
of the last Ministerial Coalition. He might have been Vaudrey's
colleague instead of his rival. Sulpice was as glad to have him as an
opponent in the Chamber as a colleague in the ministerial council. He
was, however, not an adversary to be trifled with. Granet was a power in
himself.

"Well!" said the minister to Granet, who entered smiling, and with a
very polite greeting, "you come then to inspect your future office?
Already!--"

"I?" said Granet, who did his best to be agreeable, "God prevent me from
thinking of this department. It is too well filled."

"That is very gallant, my dear Granet."

"Far from disputing your portfolio, I come, on the contrary, to give
you some advice as to strengthening your already excellent position."

"Advice from you, my dear colleague, should be excellent. Let us hear
it."

"My dear minister, it is about the appointment of an Under Secretary of
State for the Interior. Well! I have come to urge the claims of my
friend, our colleague Warcolier."

While speaking, Granet, who was seated near the bureau of the minister,
with his hat on his knee, was watching Vaudrey through his eyeglass; he
saw that his lips twitched slightly as he hesitated before replying.

"But I am bound to Jacquier--of l'Oise," Vaudrey said abruptly.

Granet smiled. Certainly Jacquier would be a most excellent choice. He
was a cool, solid and remarkable man. But he had little influence with
the Chamber, frequented society rarely, was morose and exclusive, while
Warcolier was a most amiable man, an excellent speaker and one who was
well-known in the Chamber. He was a fine orator. He was highly esteemed
by the Granet group.

"My personal friend, too, my dear minister. You would, I assure you,
displease me if you did not support Warcolier this morning at the
Ministerial Council, at which the nomination of under secretaries should
take place. It is this morning, isn't it?"

"Certainly, in an hour's time."

Granet left the minister, repeating with considerable emphasis, which
Vaudrey could not fail to remark, that the nomination of Warcolier would
be favorably viewed by the majority of the deputies. A hundred times
more so than that of Jacquier--of l'Oise.

"Jacquier is a bear. They don't like bears," said Granet, tapping his
thumb lightly with his eyeglass.

He left Vaudrey out of humor, and very much disgusted at finding that
Warcolier had already exploited the field.

In truth, Vaudrey liked Warcolier as little as he did Granet. Warcolier
took life easily. He was naturally of a contented disposition. He liked
people who were easily pleased. An Imperialist under the Empire, he was
now a Republican under the Republic. Epicurean in his tastes, he was
agreeable, clever and fond of enjoyment, and he approved of everything
that went the way he desired. He sniffed the breeze light-heartedly and
allowed it to swell his sail and his self-love. He did not like
ill-tempered people, people who frowned or were discontented or gloomy.
Having a good digestion, he could not understand the possibility of
disordered stomachs. A free-liver, he could not realize that hungry
people should ever think of better food. Everything was good; everything
was right; everything was beautiful. Of an admirably tranquil
disposition, he felt neither anger nor envy. Thinking himself superior
to every one else, Warcolier never made comparisons, he did not even
prefer himself: he worshipped himself. The world belonged to him, he
trod the ground with a firm step, swinging his arms, his paunch smooth,
his head erect and his shoulders thrown forward. He seemed to inhale, at
every step, the odor of triumph. He was not the man to compromise with a
defeated adversary.

Of Warcolier's literary efforts, people were familiar with his _History
of Work and Workers_ that he had formerly dedicated to His Majesty
Napoleon III. in these flattering terms: "To you, sire, who have
substituted for the nobility of birth, that of work, and for the pride
of ancestry, that of shedding blood for one's country."

Later, in 1875, Warcolier had re-issued his _History of Work_ and his
dedication was anxiously awaited. It did not take him long to get over
the difficulty. He dedicated his work to another sovereign: "To the
People, who have substituted the nobility of work for that of birth, and
that of blood shed for the country for that of blood shed by ancestors."

And that very name which was formerly read at the foot of professions of
faith:--_Appeal to Honest People. The Revolution overwhelms us!_ is now
found at the foot of proclamations wherein this devil of a Warcolier
exclaims:--_Appeal to Good Citizens. Reaction now threatens us!_

This was the man whom Granet and his friends had worked so hard to
thrust into the position of Undersecretary of State of the Interior.
Vaudrey reserved his opinion on this subject to be communicated to the
President by and by.

The hour for the meeting of the Council drew near. Sulpice saw, through
the white curtains of the window, his horses harnessed to his coupe and
prancing in the courtyard, although it was but a short distance from
Place Beauvau to the Elysee. He slipped the reports of the Prefect of
Police and the Director of the Press into his portfolio and was about to
leave, when the usher brought him another card.

"It is useless, I cannot see any one else."

"But the gentleman said that if the minister saw his name, he would most
assuredly see him."

Vaudrey took the card that was extended to him on the tray:

"Jeliotte! He is right. Show him in."

He removed his hat and went straight toward the door, that was then
opened to admit a pale-faced, lean man with long black whiskers that
formed a sort of horsetail fringe to his face. Jeliotte was a former
comrade in the law courts, an advocate in the Court of Appeal, and he
entered, bowing ceremoniously to Sulpice, who with a pleased face and
outstretched hands, went to welcome the old companion of his youth.

Jeliotte bowed with a certain affectation of respect, and smiled
nervously.

"How happy I am to see you," Vaudrey said.

"You still address me in the old familiar way," Jeliotte answered,
showing his slightly broken and yellow teeth.

"What an idea! Have I forfeited your good opinion, that I should abandon
our familiar form of address?"

"Honors, then, have not changed you; well! so much the better," said
Jeliotte. "You ask me how I am? Oh! always the same!--I work hard--I am
out of your sight--but I applaud all your successes."

While Jeliotte was speaking of Vaudrey's successes, he sat on the edge
of a chair, staring at his hat, and wagging his jaw as if he were
cracking a nut between his frail teeth.

"I have been delighted at your getting into the cabinet. Delighted for
your sake--"

"You ought also to be delighted on your own account, my good Jeliotte.
Whatever I may hereafter be able to do--"

Jeliotte cut the minister short and said in a tone as dry as tinder:

"Oh! my dear Sulpice, believe one thing,--that I ask you nothing."

"Why?"

"Because--no, nothing. And I repeat, nothing."

"And you would be wrong if I could be friendly to you or useful."

"I have said _nothing_, and I stick to _nothing_. You will meet quite
enough office-seekers in your career--"

"Evidently!"

"Petitioners also!"

"Most assuredly!"

"Well! I am neither a petitioner nor an office-seeker nor a sycophant. I
am your friend."

"And you are right, for I have great affection for you."

"I am your friend and your devoted friend. I should consider it a
rascally thing to ask you for anything. A rascally thing, I say! You are
in office, you are a minister, so much the better, yes, so much the
better! But, at least, don't let your friends pester you, like vermin
crawling before you, because you are all-powerful. I will never crawl
before you, I warn you. I shall remain just what I am. You will take me
just as I am or not at all. That will depend altogether upon the change
of humor that the acquisition of honors may produce in you--"

"Jeliotte! we shall see, Jeliotte!"

"Well! You can take me or leave me. And as I do not wish to be
confounded with the cringing valets who crowd your antechambers--"

"You crowd nothing, you will not dance attendance. Have I asked you to
dance attendance?"

"No, not yet--I called simply to see if I should be received. Yes, it is
merely in the nature of an experiment--it is made. It is to your honor,
I admit, but I will not repeat it--I shall disappear. It is more simple.
Yes, I have told you and I was determined to tell you that you will
never see me, so long as you are a minister."

"Ah! Jeliotte! Jeliotte!"

"Never--not until you have fallen--For one always falls--"

"Fortunately," said Sulpice, with a laugh.

"Fortunately or unfortunately, that depends. I say: when you have
fallen--then, oh! then, don't fear, I will not be the one to turn my
back on you--"

"You are very kind."

"Whatever you may have said or done, you understand, while you are in
power--and power intoxicates men!--I will always offer you my hand. Yes,
this hand shall always be extended to you. You will find plenty of
people who will turn their backs on you at that moment. Not I! I am a
friend in dark days--"

"That is understood."

"I will leave you to your glory, Vaudrey. I crave pardon for not styling
you: Monsieur le Ministre; I could not. It is not familiar to me. I
cannot help it. I am not the friend for the hour of success, but for
that of misfortune."

"And you will return?"

"When you are overthrown!--"

"Thank you!"

"That is like me! I love my friends."

"When they are down!" said Sulpice.

"That is so!" exclaimed Jeliotte.

"And is that all you had to say to me?" the minister asked.

"Is not that enough?"

"Yes! yes! _Au revoir_, Jeliotte."

"_Au revoir!_ Till--you know when."

"Yes. When I feel my position threatened, I will call upon you. Don't be
afraid. That time will come."

"The idiot!" said Sulpice, angrily shrugging his shoulders, when the
advocate was gone.

He snatched his hat and went out hurriedly to his carriage, the
messengers rising to bow to him as he passed through the antechamber.

It was hardly necessary for him to order his coachman to drive to the
Elysee. The duties of each day were so well ordered in advance, and
besides, the attendants at the department knew quite as well as the
minister if a Council was to be held at the Elysee.

Sulpice was somewhat upset. Jeliotte's visit, following that of Granet,
presented the human species in an evil aspect. He had never felt envious
of any one, and it seemed to him that the whole world should be
gratified at his modest bearing under success.

"For, after all, I triumph, that is certain!--That animal of a Jeliotte
is not such a simpleton!--There are many who, if they were in my place,
would swagger!"

So he complacently awarded himself a patent of modesty.

The carriage stopped at the foot of the steps of the Elysee. Sulpice
always felt an exquisite joy in alighting from his carriage, his
portfolio pressed to his side, and leaping over the carpet-covered steps
of the stone staircase leading to the Council Chambers. He passed
through them, as he did everywhere, between rows of spectators who
respectfully bowed to him. Devoted friends extended their hands
respectfully toward his overcoat. Certainly, he only knew the men by
their heads, bald or crowned with locks, as the case might be. His
colleagues were gathered together, awaiting him, and chatting in the
salon, decorated in white and gold, the invariable salon of official
apartments with the inevitable Sevres vases with deep-blue, light-green
or buff color grounds, placed upon consoles or pedestals. The portfolios
appeared stuffed or empty, limp or bursting with paper bundles, under
the arms of their Excellencies. Suddenly a door was opened, the ushers
fell back and the President approached, looking very serious and taking
his accustomed place opposite to the President of the Council with the
formality of an orderly, the Minister of the Interior on the left of the
President of the Republic, with the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the
right.

Then, in turn, each minister, beginning at the right, reported the
business of his department, sometimes debated in private council. Each
having completed his information, bowed to his neighbor on the right,
and said:

"I have finished. It is your turn, my dear colleague."

The President listened. Sulpice sometimes allowed himself to muse while
seated at this green-covered table, forgetting altogether the affairs
under consideration. Sometimes he recalled those green-covered tables of
the Council Chambers of the Grenoble Prefecture, finding that this
Ministerial Council recalled the mean impression invoked by his
provincial recollections, at other times, a vein of poesy would flit
across his mind, or an eloquent word would reach his ear, suggesting to
him the thought that, after all, these men seated there before their
open portfolios, turning over or scattering about the papers,
nevertheless represented cherished France and held in their leather
pouches the secrets, the destinies, aye, even the very fate of the
fatherland.

And this Sulpice, overjoyed to expand at his ease in the delights of
power, sitting there in his accustomed chair,--a chair which now seemed
to be really his own--enjoying a sort of physical satisfaction ever new,
inhaling power like the fumes of a nargileh, forgot himself, however,
and suddenly felt himself recalled to the urgent reality when his
colleague, the Minister of War, a spare man with a grizzled moustache,
dropped an infrequent remark in which, in the laconic speech of a
soldier, could be comprehended some cause of anxiety or of hope. Sulpice
listened then, more moved than he was willing to have it appear,
trying, in his turn, to hide all his artistic and patriotic anxieties
under that firm exterior which his colleague of the Department of
Foreign Affairs wore, a dull-eyed, listless face, and cheeks that might
be made of pasteboard.

The business of the Council was of little importance that morning. The
Keeper of the Seals, Monsieur Collard--of Nantes--a fat, puffing,
apoplectic man with somewhat glassy, round eyes, proposed to the
President, who listened attentively but without replying, some reform to
which Vaudrey was perfectly indifferent. He did not even hear his
colleague's dull speech, the latter lost himself in useless
considerations, while the Minister of War looked at him, as if his eyes,
loaded with grapeshot said, in military fashion: "_Sacrebleu!_ get
done!"

Vaudrey looked out of the window at the dark horizon of the winter sky
and the gray tints of the leafless trees, and watched the little birds
that chased one another among the branches. His thoughts were far, very
far away from the table where the sober silence was broken by the
interminable phrases of the Minister of Justice, whose words suggested
the constant flow of an open spigot.

The vision of a female form at the end of the garden appeared to him, a
form that, notwithstanding the cold, was clothed in the soft blue gown
that Marianne wore yesterday at Sabine's. He seemed to catch that
fleeting smile, the exact expression of which he sought to recall, that
peculiar glance, cunning and enticing, that exquisite outline of a
perfect Parisian woman. How charming she was! And how sweet that name,
Marianne!

Let us see indeed, what in reality could such a woman be! Terrible,
perhaps, but certainly irresistible!

Not for years had Vaudrey felt such an anxiety or allowed himself to be,
as it were, carried away by such a dominating influence. Waking, he
found Marianne the basis of all his thoughts, as she was during his
slumber.

And so charming!

"Monsieur le Ministre de l'Interieur is the next to address the
Council."

Vaudrey had not noticed that Monsieur Collard--of Nantes--had finished
his harangue, and that after the Minister of Justice, the Minister of
Foreign Affairs had just concluded his remarks. Vaudrey, therefore,
needed a moment's reflection, a hasty self-examination to recognize his
own personality: _Monsieur le Ministre de l'Interieur!_ This title only
called up his _ego_ after a momentary reflection, a sort of simulated
astonishment under the cloak of a pensive attitude. Vaudrey's colleagues
did not perceive that this man seated beside them was, as it were, lost
in meditation.

Sulpice, moreover, had little to say. Nothing serious. The confirmation
of the favorable reports that had been made to him. Within a week he
would finish his plan of prefectorial changes. He simply required the
Council to deal at once with the nomination of the Undersecretaries of
State.

It was then that Vaudrey realized the extraordinary influence that
Lucien Granet must possess. From the very opening of the discussion, the
minister felt that his candidate, Jacquier--of l'Oise--was defeated in
advance by Warcolier. Granet must have laid siege to the ministers one
by one. The President was entirely in Warcolier's favor. Warcolier's
amiability, tact, the extraordinary facility with which he threw
overboard previous opinions, were so many claims in his favor. It was
necessary to give pledges to new converts, to prove that the government
was not closed against penitents.

"That is a very Christian theory," said Vaudrey, "and truly, I am
neither in favor of jacobinism nor suspicion, but there is something
ironical in granting this amnesty to turncoats."

"But it is decidedly politic," said Monsieur Collard--of Nantes.

"It is a premium offered to the new converts."

"Eh! eh! that is not so badly done!"

Vaudrey knew perfectly well that it was useless to insist, he must put
up with Warcolier. It was his task to manage matters so that this man
should not have unlimited power in the ministry.

Warcolier was elected and the President signed his appointment at the
earliest possible moment.

"A nomination discounted in advance," thought Vaudrey, who again
recalled Granet's polite but threatening smile.

He felt somewhat nervous and annoyed at this result. But what could be
done? To divert his thoughts, he listened to his colleagues'
communications. The Minister of War commenced to speak, and in a tone of
irritated surprise, instead of the lofty, patriotic considerations that
Vaudrey expected of him, Vaudrey heard him muttering behind his
moustache about soldiers' cap-straps, shakos, gaiter-buttons,
shoulder-straps, cloth and overcoats. That was all. It was the vulgar
report of a shoemaker or a tailor, or of a contractor detailing the
items of his account.

Sulpice was anxious for the Council to be over. The President, before
the close of the session, repeated, with all the seriousness of a judge
of the Court of Appeal: "Above all, messieurs, no innovations, don't try
to do too well, let things alone. Don't let us trouble about business!
Let us be content to live! The session is ended."

"Not about business?" said Vaudrey to himself.

He understood power in quite a different way. Longing for improvements,
he did not understand how to let himself be dragged on like a cork upon
a stream, by the wave of daily events. He was determined to put his
ideas into force, to give life and durability to his ministry. There was
no use in being a minister if he must continue the habitual
go-as-you-please of current politics. In that case, the first chief of
bureau one might meet would make as good a minister as he.

At the moment of leaving the Council Chamber, the Minister of War said
to him, in a jocose, brusque way: "Well! my dear colleague, Warcolier's
election does not seem to have pleased you? Bah! if he has changed
shoulders with his gun, that only proves that he knows how to drill."

And the soldier laughed heartily behind his closely buttoned frock coat.

Vaudrey got into his carriage and returned to the ministry to breakfast.

Formerly the breakfast hour was generally the time of joyous freedom for
Sulpice. He felt soothed beside Adrienne and forgot his daily struggles.

In their home on Chaussee d'Antin, he usually abandoned himself freely
to lively and cheerful conversation, to allow his wife to find in him,
the man of forty years, the fiance, the young husband of former days.
But here, before these exclusive domestics, the familiars of the
ministry, planted around the table like so many inspectors, rather than
servants, he dared not manifest himself. He scarcely spoke. He felt that
he was watched and listened to. The valet who passed him the dishes
watched over Monsieur le Ministre. He imagined that _his attendants_ in
their silent reflections compared the present minister with those that
had gone before him. On one occasion, one of the domestics replied to a
remark made by Adrienne: "Monsieur Pichereau, who preceded Monsieur le
Ministre, and Monsieur le Comte d'Harville, who preceded Monsieur
Pichereau, considered my service very proper, madame."

Adrienne accepted as well as she could the necessities of her new
position. Since that was power, let power rule! She was resigned to
those wastes whose luxury was apparent, since the political fortunes of
her husband cast her there, like a prisoner, in that huge, commonplace,
ministerial mansion, wherein none of the joys of home or of that
Parisian apartment that she had furnished with such refined taste were
left her. She felt half lost in those vast, cold salons of that ancient
Hotel Beauvau,--cold in spite of their stoves, and which partook at one
and the same time of the provisional domicile and the furnished
apartment,--with its defaced gilded panels, and here and there a crack
in the ceiling, and those vulgar ornaments, those wearisome imitation
Chardins with their cracked colors and those old-fashioned pictures of
Roqueplan, giving to everything at once _one date_, a bygone style. With
what a truly melancholy smile Adrienne greeted the friends who came to
see her on her reception day, when they remarked to her: "Why, you are
in a palace!"

"Yes, but I much prefer my accustomed furniture and my own house."

Sulpice, free at last from that Council and the morning receptions, as
he alighted from his carriage, caused _Madame_ to be informed that he
had returned.

Adrienne, who was looking pretty in a tight-fitting, black velvet gown,
approached him with a smile and was suddenly overcome with sadness on
seeing him absorbed in thought. She dared not question him, but being
somewhat anxious, she, nevertheless, inquired the cause of his frowning
expression.

"You have your bad look, my good Sulpice," she smilingly said.

He then quickly explained the Warcolier business.

"Is that all? Bah!" she said, "you will have many other such
annoyances."

She was smiling graciously.

"That is politics!--And then you like it--At least, confine your likes
to that, Sulpice," she said, drawing near to Vaudrey.

She was about to present her forehead for his kiss, as formerly, but she
drew back abruptly. A valet entered with a dignified air and
ceremoniously announced that breakfast was served.

Vaudrey ate without appetite. Adrienne watched him tenderly, her eyes
were kind and gentle. How nervous he was and quickly disturbed! Truly,
Warcolier's appointment was not worth his giving himself the least
anxiety about.

She was going to speak to him about it. Vaudrey imposed silence by a
sign. The motionless domestics were listening.

Like Sulpice, Adrienne suffered the annoyance of a constant
surveillance. She was hungry when she sat down to table, but her
appetite had vanished. The viands were served cold, brought on plates
decorated with various designs and marked with the initials of Louis
Philippe, L.P., intertwined, or with the monogram of the Empire, N.; the
gilt was worn off, the fillets of gold half obliterated: a service of
Sevres that had been used everywhere, in imperial dwellings, national
palaces, and was at last sent to the various ministries as the remnant
of the tables of banished sovereigns.

Instead of eating, Adrienne musingly looked at the decorations. It
seemed to her that she was in a gloomy restaurant where the badly served
dishes banished her appetite. Sulpice, sad himself, scarcely spoke and
in mute preoccupation, in turn confused the shrewd, sly Granet, the
intriguing Warcolier, and Marianne Kayser, whose image never left him.
He was discontented with himself and excited by the persistency with
which the image of this woman haunted him.

In vain did Adrienne smile and seek to divert him from the thoughts that
besieged him--she was herself in a melancholy mood, without knowing why,
and her endeavors were but wasted; if he abandoned the train of his
reflections, it was merely to express a thought in rapid tones, and he
seemed momentarily to shake off his torpor; he replied to his wife's
forced smile by a mechanical grimace, and immediately relapsed into his
nervously silent state.

In the hours of anxious struggle, she had often seen him thus, hence she
was not alarmed. If she had been in her own home, instead of occupying
this strange mansion, she would have rushed to him, and seated on his
knees, taken his burning head between her little hands and said: "Come
now! what ails you? what is the matter? Tell me everything so that,
child as I may be, I may comfort my big boy."

But there, still in the presence of those people, always in full view,
she dared not. She carefully and anxiously watched Sulpice's mortified
countenance. Since his entry on his ministerial functions, this was the
first occasion, probably, that he had been so preoccupied.

"There is something the matter with you, is there not, my dear?"

"No--nothing--Besides--"

The minister's glance was a sufficient conclusion to his remark.
Moreover, how could he, even if he had some trouble to confide, make it
known before the ever watchful lackeys? Before these impassive
attendants, who, though apparently obsequious, might in reality be
hostile, and who looked at them with cold glances? What a distance
separated them from the old-time intimacies, the cherished interchange
of thought interrupted by piquant kisses and laughter, just like a
young husband and wife!

In truth, Adrienne had not thought of it: Sulpice could not talk.

"You will serve the coffee at once," she said.

She made haste in order that she might take refuge in her own apartment
to be alone with her husband. He, however, as if he shunned this
tete-a-tete, eager as he was for solitude, quickly attributed his
unpleasant humor to neuralgia or headache. Too much work or too close
application of mind.

"At the Ministerial Council perhaps?" remarked Adrienne inquiringly.

"Yes, at the Council,--I must take a little fresh air--I will take a
round in the Bois--The day is dry--That will do me good!"

"Will you take me?" she said gayly.

"If you wish," he replied. Then, in an almost embarrassed tone, he
added:

"Perhaps it will be better for me to go alone--I have to think--to
work--There is no sitting at the Chamber to-day; and the day is entirely
at my own disposal."

"Just as you please," Adrienne replied, looking at Sulpice with a tender
and submissive glance. "It would, however, have been so delightful and
beneficial to have gone to the Bois together on such a bright day! But
you and your affairs before everything, you are right; take an airing,
be off, come, breathe--I shall be glad to see you return smiling
cheerfully as in the sweet days."

Sulpice looked at his young wife with a fondness that almost inspired
him with remorse. In her look there was so complete an expression of her
love. Then her affection was so deep, and her calm like the face of a
motionless lake was so manifest, and she loved him so deeply, so
intelligently. And how trustful, too!

He was impelled now to beg her don her cloak and to have a fur robe put
into the coupe and set out now, when the sun was gradually showing
itself, like two lovers bound for a country party. At the same time he
felt a desperate longing to be alone, to abandon himself to his new idea
and to the image that beset him. He felt that he was leaving Adrienne
for Marianne.

He did not hold to the suggestion, in fact, he repeated that it would be
better if he were alone. As there would be no session of the Chamber for
a whole week, he would go out with Adrienne the next day. The coachman
could drive them a long distance, even to Saint-Cloud or Ville-d'Avray.
They would breakfast together all alone, unknown, in the woods.

"Truly?" said Adrienne.

"Truly! I feel the necessity of avoiding so many demonstrations in my
honor."

Sulpice laughed.

"I am stifled by them," he said, as he kissed Adrienne, whose face was
pink with delight at the thought of that unrestrained escapade.

"How you blush!" said Sulpice, ingenuously. "What is the matter with
you?"

"With me? Nothing."

She looked at him anxiously.

"You think my complexion too ruddy! I have not the Parisian tint. Only
remain a minister for some time, and that will vanish. There is no
dispraise in that."

She again offered her brow to him.

He left her, happy to feel himself free.

At last! For an entire day he was released from the ordinary routine of
his life; from the wrangling of the assembly, the hubbub of the
corridors, the gossip of the lobbies, interruptions, interrupted
conversations, from all that excitement that he delighted in, but which
at times left him crushed and feverish at the close of the day. He
became once more master of his thoughts, of his meditation. He belonged
to himself. It was almost impossible to recover his self-mastery in the
stormy arena into which he was thrust, happy to be there, and where his
distended nostrils inhaled, as it were, the fumes of sulphur.

At times, amid the whirlwind of politics, he suffered from a yearning
for rest, a sick longing for home quiet, a desire to be free, to go
between the acts, as it were, to vegetate in some corner of the earth
and to resume in very truth an altogether different life from the
exasperating, irritating life that he led in Paris, always, so to speak,
under the lash; or, still better, to change the form of his activity, to
travel, to feed his eyes on new images, the fresh verdure, or the varied
scenes of unknown cities.

But the years had rolled by amid the excitement and nervous strain of
political life. He lived with Adrienne in an artificial and overheated
atmosphere. Happy because he was loved, that his ambitions were
realized, that he charmed an assembly of men by the same power that had
obtained him the adoration of this woman, yes, he was happy, very happy:
to bless life, to excite envy, to arouse jealousy, to appear simply
ridiculous if he complained of destiny; and nevertheless, at the bottom
of his soul, discontented without knowing why, consumed by intangible,
feverish instincts, ill-defined desires for Parisian curiosities, having
dreamed in his youth of results very inferior to those he had realized,
yet finding when he analyzed the realities that he enjoyed, that the
promises of his dreams were more intoxicating than the best
realizations.

Vaudrey was an ambitious man, but he was ambitious to perform valiant
feats. Life had formerly seemed to him to be made up of glory, triumphal
entries into cities, accompanied by the fluttering of flags and the
flourish of trumpets. He pictured conquests, victories, exaltations!
Theatrical magnificence! But now, more ironical, he was contented with
quasi-triumphs, if his restless, anxious nature could be satisfied with
what he obtained.

Adrienne loved him. He loved her profoundly.

Why had the meeting with Marianne troubled him so profoundly, then?
Manifestly, Mademoiselle Kayser realized the picture of his vanished
dreams, and the desires of a particular love that the passion for
Adrienne, although absolute, could not satisfy. This man had a nature of
peculiar ardor--or rather, curious desires, a greedy desire to know, an
itching need to approach and peep into abysses.

Sometimes it seemed to Vaudrey that he had not lived at all, and this
was the fear and desire of his life: to live that Parisian life which
flattered all his instincts and awoke and reanimated all his dreams. But
yesterday it had appeared to him when he met this young woman who raised
her eyes to him, half-veiled by her long eyelashes, that a stage-curtain
had been raised, disclosing dazzling fairy scenery, and since then that
scenery had been always before him. It banished, during his drive, all
peace, and while the coupe threaded its way along the Faubourg
Saint-Honore toward the Arc-de-Triomphe, the minister who, but two hours
before, had been plunged in state affairs, settled himself down in a
corner of the carriage, his legs swaddled in a robe and his feet resting
on a foot-warmer, looking at, but without observing the cold figures
that walked rapidly past him, the houses lighted up by the sun's rays,
and the dry pavements, and he thought of those strange eyes and those
black butterflies, which seemed to him to flutter over that fair hair
like swallows over a field of ripe wheat.

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
soiree 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 Francaise_, 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 coupe 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
Jeliotte 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!"

Ramel appeared to be delighted to see Vaudrey, whose name the
housekeeper murdered by announcing him as _Monsieur Vaugrey_. He placed
a chair for him, and asked him smilingly, what he wanted "with an
antediluvian journalist."

"A mastodon of the press," he said.

What had Vaudrey come for?

His visit had no other object than to enjoy again a former faithful
affection, the advice he used to obtain, and also to try to drag the
headstrong Ramel into the ministry. Would not the directorship of the
press tempt him?

"With it, the directing of the press!" said Denis. "It is much better to
have an opposition press than one that you have under your thumb.
Friendly sheets advise only foolishly."

"Why, Vaudrey, do you know," suddenly exclaimed the veteran journalist,
"that you are the first among my friends who have come into power--I say
the first--who has ever thought of me?"

"You cannot do me a greater pleasure than tell me so, my dear Ramel. I
know nothing more contemptible than ingrates. In my opinion, to remember
what one owes to people, is to be scrupulously exact; it is simply
knowing orthography."

"Well! mercy! there are a devilish lot of people who don't know if the
word gratitude is spelled with an _e_ or an _a_. No, people are not so
well skilled as that in orthography. There are not a few good little
creatures to be sent back to school. All the more reason to be thankful
for having learned by heart--by heart, that is the way to put it, my
dear Vaudrey--your participles."

Sulpice was well acquainted with Ramel's singular wit, a little sly, but
tinged with humor, like pure water into which a drop of gin has been
poured, more perfumed than bitter. He knew no man more indulgent and
keen-sighted than him.

"For what should I bear a grudge against people?" said the veteran. "For
their stupidity? I pity them, I haven't time to dislike them; one can't
do everything."

Besides, the minister felt altogether happy to be with this man no
longer in vogue, but who might be likened to coins that have ceased to
be current and have acquired a higher value as commemorative medals. He
could unbosom himself to him: treachery was impossible. He longed to
have such a stay beside him, and still urged him, but Ramel was
inflexible.

"But as I have already said--if I have need of you?"

"Of me? I am too old."

"Of your advice?"

"Well! it is not necessary for me to give you my address, since you find
yourself here now, or to tell you that you can depend on me, seeing you
know me."

Vaudrey felt that it was useless to pursue the matter further. He was
not talking with a misanthrope or a scorner, but with a learned man. He
would find at hand whenever he needed it, the old, ever faithful
devotedness of this white-haired man, who, with skull-cap on his head,
was smoking his pipe near the window when the minister entered.

"Then, you are happy, Ramel?" said Sulpice, a little astonished,
perhaps.

"Perfectly so."

"You have no ambition for anything whatever?"

"Nothing, I await philosophically the hour for the monument."

He smiled when he saw that his own familiar remark was puzzling Vaudrey.

"The monument, there, on one side: Villa Montmartre!--Oh! I am not
anxious to have done with life. It is amusing enough at times. But,
after all, it is necessary to admit that the comedy ends when it is
finished. One fine day, I shall be found sleeping somewhere, here in my
armchair, or in my bed, suddenly, or perhaps after a long illness--this
would weary me, as a lingering illness is repugnant to me--and you will
read in one or two journals a short paragraph announcing that the
obsequies of Monsieur Denis Ramel, one-time editor of a host of
democratic newspapers, a celebrated man in his day, but little known
recently, will take place on such a day at such an hour. Few will
attend, but I ask you to be present--that is, if there is no important
sitting at the Chamber."

Old Ramel twirled his moustache with his long, lean fingers as he spoke
these last words into which he infused a dash of irony. He nullified it,
however, as he extended his frankly opened hand and said to Sulpice
Vaudrey:

"What I have said to you is very cheerful! A thousand pardons. The more
so that I do not think of doubting you for a single moment--You have
always been credulous. That is your defect, and it is a capital one. In
the world of business men and politicians, who are for the most part
egotists, of mediocrities, or to speak plainly--I know no more
picturesque term--of _dodgers_,--you move about with all the illusions
and tastes of an artist. You are like the brave fellows of our army,
poets of war, as it were, who hurled themselves to their destruction
against regiments of engineers. Certainly, my dear minister, I shall
always be delighted to give you my counsel, you whom I used to call my
dear child, and if the observations of a living waif can serve you in
anything, count on me. Dispose of me, and if by chance I can be useful
to you, I shall feel myself amply repaid."

"Ah!" cried Sulpice, "if you only knew how much good it does me to hear
the sincere thoughts of a man one can rely on! How different is their
ring from that of others!"

He then allowed himself to pass by an easy transition to the confessions
of his first deceptions or annoyances.

The selection that very morning, of Warcolier as Under Secretary of
State in a Republican administration, a man who had played charades at
Compiegne, had thrown him into a state of angry excitement.

Ramel, however, burst into laughter.

"Ah, nonsense! You will see many other such! Why, governments always do
favors to their enemies when their opponents pretend to lower their
colors! What good is it to serve friends? They love you."

"This does not vex you, then, old Republican?"

"I, an old soldier grown white in harness," said Ramel, whose moustache
still played under his smile, "that doesn't disturb my peace in the
least. I comfort myself with the thought that my dream, my _ideal_, to
use a trite expression, is not touched by such absurdities, and I am
persuaded that progress does not lag and that the cause of liberty gains
ground, in spite of so much injustice and folly. I confess, however,
that I sometimes feel the strange emotion that a man might experience on
seeing, after the lapse of years, the lovely woman whom he loved to
distraction at twenty, in the arms of a person whom he did not
particularly respect."

Ramel had lighted his pipe, and half-hidden by the bluish wreaths of
smoke, chatted away, quite happy on his side to give himself up to the
revelation of the secret of his heart without the least bitterness, and
like an elder brother, advised this man, who was still young and whom
he had compared formerly to one of those too fine pieces of porcelain
that the least shock would crack.

"Ah!" he said abruptly, "above all, my dear Vaudrey, do not fear to
appear in the tribune more uncouth and assertive than you really are. In
times when the word _sympathetic_ becomes an insult, it is wiser to have
the manners of a boor. Tact is a good thing."

"I shall never succeed in that," said Sulpice, smiling as usual.

"So much the worse! What has been wanting in my case is not to have been
able to secure the title of _our antipathetic confrere_. The modest and
refined people are dupes. By virtue of swelling their necks, turkeys
succeed in resembling peacocks. Believe me, my dear friend, it is
dangerous to have too refined a taste, even in office, even in the rank
in which you are placed. One hesitates to proclaim the excessively
stupid things that stir the crowd, and the blockhead who is bold enough
to declare his folly creates a hellish noise with his nonsense, while a
man of refinement, who is not always a squeamish man, remains in his
corner unseen. Remember that more moths are caught at night with a
greasy candle than with a diamond of the first water."

"You speak in paradox--" Sulpice began.

"And you think I am making paradoxes? Not in the least, I will give
you--not at cost, for it has cost me dearly, but in block,--my stock of
experience. Do with it what you please, and, above all, beware of _alle
donne!_"

"Women?" asked the minister, with involuntary disquiet.

"Women, exactly. Encircling every minister there is a squadron of
seductive women, who though perhaps more fully clothed than the flying
squadron of the Medicis, is certainly not less dangerous. Women who
complain that they are denied political rights, have in reality all,
since they are able to rule administrations and knock ministers off, as
the Du Barry did her oranges! When I speak of women, you will observe
well that I do not speak of your admirable wife," said Ramel, with a
respect that was most touching, coming from this honest veteran.

"While we are gossiping," he resumed, "I am going to tell you frankly
what strikes me most clearly in the present conjuncture. You will gather
from it what you choose. In these days, my dear Vaudrey, what is most
remarkable is the facility men have for destroying their credit and
wearing themselves out. Politics, especially, entails a formidable
consumption. It seems that the modern being is not cut out to wear long.
This, perhaps, is due to the fact that public business, whichever party
wins, is always committed to men who are ill-prepared for their good
fortune. I do not say this of you, who, intellectually speaking, are an
exception. But men are no longer bathed in the Styx, or perhaps they
show the heel too quickly. For some years, moreover, the strange
phenomenon has presented itself of the provincial towns being the prey
of Parisian manufacturers, who reconstruct them and demolish their
picturesque antiquity, in order to garnish their boulevards and fine
mansions, while Paris, on the contrary, is directed and governed by
provincials, who provincialize it just as the Parisian companies
parisianize the provinces. Our provincials, astonished to find
themselves at the head of Parisian movement, lose their heads somewhat
and rush with immoderate appetites at the delicate feast. They have the
gluttony of famished children, and on the most perilous question they
are simply gourmands. It is _woman_ again to whom I refer. The country
squires and gentlemen riders, who have grown old in their province with
the love of farm-wenches, or small tradesmen professing medicine or law
within their sub-prefectures, after having made verses for the female
tax-gatherer, all, you understand, all are hungry to know that unknown
creature: _woman_. And speedily enough the woman has drained their
Excellencies. Oh! yes, even to the marrow! She robs the Opposition of
its energy; the faithful to liberty, of the virility of their faith.
Energetic ministers or ministers with ideas are not long before woman
destroys both their strength and their ideas. Eh! _parbleu!_ it is just
because they do not rule Paris as one pleads a civil suit in a
provincial court."

The minister listened with a somewhat anxious, sober air to these
truisms, clear-cut as with a knife, expressed by the old journalist
without passion, without exasperation, without anger. He was, in fact,
pleased that Ramel should speak to him so candidly.

Yes, indeed, what the old "veteran,"--as Denis sometimes called
himself--said, were Vaudrey's own sentiments. These sufficiently
saddening observations he had himself made more than once. It was
precisely to put an end to such abuses, folly, and provincialism, this
hobbling spirit inculcated in a great nation, that he had assumed power,
and was about to increase his efforts.

He thanked Ramel profusely and sincerely. This visit would not be his
last, he would often return to this Rue Boursault where he knew that a
true friend would be waiting.

"And you will be right," said Denis. "Nowhere will you find a love more
profound, or hear truths more frankly spoken. You see, Vaudrey, the
walls of the ministerial apartments are too thick. There, neither the
noise of carriages nor the sound of street-cries is heard. I have passed
a few days in a palace--in '48,--at the Tuileries, as a national guard:
at the end of two hours, I heard nothing. The carpets, the curtains,
stifled everything, and, believe me, a cannon might have been fired
without my hearing anything more than an echo, much less could I hear
the truth! Besides, people do not like to pronounce truth too loudly.
They are afraid."

"I swear to you that I will listen to everything," replied Sulpice, "and
I will strive to understand everything. And since I have the power--"

Denis Ramel shook his head:

"Power? Ah! you will see if that is ever taken in any but homoeopathic
doses! Why, you will have against you the _bureaux_, those sacrosanct
_bureaux_ that have governed this country since bureaucracy has existed,
and they will cram more than one Warcolier down your throat, I warn
you."

"Yes, if I allow it," said Vaudrey haughtily.

"Eh! my poor friend, you have already allowed it," said the veteran.

He had risen, Vaudrey had taken his hat, and he said to the minister,
leaning on his arm, with gentle familiarity, as he led him to the door:

"Power is like a kite, but there is always some rascal who holds the
thread."

"Come, come," said Vaudrey, "you are a pessimist!"

"I confess that Schopenhauer is not unpleasant to me--sometimes."

Thereupon they separated, after a cordial grasp of the hand, and Denis
Ramel resumed his pipe and his seat at the window corner, while the
minister carried away from this interview, as if he had not already been
in the habit of a frank interchange of opinions, an agreeable though
perhaps anxious impression.

He felt the need of _mentally digesting_ this conversation: the idea of
going back, on this beautiful February day, to his official apartments
did not enter his mind. He was overcome by a springtime hunger.

"To the Bois! Around the Lake!" he said to the coachman, as he
re-entered his carriage.

The air was as balmy as on an afternoon in May. Vaudrey lowered the
carriage window to breathe freely. This exterior boulevard that he
rolled along was full of merry pedestrians. One would have thought it
was a Sunday afternoon. Old people, sitting on benches, were enjoying
the early sun.

Sulpice looked at them, his brain busy with Ramel's warnings. He had
just called him a pessimist, but inwardly he acknowledged that the old
stager, who had remained a philosopher, spoke the truth. Woman! Why had
Ramel spoken to him of woman?

This half-disquieting thought speedily left Sulpice, attracted as he was
by the joyous movement, the delight of the eyes which presented itself
to his view.

In thus journeying to the Bois, he felt a delightful emotion of solitude
and forgetfulness. He gradually recovered his self-possession and became
himself once more. He drew his breath more freely in that long avenue
where, at this hour of the day, few persons passed. There was no
petition to listen to, no salutation to acknowledge.

Ah! how easy it would be to be happy, to sweetly enjoy the Paris that
fascinated him instead of burning away his life! Just now, at the foot
of the Arc de Triomphe, he had seen people dressed in blouses, sleeping
like Andalusian beggars before the walls of the Alhambra. Little they
cared for the fever of success! Perhaps they were wise.

An almost complete solitude reigned over the Bois. Vaudrey saw, as he
glanced between the copsewood, now growing green, only a few isolated
pedestrians, some English governesses in charge of scampering children,
the dark green uniform of a guard or the blue blouse of a man who
trimmed the trees.

The coachman drove slowly and Sulpice, enjoying the intoxication of this
early sun, lowered the shade and breathed the keen air while he repeated
to himself that peaceful joy was within the reach of everybody at Paris.

"But why is this wood so deserted? It is so pleasant here."

He almost reproached himself for not having brought Adrienne. She would
have been so happy for this advanced spring day. She required so little
to make her smile: mere crumbs of joy. She was better than he.

He excused himself by reflecting that he would not have been able to
talk to Ramel.

And then it would have been necessary to talk to Adrienne, whereas the
joy of the present moment was this solitary silence, the bath of warm
air taken in the complete forgetfulness of the habitual existence.

The sight of the blue, gleaming lake before him, encircled with pines,
like an artificial Swiss lake, compelled him to look out of the window.

The coachman slowly drove the carriage to the left in order to make the
tour of the Lake.

Vaudrey looked at the sheet of water upon which the light played, and on
which two or three skiffs glided noiselessly, even the sound of their
oars not reaching his ears.

At the extremity of the alley, a carriage was standing, a hackney coach
whose driver was peacefully sleeping in the sunshine, with his head
leaning on his right shoulder, his broad-brimmed hat, bathed in the
sunshine, serving him as a shade.

It was the only carriage there, and a few paces from the border of the
water, standing out in dark relief against the violet-blue of the lake,
a woman stood surrounded by a group of ducks of all shades, running
after morsels of brown bread while uttering their hoarse cries.

Two white swans had remained in the water and looked at her with a
dignified air, at a distance.

At the first glance at this woman, Sulpice felt a strange emotion. His
legs trembled and his heart was agitated.

He could not be mistaken, he certainly recognized her. Either there was
an extraordinary resemblance between them, or it was Mademoiselle Kayser
herself.

Marianne? Marianne on the edge of this Lake at an hour when there was
no one at the Bois? Vaudrey believed neither in superstitions nor in
predestination. Nevertheless, he considered the meeting extraordinary,
but there is in this fantastic life a reality that brings in our path
the being about whom one has just been thinking. He had frequently
observed this fact. He had already descended from his carriage to go to
her, taking a little pathway under the furze in order to reach the
water's edge. There was no longer any doubt, it was she. Evidently he
was to meet Mademoiselle Kayser some day. But how could chance will that
he should desire to take that promenade to the Lake at the very hour
that the young woman had driven there?

As he advanced, he thought how surprised Marianne would be. As he walked
along, he looked at her.

She stood near a kind of wooden landing jutting out over the water. Over
her black dress she had flung a short cloak of satin, embroidered with
jet which sparkled in the sunlight. The light wind gently waved a black
feather that hung from her hat, in which other feathers were entwined
with a fringe of old gold bullion. Vaudrey noted every detail of this
living statuette of a Parisian woman: between a little veil knotted
behind her head and the lace ruching of her cloak, light, golden curls
fell on her neck, and in that frame of light, this elegant woman, this
silhouette standing out in full relief against the sky and the horizon
line of the water, with a pencil of rays gilding her fair locks, seemed
more exquisite and more the "woman" to Sulpice than in the decollete
of a ball costume.

When she heard the crushing of the sand by Sulpice's footsteps as he
approached her with timid haste, she turned abruptly. Under her small
black veil, drawn tightly over her face, and whose dots looked like so
many patches on her face, Vaudrey at first observed Marianne's almost
sickly paleness, then her suddenly joyous glance. A furtive blush
mounted even to the young girl's cheek.

"You here?" she said--"you, Monsieur le Ministre?"

She had already imparted an entirely different tone to these questions.
There was more abandon in the first, which seemed more like a cry, but
the second betrayed a sudden politeness, perhaps a little affected.

Vaudrey replied by some commonplace remark. It was a fine day; he was
tired; he wished to warm himself in this early sunshine. But she?--

"Oh! I--really I don't know why I am here. Ask the--my coachman. He has
driven me where he pleased."

She spoke in a curt, irritated tone, under which either deception or
grief was hidden.

She was still mechanically throwing crumbs of bread around her, which
were eagerly snatched at by the many-colored ducks, white or gray,
black, spotted, striped like tulips, marbled like Cordovan leather, with
iridescent green or blue necks, whose tone suggested Venetian
glassware, all of them hurrying, stretching their necks, opening their
bills, or casting themselves at Marianne's feet, fighting, then almost
choking themselves to swallow the enormous pieces of bread that were
sold by a dealer close at hand.

"Ah! bless me! I did not think I should have the honor of meeting you
here," she said.

"The honor?" said Vaudrey. "I, I should say the joy."

She looked straight into his eyes, frankly.

"I do not know what joy is, to-day," she said. "I come from the
Continental Hotel, where I hoped to see--"

"What is that?"

"Nothing--"

"If it were nothing, you would not have frowned so."

"Oh! well! a friend--a friend whom I have again found--and who has
disappeared. Just so,--abruptly--No matter, perhaps, after all! What
happens, must happen. In short--and to continue my riddle, behold me
feeding these ducks. God knows why! I detest the creatures. The state
feeds them badly, Monsieur le Ministre, I tell you: they are famished.
Well? well?" she said to a species of Indian duck, bolder than the
others, who snapped at the hem of her skirt to attract attention and to
demand fresh mouthfuls.

She commenced to laugh nervously, and said:

"That one isn't afraid."

She threw him a morsel that he swallowed with a greedy gulp.

"Do you know, Monsieur le Ministre, that the story of these ducks is
that of the human species? There are some that have got nothing of all
the bread that I have thrown them, and there are others who have gorged
enough to kill them with indigestion. How would you classify that? Poor
political economy."

"Oh, oh!" said Vaudrey. "You are wandering into the realms of lofty
philosophy!--"

"Apropos of that, yes," said Marianne, as she pointed to the line of
birds that hurried on all sides, left the water, waddled about, uttering
their noisy cries. "You know that when one is sad, one philosophizes
anent everything."

"And you are sad?" asked Sulpice, in a voice that certainly quivered
slightly.

She threw away, without breaking it, the piece of bread that was left,
brushed her gloved fingers, and, turning toward the minister, said with
a smile that would make the flesh creep:

"Very sad. Oh! what would you have? The black butterflies, you know, the
blue devils."

He saw her again, just as she had appeared before him yesterday, with
arms and shoulders bare, lovely and seductive, and now, with her
shoulders hidden under her cloak, her face half-veiled and quite pale,
he thought her still more disquietingly charming. Moreover, the
strangeness of the situation, the chance meeting, imparted something of
mystery to their conversation and the attraction of an assignation.

Ah! how happy he felt at having desired to breathe the air of the Bois!
It now seemed to him that he had only come there for her sake. Once more
it appeared to him that some magnetic thought led to this deserted spot
these two beings, who but yesterday had only exchanged commonplace
remarks and who, in this sunbathed solitude, under these trees, in the
fresh breeze of the departing winter, met again, impelled toward each
other, drawn on by the same sympathy.

"Do you know what I was thinking of?" she said, smiling graciously.
"Yes, of what I was thinking as I cast the brown bread to those ducks?
An idyll, is it not? Well! I was thinking that if one dared--a quick
plunge into such a sheet of water--very pure--quite tempting--Eh! well!
it would end all."

Vaudrey did not reply. He looked at her stupidly, his glance betraying
the utmost anxiety.

"Oh! fear nothing," she said. "A whim! and besides, I can swim better
than the swans, there is no danger."

He had seized her hands instinctively and he experienced a singular
delight in feeling the flesh of Marianne's wrists under his fingers.

"You are feverish," he said.

"I should be, at any rate."

Her voice was still harsh, as if she were distressed.

"The departure of--of that friend--has, then, caused you much
suffering?"

"Suffering? No. Vexation, yes--You have built many castles of cards in
your life--Come! how stupid I am!" she said bitterly. "You still build
many of them. Well! there it is, you see!"

She had withdrawn her hands from Sulpice, and walked away slowly from
the border of the lake, going toward the end of the path where her
coachman awaited her, his eyes closed and his mouth open.

"Where are you going on leaving the Bois?" asked Vaudrey.

"I? I don't know."

He had made a movement.

"Oh! once more I tell you, don't be afraid," she said. "I want to live.
Fear nothing, I will go home, _parbleu_."

"Home?"

"Or to my uncle's."

"But, really, Monsieur le Ministre," she said, "you are taking upon
yourself the affairs of Monsieur Jouvenet, your Prefect of Police. I
know him well, and certainly he asks fewer questions than Your
Excellency."

"That, perhaps," said Vaudrey, with a smile, "is because he has less
anxiety about you than I have."

"Ah! bah!" said Marianne.

She had by this time got close to her hackney coach and looked at the
coachman for a moment. "Don't you think it would be very wrong to waken
him?" she said. "Will you accompany me for a moment, Monsieur le
Ministre?"

Vaudrey paled slightly, divining under this question a seductive
prospect.

Marianne's gray eyes were never turned from him.

They walked along slowly, followed by the coupe whose lengthened shadow
was projected in front of them along the yellow pathway, moving beside
the lake where the swans floated with their pure white wings extended
and striking the water with their feet, raising all around them a white
foam, like snow falling in flakes. The blue heavens were reflected in
the water. The grass, of a burnt-green, almost gray color, looked like
worn velvet here and there, showing the weft and spotted with earth.

Side by side they walked, Vaudrey earnestly watching Marianne, while she
gazed about her and pointed out to him the gray, winter-worn rocks, the
smooth ivy, and on the horizon some hinds browsing, in the far distance,
as in a desert, the bare grass as yellow as ripe wheat, around a pond,
in a gloomy landscape, russet horizons against a pale sky, presenting a
forlorn, mysterious and fleeting aspect.

"One would think one's self at the end of the world," said Sulpice, with
lowered voice and troubled heart.

A slight laugh from Marianne was her only reply, as she pointed with the
tip of her finger to an inscription on a sign:

"_To Croix-Catelan!_" she said. "That end of the world is decidedly
Parisian!"

"Nevertheless, see how isolated we are to-day."

It seemed as if she had divined his thought, for she took a path that
skirted a road and there, in the narrowest strip of soft, fresh soil, on
which the tiny heels of her boots made imprints like kisses upon a
cheek, she walked in front of him, the shadows of the small branches
dappling her black dress, while Vaudrey, deeply moved, still looked at
her, framed as she was by trees with moss-covered trunks and surrounded
with brambles, a medley of twisted branches.

And Sulpice felt, at each step that he took, a more profound emotion.
Along this russet-tinted wood, stood out here and there the bright
trunks of birch-trees, and far above it, the pale blue sky; the abyss of
heaven, strewn with milky clouds and throughout the course of this
pathway arose like a Cybelean incense, a healthful and fresh odor that
filled the lungs and infused a desire to live.

To live! and, thought Sulpice, but a moment ago this lovely, slender
girl spoke of dying. He approached her gently, walking by her side, at
first not speaking, then little by little returning to that thought and
almost whispering in her ear--that rosy ear that stood out against the
paleness of her cheek:

"Is it possible to think of anything besides the opening spring, in this
wood where everything is awakening to life? Is it really true,
Marianne, that you really wished to die?"

He did not feel astonished at having dared to call her by name. It
seemed as if he had known her for years. He forgot everything, as if the
world was nothing but a dream and that this dream presented this woman's
face.

"Yes," she replied. "Upon my honor, I was weary of life, but I see that
most frequently at the very moment when one despairs--"

She stopped suddenly.

"Well?" he asked, as he waited for her to continue.

"Nothing. No, nothing!"

She commenced to laugh, calling his attention to the end of the path, to
a broader alley which brought them back to the edge of the lake, whose
blue line they saw in the distance.

"Blue on blue," she said, pointing to the sky and the water. "You
reproach me for not liking blue, Monsieur le Ministre, see! I am taking
an azure bath. This horizon is superb, is it not?"

Vaudrey debated with himself if she were jesting. Why should she give
him that title which here and at such a moment, had such an out-of-place
ring?

She glanced at him sidelong with a little droll expression, her pretty
mouth yielding to a smile that enticed a kiss.

"We shall soon have returned to my carriage," she said. "Already!"

"That _already_ pleases me," said Sulpice.

"It is true. This short promenade is nothing, but it suffices to make
one forget many things."

"Does it not?" exclaimed Vaudrey.

The shadow of his coupe was still projected between them along the
ochre-colored road.

"Do you come to the Bois often?" asked the minister.

"No. Why?"

"Because I shall frequently return here," he said in a trembling voice.

"Really!--Then, oh! why then, it would be love-making?" said Marianne,
who pierced him with her warm, tender glances.

He wished to seize this woman's hand and print a kiss thereon, or to
press his lips upon her bare neck upon which the golden honey-colored
ringlets danced in the bright sunlight.

"On these clear, fine days," she said in an odd tone, emphasizing every
word, "it is very likely that I shall return frequently to visit this
pathway. Eh! what is that?" she said, turning around.

She was dragging a dry bramble that had fastened its thorns to the folds
of her satin skirt and she stopped to shake it off.

"Stop," said Sulpice.

He desired to tread on the russet-colored bramble.

"You will tear my gown," said Marianne. "The bramble clings too
tightly."

Then he stooped, gently removed the thorn, and Marianne, her bosom
turned toward him and half-stooping, looked at that man--a
minister--almost kneeling before her in this wood.

He cast the bramble away from him.

"There," he said.

"Thanks."

As he rose, he felt Marianne's fresh breath on his forehead. It fell on
his face, as sweet as new-mown hay. He became very pale and looked at
her with so penetrating an expression that she blushed slightly--from
pleasure, perhaps,--and until they reached the carriage where her
coachman was still sleeping, they said nothing further, fearing that
they had both said too much.

At the moment when she entered her carriage, Sulpice, suddenly, with an
effort at boldness, said to her, as he leaned over the door:

"I must see you again, Marianne."

"What is the use?" she said, keeping her eyes fixed on his.

"Where shall I see you?" he asked, without replying to her question.

"I do not know--at my house--"

"At your house?"

"Wait," she added abruptly, "I will write to you."

"You promise me?"

"On my word of honor. At the ministry, _Personal_, isn't that so?"

"Yes!--Ah! you are very good!" he cried, without knowing what he was
saying, while Marianne's coachman whipped his horses and the carriage
disappeared in the direction of Paris.

It seemed to Vaudrey, who remained standing, that little gloved fingers
appeared behind the window and that he caught glimpses of a face hidden
under a black, dotted veil.

The carriage disappeared in the distance.

"To the ministry!" said the minister, as he got into his carriage.

He stretched himself out as if intoxicated. He looked at all the
carriages along the drive of the Bois de Boulogne, the high life was
already moving toward the Lake. In caleches, old ladies in mourning
appeared with pale nuns, and old men with red decorations stretched out
under lap-robes. Pretty girls with pale countenances pierced with bright
eyes, like fragments of coal in flour, showed themselves at the doors of
the coupes, close to the muzzles of pink-nosed, well-combed,
white-haired little dogs. Vaudrey strove to find Marianne amid that
throng, to see her again. She was far away.

He thought only of her, while his coupe went down the Avenue des
Champs-Elysees, bustling with noise and movement and flooded with light.
The coachman took a side street and the carriage disappeared through an
open gateway between two high posts surmounted by two lamps, in a
passage leading to a huge white mansion whose slate roof was ablaze
with sunlight. An infantry soldier in red trousers, with a shako on his
head, mounted guard and stood motionless beside a brown-painted
sentry-box that stood at the right. Above the gateways a new tricolor
flag, in honor of the new ministry, waved in the sunshine.

Against the ministerial edifice were two gas fixtures bearing two huge
capital letters: R.F., ready to be illuminated on important reception
nights.

Two lackeys hastily opening the door, rushed up to the halted carriage
and stood at its door.

"Adieu! Marianne," thought Sulpice, as he placed his foot in the
antechamber of this vast mansion as cold as a tomb.


       *       *       *       *       *

_She was still mechanically throwing crumbs of bread around her,
which were eagerly snatched at by the many-colored ducks_ ...

[Illustration: VAUDREY MEETS MARIANNE IN THE BOIS]




VIII


Marianne Kayser was superstitious. She believed that in the case of
compromised affairs, salvation appeared at the supreme moment of playing
the very last stake. She had always rebounded, for her part,--like a
rubber-ball, she said--at the moment that she found herself overthrown,
and more than half conquered. Fate had given some cause for her
superstitious ideas. She thought herself lost, and was weary of
searching, of living, in fact, when suddenly Monsieur de Rosas reached
Paris from the other end of the world. That was salvation.

The duke did not prove very difficult to ensnare. He had yielded like a
child in Sabine's boudoir. Marianne left that soiree with unbounded
delight. She had recovered all her hopes and regained her _luck_. The
next day she would again see Rosas. She passed the night in dreams.
Light and gold reigned upon her life. She was radiant on awaking.

Her uncle, on seeing her, found her looking younger and superb.

"You are as beautiful as a Correggio, who though a voluptuous painter,
must have been talented. You ought to pose to me for a Saint Cecilia. It
would be magnificent, with a nimbus--"

"Oh! let your saint come later," said Marianne, "I haven't time."

Simon Kayser did not ask the young woman, moreover, why "she had not
time." Marianne was perfectly free. Each managed his affairs in his own
way. Such, in fact, was one of the favorite axioms of this painter, a
man of principle.

Marianne breakfasted quickly and early, and after dressing herself,
during which she studied coquettish effects while standing before her
mirror, she left the house, jumped into a cab and drove to the Hotel
Continental. With proud mien and tossing her head, she asked for the
duke as if he belonged to her. She was almost inclined to exclaim before
all the people: "I am his mistress!"

But she suddenly turned pale upon hearing that Monsieur de Rosas had
left.

"What! gone?"

Gone thus, suddenly, unceremoniously, without notice, without a word? It
was not possible.

They were obliged to confirm this news to her several times at the hotel
office. Monsieur le duc had that very morning ordered a coupe to take
him to catch a train for Calais. It was true that he had left some
baggage behind, but at the same time he notified them that they would
perhaps have to forward it to him in England later.

Marianne listened in stupid astonishment. She became livid under her
little veil.

"Monsieur de Rosas did not receive a telegram?"

"Yes, madame."

"Ah!"

Something serious had, perhaps, suddenly intervened in the duke's life.
Nevertheless, this abrupt departure without notification, following the
exciting soiree of the previous day, greatly astonished this woman who
but now believed herself securely possessed of Jose.

"Nonsense!" she thought. "He was afraid of me--Yes, that's it!--Of
course, he was afraid of me. He loves me much, too much, and distrusts
himself. He has gone away."

She commenced to laugh uneasily as she got into her carriage again.

"Assuredly, that is part of my fate. That stupid Guy leaves for Italy.
Rosas leaves for England. Steam was invented to admit of escape from
dangerous women. I did not follow Lissac. What if I followed the duke?"

She shrugged her shoulders, and gnawed her cambric handkerchief under
her veil, her head resting on the back of the coach, while the driver
waited, standing on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, ignorant of the
direction in which the young woman wished to go.

Marianne felt herself beaten. She was like a gambler who loses a
decisive game. Evidently, Rosas only showed more clearly by the action
he had taken, how much he was smitten; she measured his love by her own
dismay; but what was the good of that love, if the duke escaped in a
cowardly fashion?--But where could she find him? Where follow him? Where
write to him?--A man who runs about as he does! A madman! Perhaps on
arriving at Dover he had already re-embarked for Japan or Australia.

"Ah! the unexpected happens, it seems," thought Marianne, laughing
maliciously, as she considered the ludicrousness of her failure.

"Madame, we are going--?" indifferently asked the coachman, who was
tired of waiting.

"Where you please--to the Bois!"

"Very good, madame."

He looked at his huge aluminum watch, coolly remarking:

"It was a quarter of twelve when I took Madame--"

"Good! good!--to the Bois!"

The movement of the carriage, the sight of the passers-by, the sunlight
playing on the fountains and the paving-stones of the Place de la
Concorde fully occupied Marianne's mind, although irritating her at the
same time. All the cheerfulness attending the awakening spring,
delightful as it is in Paris, seemed irony to her. She felt again, but
with increased bitterness, all the sentiments she experienced a few
mornings previously when she called on Guy and told him of her
burdensome weariness and distaste of life. Of what use was she now? She
had just built so many fond dreams on hope! And all her edifices had
crumbled.

"All has to be recommenced. To lead the stupid life of a needy, lost,
harassed woman; no, that is too ridiculous, too sad! What then--" she
said to herself, as with fixed eyes she gazed into the infinite and
discovered no solution.

She was savagely annoyed at Rosas. She would have liked to tear him in
pieces like the handkerchief that she shredded. Ah! if he should ever
return to her after this flight!

But perhaps it was not a flight--who knows? The duke would write, would
perhaps reappear.

"No," a secret voice whispered to Marianne. "The truth is that he is
afraid of you! It is you, you, whom he flees from."

To renounce everything was enough to banish all patience. Yesterday, on
leaving Rosas, she believed herself to be withdrawn forever from the
wretched Bohemian life she had so painfully endured. To-day, she felt
herself sunk deeper in its mire. Too much mire and misery at last!
However, if she only had courage!

It was while looking at the great blue lake, the snowy swans, the
gleaming barks, that she dreamed, as she had just told Vaudrey, of
making an end of all. Madness, worse than that, stupidity! One does not
kill one's self at her age; one does not make of beauty a valueless
draft. In order to occupy herself, she had bought some brown bread,
which she mechanically threw to the ducks, in order to draw her out of
herself. It was then that Sulpice saw her.

"Assuredly," she thought, as she left the minister, "those who despair
are idiots!"

In fact, it seemed that chance, as her fingers had cast mouthfuls of
bread to the hungry bills, had thrown Vaudrey to her in place of Rosas.

A minister! that young man who smiled on her just now in the alleys of
the Bois and drew near her with trembling breath was a minister. A
minister as popular as Vaudrey was a power, and since Marianne, weary of
seeking love, was pursuing an actuality quite as difficult to
obtain--riches, Sulpice unquestionably was not to be despised.

"As a last resource, one might find worse," thought Marianne, as she
entered her home.

She had not, moreover, hesitated long. She was not in the mood for
prolonged anger. She was at an age when prompt decisions must be made on
every occasion that life, with its harsh spurs, proposed a problem or
furnished an opportunity. On the way between the Lake and Rue de
Navarin, Marianne had formed her plan. Since she had to reply to
Vaudrey, she would write him. She felt an ardent desire to avenge
herself for Rosas's treatment, as if he ought to suffer therefor, as if
he were about to know that Sulpice loved her.

Had she found the duke awaiting her, as she entered the house, she would
have been quite capable of lashing his face with a whip, while making
the lying confession:

"Ah! you here? It is too late! I love Monsieur Vaudrey."

She would, moreover, never know any but gloomy feelings arising from her
poverty in that house. The thought suggested itself to her of at once
inviting Vaudrey to call on her. But surrounded by the vulgar
appointments of that poor, almost bare, studio, concealing her poverty
under worn-out hangings, indifferent studies, old, yellowed casts
covered with dust--to receive Vaudrey there would be to confess her
terribly straitened condition, her necessities, her eagerness, all that
repels and freezes love. In glancing around her uncle's studio, she
scrutinized everything with an expression of hatred.

It smacked of dirty poverty, bourgeois ugliness. She would never dare to
ask Vaudrey to sit upon that divan, which was littered with old, torn
books and tobacco grains, and which, when one sat upon it, discharged a
cloud of dust whose atoms danced in the sunlight.

"What are you looking at?" asked Kayser, as he followed his niece's
glances about the room. "You seem to be making an inspection."

"Precisely. And I am thinking that your studio would not fetch a very
high figure at Drouot's auction mart."

"Lofty and moral creations don't sell in times like these," gravely
replied the old dauber. "For myself, I am not a painter of obscene
subjects and lewd photography."

Marianne shrugged her shoulders and went out, coughing involuntarily.
Old Kayser passed his time steeped in the odors of nicotine.

"I am lost, if Vaudrey comes here," she said to herself.

She knew well enough that caprice, the love of those who do not love,
lives on luxury, intoxicating perfumes, shimmering silk, and all the
mysterious surroundings of draperies which are the accompaniment of the
adventure. Vaudrey would recoil before this Bohemian studio. The famous
"nimbus," of which Kayser spoke, was the creature of his tobacco smoke.
What was to be done, then? Receive the minister yonder in that remote
apartment where, all alone,--it was true--she went to dream, dream with
all the strange joys attending isolation? Draw this man to a distant
corner of Paris, in the midst of the ruins of former luxury, as mean as
the wretch's studio?--Eh! that was to acknowledge to Vaudrey that she
was intriguing for a liaison with the single object of quitting the
prison-walls of want. She realized that this man, full of illusions,
believing that he had to do with perhaps a virtuous girl, or, at least,
one who was not moving in her own circle, who was giving herself, but
not selling herself, would shrink at the reality on finding himself face
to face with an adventuress.

"Illusion is everything! He must be deceived! They are all stupid!" she
mused.

But how was she to deceive this man as to her condition, how cloak her
want, how cause herself to pass for what she was not? With Rosas it
would have been a simple matter. Poor, she presented herself to him in
her poverty. He loved her so. She could the better mislead him. But with
Vaudrey, on the contrary, she must dazzle.

"Two innocents," Marianne said to herself, "the one thirsts for virtue,
the other for vice."

Should she confess everything to Sulpice as she had done to Rosas? Yes,
perhaps, if she discovered no better way, but a better plan had to be
found, sought, or invented. Find what? Borrow? Ask? Whom? Guy? She would
not dare to do so, even supposing that Lissac was sufficiently well off.
Then she wished to keep up appearances, even in Guy's eyes. Further,
she had never forgiven him for running off to Italy. She never would
forget it. No, no, she would ask nothing from Guy.

To whom, then, should she apply? She again found herself in the
frightful extremity of those who, in that almost limitless Paris,
involved in the terrible intricacies of that madly-directed machine,
seek money, a loan, some help, an outstretched hand, but who find
nothing, not an effort to help them in all its crowd. She was overcome
with rage and hatred. Nothing! she had nothing! She would have sold
herself to any person whatsoever, to have speedily obtained a few of the
luxuries she required. Yes; sold herself now, to sell herself more
dearly to-morrow.

Sold! Suddenly from the depths of her memory she recalled a form,
confused at first, but quickly remembered vividly, of an old woman
against whom she had formerly jostled, in the chance life she had led,
and who, once beautiful, and still clever and rich, it was said, had
been seized with a friendly desire to protect Marianne. It was a long
time since the young woman had thought of Claire Dujarrier. She met her
occasionally, her white locks hidden under a copious layer of golden
powder, looking as yellow as sawdust. The old woman had said to her:

"Whenever you need advice or assistance, do not forget my address: Rue
La Fontaine, Auteuil."

Marianne had thanked her at the time, and had forgotten all about it
till now, when in the anguish of her pursuit she recalled the name and
features of Claire Dujarrier as from the memories of yesterday. Claire
Dujarrier, a former danseuse, whose black eyes, diamonds, wild
extravagance, and love adventures were notorious formerly, had for the
last two or three years buried herself in a little house, fearing that
she would be assassinated; she kept her diamonds in iron-lined safes
built in the wall, and had a young lover, a clerk in a novelty store,
who was stronger than a market-house porter, and who from time to time
assumed a high tone and before whom she stood in awe.

"Claire Dujarrier! The very thing!--Why not?" thought Marianne.

She had been introduced to the ex-danseuse by Guy de Lissac. He was
considered as one of Claire's old lovers. They quarrelled when the old
dame had heard one of Guy's bons mots that had become familiar at the
Club:

"When I see her, I always feel a slight emotion: she recalls my youth to
me!--But alas! not hers!"

Claire was well-off and perhaps miserly. Marianne instinctively felt,
however, that she would get help at her hands.

Money!

"I will return her all! It is usury. Her pledge is here!"

With brazen front, Kayser's niece struck her bosom, looking at the same
time at the reflection of her fine bust and pale face in the mirror.

The next day she went straight to the former danseuse's.

Claire Dujarrier lived in that long Rue La Fontaine at Auteuil which
partook of the characteristics of a suburban main street and a
provincial faubourg, with its summer villas, its little cottages
enclosed within gloomy little gardens, railed-off flower-beds,
boarding-schools for young people, and elbowing each other as in some
village passage, the butcher's store, the pharmacy, the wine-dealer's
shop, the baker's establishment,--a kind of little summer resort with a
forlorn look in February, the kiosks and cottages half decayed, the
gardens full of faded, dreary-looking leaves. Marianne looked about,
seeking the little Claire house. She had visited it formerly. A
policeman wandered along sadly,--as if to remind one of the town,--and
on one side, a gardener passed scuffling his wooden shoes, as if to
recall the village.

However, here it was that the formerly celebrated girl, who awoke storms
of applause when she danced beside Cerrito at the Opera, now lived
buried in silence,--a cab going to the Villa Montmorency seemed an event
in her eyes,--forgotten, her windows shut, and as a diversion looking
through the shutters at the high chimneys of some factory in the
neighboring Rue Gras that belched forth their ruddy or bluish fumes, or
yellow like sulphuric acid, or again red like the reflection of fire.

Marianne rang several times when she arrived at the garden railing of
the little house. The bells sounded as if they were coated with rust. An
ancient maid-servant, astonished and morose, came to open the door.

She conducted the young woman into the salon where Claire Dujarrier sat
alone, eating cakes, with her terrier on her lap.

The dog almost leaped at Marianne's throat while Claire, rising, threw
herself on her neck.

"Ah! dear little one!--How pleased I am! What chance brings you?"

Marianne looked at the Dujarrier. She might still be called almost
lovely, although she was a little painted and her eyes were swollen, and
her cheeks withered; but she knew so perfectly well all the secrets for
rejuvenating, the eyebrow preparation, the labial wash, that she was a
walking pharmaceutical painting done on finely sculptured features. The
statue, although burdened with fat, was still superb.

She listened to Marianne, smiled, frowned and, love-broker and advisory
courtesan that she was, ended by saying to the "little one" that she had
a devilish good chance and that she had arrived like March in Lent.

"It is true, it has purposely happened. Vanda, you know her well?"

"No!" answered Marianne.

"What! Vanda, whom that big viper Guy called the Walking Rain?"

"I do not remember--"

"Well! Vanda has gone to Russia, she left a month ago. She will be there
all the winter and summer, and part of next winter. Her _general_
requires her. He is appointed to keep an eye on the Nihilists. So she
wishes to rent her house in Rue Prony. That is very natural. A charming
house. Very _chic_. In admirable taste. You have the chance. And not
dear."

"Too dear for me, who have nothing!"

"Little silly! You have yourself," said Claire Dujarrier. "Then you have
me, I have always liked you. I will lend you the ready cash to set
yourself up, you can give me bills of exchange, little documents that
your minister--pest! you are going on well, you are, ministers!--that
His Excellency will endorse. Vanda will not expect anything after the
first quarter. Provided that her house is well-rented to someone who
does not spoil it, she will be satisfied. If she should claim all, why,
at a pinch I can make up the amount. But, my dear,"--and the old woman
lowered her voice,--"on no account say anything to Adolphe."

"Adolphe?"

"Yes, my _husband_. You do not know him?"

She took from the table a photograph enclosed in a photograph-case of
sky-blue plush, in which Marianne recognized a swaggering fellow with
flat face, large hands, fierce, bushy moustache, who leaned on a cane,
swelling out his huge chest in outline against a mean, gray-tinted
garden ornamented with Medicis vases.

"A handsome fellow, isn't he? Quite young!--and he loves me--I adore
him, too!"

The tumid eyes of Claire Dujarrier resembled lighted coals. She pressed
kiss after kiss of her painted lips on the photograph and reverently
laid it on the table.

Marianne almost pitied this half-senile love, the courtesan's
terrifying, last love.

She was, however, too content either to trouble herself, or even to
reflect upon it. She was wild with joy. It seemed to her that a sudden
rift had opened before her and a gloriously sunny future pictured itself
to her mind. What an inspiration it was to think of Claire Dujarrier!

She would sign everything she wished, acknowledge the sums lent, with
any interest that might be demanded. Much she cared about that,
indeed!--She was sure now to free herself and to _succeed_.

"You are jolly right," said the ancient danseuse. "The nest is entirely
at the birds' disposal. Your minister--I don't ask his name, but I shall
learn it by the bills of exchange--would treat you as a grisette if he
found you at your uncle's. Whereas at Vanda's--ah! at Vanda's! you will
have news to tell me. So, see this is all that is necessary. I will
write to Vanda that her house is rented, and well rented. Kiss me and
skip! I hear Adolphe coming. He does not care to see new faces. And
then, yours is too pretty!" she added, with a peculiar significance.

She got the old servant to show Marianne out promptly, as if she felt
fearful lest her _husband_ should see the pretty creature. Claire
Dujarrier was certainly jealous.

"It is not I that would rob her of her porter!" Marianne thought, as she
walked away from Rue La Fontaine.

Evening was now darkening the gray streets. A faint bluish mist was
rising over the river and spreading like breath over the quays. Marianne
saw Paris in the distance, and her visit seemed like a dream to her; she
closed her eyes, and a voice within her whispered confusedly the names
of Rosas, Vaudrey, Vanda, Rue Prony; she pictured herself stretched at
length on a reclining chair in the luxurious house of a courtesan, and
she saw at her feet that man--a minister--who supplicatingly besought
her favor, while in the distance a man who resembled Rosas was
travelling, moving away, disappearing--

"Nonsense!" the superstitious creature said to herself, "it was one or
the other! The duke or the minister! I have not made the choice."

Then looking at the confused image of herself thrown on the window of
the cab, she threw a kiss at her own pale reflection, happy with the
unbounded joy of a child, and cried aloud while laughing heartily:

"Bonjour, Vanda! I greet you, Mademoiselle Vanda."





PART SECOND

I


The Monceau plain is the quarter of changed fortunes and dice-throwing.
An entire town given over to luxury, born in a single night, suddenly
sprung into existence. The unpremeditated offspring of the aggregation
of millions. Instead of the cobbler's stall, the red-bedaubed shop of
the dealer in wines, the nakedness of an outer boulevard, here in this
spot of earth all styles flourish: the contrast of fancy, the chateau
throwing the English cottage in the shade; the Louis XIII. dwelling
hobnobbing with the Flemish house; the salamander of Francis I. hugging
the bourgeois tenement; the Gothic gateway opening for the entry of the
carriages of the courtesan. A town within a town. Something novel,
white, extravagant, overdone: the colossal in proximity to the
attractive, the vastness of a grand American hotel casting its shadow
over an Italian loggia. It partook at once of the Parisian and the
Yankee. The Chateau de Chambord sheltering a chocolate maker, and the
studio of an artist now become the salon of a rich curbstone broker.

The little Hotel de Vanda,--_one of our charming fugitives_, as those of
the chroniclers who still remember Vanda, say of her in their articles
sometimes--is an elegant establishment, severe in external appearance,
but of entirely modern interior arrangements, with a wealth of choice
knickknacks, and is regarded as one of the most attractive houses in Rue
Prony. Since the flight of the pretty courtesan, it bears the sad
notice: _Residence to let_. Its fast closed shutters give it the gloomy
appearance of a deserted boudoir. Complete silence succeeds feverish
bustle! Vanda was a boisterous, madcap spendthrift. Through the old
windows with their old-fashioned panes there often used to escape
snatches of song, airs of waltzes, fragments of quadrilles. Vanda's
horses pawed the ground spiritedly as they started at the fashionable
hour for the Bois, through the great gateway leading to the stables. And
now, for months, a corner of Rue Prony had been silent and drowsy, and
weighted with the melancholy that surrounds forsaken objects.

It was here that Marianne, in carrying out her determination, entered
with a high head, resolved to cast off her sombre misery or to sink, her
plans defeated. The Dujarrier had greatly assisted her in taking up her
abode, building her hopes on Mademoiselle Kayser's beauty as on some
temporary profitable investment. As the old woman looked at her, she
shook her head. Marianne had to be quick. She was pale, already weary,
and her beauty, heightened by this weariness, was "in full blast," as
the former bungling artiste said in her capacity of a connoisseur.

"After all," Dujarrier said to herself, "it is the favorable moment for
success. One does not become a _general_ except through seniority."

Marianne also experienced the same feelings as the Dujarrier. She
realized that she had reached the turning-point of her life, it was like
a game of baccarat that she was playing with fate. She might come out of
it rich and preserved from the possibility of dying in a hospital or a
hovel after having dragged her tattered skirts through the streets, or
overwhelmed with debts, ruined forever, strangled by liabilities. This
commercial term made her smile ironically when she thought of it.
Against her she had her past, her adventurous life, almost the life of a
courtesan, carried away by the current of her amorous whims; it now
needed only the burden of liabilities for her to become not only
completely disclassed, but ruined by Parisian life. She had given the
Dujarrier receipts for all that that quasi-silent-partner had advanced
her, the old lady excusing herself for the precaution she took by saying
precisely:

"In that way one can hold people. Grateful acknowledgments are good;
written acknowledgments are better!"

The Dujarrier considered herself witty.

Marianne had signed, moreover, all that the other had asked. She still
needed, indeed, to make further outlay. And what mattered it if she
plunged deeper while she was _taking a dive_, as she expressed it in her
language, which was a mixture of street slang and the elegant
phraseology of the salon.

"Bah! I know how to swim."

She suddenly straightened herself under this anxiety, reassured,
moreover, and spurred on as she was by the Dujarrier herself, who said
as she shrugged her shoulders:

"When a woman like you has a man like Vaudrey,--a minister,--she has her
nest lined."

Sulpice was not the man long to resist so refined a Parisienne as
Marianne. In him, the repressed ardors, the poetic ideas of a man of
twenty, had become the appetites of a man of forty. This provincial,
hungry for Parisianism,--very young in feelings and soul,--felt, as soon
as he found himself in Marianne's company, mad with desire for a new
life. The dazzling honors attending his entry into the ministry found
their culmination in the burning glance of Marianne, as their eyes met.

Hardly was she installed in Rue Prony than she reminded him of his
promise to call on her. He hastened to her with strange eagerness and he
left her more disturbed, as if he had just taken a peep at an unknown
world. The feminine elegance of the Hotel de Vanda had suddenly
intoxicated him. Marianne played her part very calmly in producing the
daily ravage that passion was making on Sulpice. She studied its rapid
progress with all the sang-froid of a physician. She regulated the doses
of her toxicant, the poison of her glance instilled into the veins of
this man. Determined to become his mistress, she desired to fall in the
guise of a woman madly in love, and not as an ordinary courtesan. With
any other man than Vaudrey, she would, perhaps, have yielded more
quickly. But she acted with Vaudrey as formerly she had done with Rosas.
Seeing that these idealists caressed their dreams, she coquetted with
platonic love, besides, she preferred to remain free for a short time,
without the burden of those pleasures of which she had grown tired, and
which had always caused her more disgust than delight.

Moreover, she said to herself that it was necessary in Sulpice's case to
have the appearance of playing frankly, of loving truly, as in the case
of Rosas. But, this time, she would not let Vaudrey escape her by
flight, as the duke did. She would yield at the desired moment, certain
that Sulpice would not leave her the next day.

"Rosas would be here," she said to herself self-confidently, "if he had
been my lover."

After a moment of regretful preoccupation, she shrugged her shoulders
and said quickly:

"Bah! _what is written is written_, as he said. If I haven't him, I have
the other."

The "other" grew day by day more deeply enamored. He rushed off in hot
haste to visit Marianne; his hired hack, in which he sometimes left his
minister's portfolio peacefully at rest, pending his return, stood
before the little door in the Avenue Prony. He was happier when he
thought he had made a forward step in Marianne's affections than when he
had acquired new votes from the minority in the Chamber. Ambitious
projects yielded to the consuming desire that he felt toward this woman.
At the ministry, during the familiar conversations at table with
Adrienne and even during the hurly-burly attendant on private receptions
and morning interviews, he sometimes remained silent, lost in thought,
his mind wandering and, in reality, with Marianne.

Adrienne, at such times, with a sweet smile which made Sulpice shudder
with remorse, would beseech him to work less, to take some recreation,
and not allow himself to be so absorbed in politics.

"You are extremely pale, I assure you. You look worn out. You work too
hard."

"It is due to administrative changes. There are so many documents to
examine."

"I know that very well, but isn't Monsieur Warcolier there? In what way
does he help you?"

"In no way," replied the minister sharply, speaking with truth.

Public affairs, in fact, absorbed him, and he found it necessary to
steal the precious time to make a hasty trip to Rue Prony. A vacation,
it is true, was near. In less than a month, Vaudrey would have more
time at his disposal. But for more than three weeks yet, the minister
would have everything to modify and change,--everything to put into a
healthy shape, as Warcolier said--in the Hotel Beauvau.

What matter! He found the time to fly incognito to the Maison de Vanda,
leaving his coupe at the ministry. Marianne was always there for him
when he arrived. The male domestic or the femme de chambre received him
with all the deference that "domestics" show when they suspect that the
visitor brings any kind of subsidy to the house. To Vaudrey, there was a
sort of mystery in Mademoiselle Kayser's life. Ramel, who knew her uncle
Kayser, had told him of the poverty of the painter. How then, seeing
that her uncle was so shabby, could the niece be so sumptuously
established?

Kayser, whom he had once met at Marianne's, had answered such a question
by remarking that his niece was a _sly puss_ who understood life
thoroughly and would be sure to make headway. But that was all.

"I have suspected for a long time that that little head was not capable
of much," the painter had added. "I considered her a light-headed
creature, nothing more. Fool that I was! she is a shrewd woman, a clever
woman, a true woman. I only find fault with her for one thing."

"What?" asked Vaudrey.

"Do you ask what, Monsieur le Ministre? The style of her establishment.
It is flashy, tawdry, noisy, it is boudoir art. It lacks seriousness! It
lacks morality! I would have in it figures that have style, character. I
don't ask for saintly pictures, but moral allegories, austere art. I
understand only the severe in art. I am a puritan in the matter of the
brush. For that reason, I shall attain nothing in these days of _genre_
and water-color painting."

And Kayser went on painting allegories, to digest his dinner, the pate
de foie gras washed down with kummel, of which he had just partaken at
his niece's.

Vaudrey himself viewed those Japanese trifles, those screens, those
carpets, those pedestals surmounted by terra-cotta figures presenting in
their nudity the flesh tints of woman, those clock-cases above the
doors, that profusion of knickknacks, of furniture, of ottomans, that
soft upholstery that seemed to be made only to excuse a fall--nay, even
urged to sudden temptations, to chance love, to violent caprices; and on
leaving the house, where he had spoken to Marianne only in compliments a
hundred times repeated, and where she had but re-echoed sarcasms full of
tender, double meanings, as a woman who would undoubtedly yield, but
would not offer herself, he bore away with him in his nostrils and, as
it were, in his clothes, a permeating, feminine odor, which would now
follow him everywhere, and everywhere float about him in whiffs, urging
him to return to that house in which a new world seemed to be opening to
him.

He would not long persist in enquiring how Marianne Kayser had procured
all those baubles that so highly incensed the puritan instincts of her
honest uncle. He found himself urged forward with profound delight in
this adventure whose mysterious features pleased him. Bah! the very fact
that he found so much inexplicable in the life of this woman enticed him
all the more. It seemed to him that not only had he entered upon a
romantic course, but that he was himself the hero of the romance. Never,
in the days when he rolled about, an unknown student, on the Parisian
wave, and had lifted his thoughts toward some pale patrician girl,
toward some pretty creature he had caught a glimpse of, leaning back in
a dark-blue coupe, or framed in by the red velvet hangings of a
proscenium box, had he more perfectly incarnated the ideal of his desire
than in so charming a creature. Dreams of power, visions of love of his
twentieth year, had now become tangible to him and at forty he stretched
out his feverish hand toward them all.

"Could Ramel have been right?" he said to himself, "and I, only a
provincial, athirst for Parisine? But what matter? Let Mademoiselle
Kayser be what she will and I what I may be, it seems to me that I have
never loved any one as I love this woman."

"Not even Adrienne," added a faint, trembling voice from within. But
Sulpice had a ready answer to stifle it: Adrienne could not be compared
with any creature in the world. Adrienne was the charm, the daily
comfort of the domestic hearth. She was the wife, not the "woman." She
was the darling, not the love. Vaudrey would have severed one of his
arms to spare her any heavy sorrow, but he was not anxious about
Adrienne. She knew nothing, she would know nothing. And what fault,
moreover, had he committed hitherto? In that word _hitherto_, a host of
mental reservations were involved that Sulpice would gladly have
obliterated with his nails, he was ready to cry out with the same good
faith,--that of the husband who deceives the wife whom he loves:

"What wrong have I done?"

One afternoon,--there was no session of the Chamber that day,--Marianne
was seated in her little salon. She was warming the tips of her
slippers, that furtively peeped from beneath the lace of her skirt as a
little bird might protrude its beak from a nest, her right leg crossed
over the other, and she appeared to be musing, her chin resting on her
delicate hand.

She was weary. Justine, her recently engaged femme de chambre, who, like
the silverware, was provided by the Dujarrier, came to announce with the
discreet, bantering little smile of servants, that Monsieur Dachet, the
upholsterer, had called twice.

"The upholsterer!"

Marianne frowned slightly.

"What did he say?"

"Nothing, that he would return to-morrow."

"You call that nothing?" said Marianne, with a short laugh.

When Justine had left the room, she went straight to a small, black,
Italian cabinet inlaid with ivory, of which one drawer was locked. In
opening it, the sound of gold coins rattling on the wood caused her to
smile; then, with the tips of her white fingers, she spread out the
louis at the bottom of the drawer, which she abruptly closed, making a
wry face, and folding her arms, she returned to her seat in front of the
fire, beating her right foot nervously upon the wrought-iron fender.

"The Dujarrier's money will not go much further," she thought. "It is
finished."

She thought of striking a decisive blow. Up to the present time, her
relations with Sulpice had floated in the regions of the
sentimentalities of the novel, or of romance. The minister believed
himself loved for love's sake. He saw in Marianne only an eccentric girl
free from all prejudices and every duty, who disposed of her life as
seemed best to her, without being under the necessity of accounting to
either husband or lover. Free, she made of her liberty pleasure or
passion according to her fancy. The frightful, practical questions, the
daily necessities, were lost sight of by this man who was burdened with
the governmental question of France. Again, he never asked himself the
source of Marianne's luxury. He delighted in it without thinking of
analyzing anything or of knowing anything, and this ingenuously.
Mademoiselle Kayser's first word must necessarily awaken him to the
situation.

She knew that Vaudrey was to come, and suddenly leaving the fire, she
arrayed herself for him in a black satin peignoir lined with red surah,
with lapels of velvet thrown widely apart and allowing the whiteness of
her neck and chest to be seen under folds of old lace. Her fair hair
fell upon her velvet collar, and surmounting this strange costume, her
pale face against the background of the red-draped salon assumed the
disturbing charm of an apparition.

On seeing her, Sulpice could not refrain from stopping short and looking
at her in admiration. Seated there, in the centre of her salon, she was
awaiting him and arranging bundles of papers in a basket with gilded
feet and lined with pink satin. She extended her hand to him. It was a
pale hand, as inanimate as the hand of a dead person, and she languidly
asked him why he remained there stupefied without approaching her.

"I am looking," said the minister.

"You are always the most gallant of men," said Marianne, and she added:

"You are not already tired then of looking at me? Usually, caprices do
not last so long."

"The affection that I have for you is not a caprice."

"What is it, then? I am curious--"

"It is a passion, Marianne, an absolute, deep, mad passion--"

"Oh! nonsense! nonsense!" said Marianne. "I know that you speak
wonderfully well, I have heard you in the tribune. A declaration of love
costs you no more than a ministerial declaration. But to-day, my dear
minister, I am not disposed to listen to it even from you."

In these last words, there was a certain tenderness that in a measure
modified the expression of weariness or sulkiness which Marianne
suggested. Sulpice inferred therefrom an implied acceptance of his
proffered love.

"Yes," said she abruptly; "I am very sad, frightfully sad."

"Without a cause?" asked Vaudrey.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh! I am not of those who allow their nerves to control them. When I am
out of sorts, there is invariably a cause. Let that be understood once
for all."

"And the cause?--I should be delighted to learn it, Marianne, for I
swear to you that I would always bear a half of your troubles and
pains."

"Thanks!--But in life there are troubles so commonplace that one could
only acknowledge them to the most intimate friends."

"You have no more devoted friend than I am," replied Vaudrey, in a tone
that conveyed unmistakable conviction.

She knew it positively. She could read that heart like an open page.

"When one meets friends like you, one is the more solicitous to keep
them and to avoid saddening them with stupid affairs."

"But why?" asked Vaudrey, drawing close to Marianne. "What troubles you?
I beseech you to tell me!"

He gazed earnestly at her eyes, seeking in the depths of their blue
pupils a secret or a confession that evaded him, and with an instinctive
movement he seized Marianne's hands which she abandoned to him; they
were quite cold. As he bent toward her to plead with her to speak, he
felt her gentle breath, inhaled the perfume of her delicate, fair skin,
and saw the exquisite curves of her body outlined beneath the black
folds of her satin peignoir. Marianne's knee gently pressed his own
while her heavy eyelids fell like veils over the young woman's eyes, in
which Vaudrey thought he observed tears.

"Marianne, I entreat you, if you have any sorrow whatever, that I can
assuage, I pray you, tell me of it!"

"Eh! if it were a sorrow!--" she said, quickly withdrawing her left hand
from Sulpice's warm grasp. "But it is worse: it is a financial worry,
yes, financial," she said brusquely, on observing that Vaudrey's face
depicted astonishment.

She seized the handful of papers that she had thrown into the
work-basket, and said in a tone that was expressive of mingled wrath and
disgust:

"There now, you see that? They are bills for this house: the accounts of
clamorous creditors, upholsterers, locksmiths, builders and I don't know
what besides!"

"What! your house?"

"You thought that I had paid for it? It is a rented one and nothing in
it is paid for. I owe for all, and to a hungry pack."

She began to laugh.

"Do you imagine then that old Kayser's niece could lead this life in
which you see her? Without a sou, should I possess all that you see
here?--No!--I have perpetrated the folly of ordering all these things
for which I am now indebted and which must be paid for at once, and now
I am about to be sued. There! you were determined to urge me to confess
all that--Such are my worries and they are not yours, so I ask your
pardon, my dear Vaudrey: so let us talk of something else. Well! how did
the Fraynais interpellation turn out?--What has taken place in the
Chamber?"

"Let us speak only of you, Marianne," said the minister, who looked at
the young woman with a sort of frank compassion as a friendly physician
looks at a sick person.

She nervously snapped her fingers and with her feet crossed, beat the
little feverish march that she had previously done.

He drew still closer to her, trying to calm her and to obtain some
explanation, some information from her; and Marianne, as if she had
already yielded in at once confiding her secret unreflectingly, refused
at present to accord him the full measure of her confidence. She
repeated that nothing that could be a source of annoyance or sordid,
ought to sadden her friends. Besides, one ought to draw the line at
one's life-secret. She was entitled, in fact, to maintain silence. That
Vaudrey should question her so, caused her horrible suffering.

"And you, Marianne," he said, "you torture me much more by not replying
to me, to whom the least detail of your life is interesting. To me who
see you preoccupied and distressed, when I wish, I swear to you, to
banish all your sadness."

She turned toward him with an abrupt movement and with her gray,
gold-speckled eyes flashing, she seemed to yield to a violent, sudden
and almost involuntary decision and said to Sulpice:

"Then you wish to know even the wretchedness of my life? So be it! But I
warn you that it is not very cheerful. For," said she, after a moment's
silence,--Sulpice shuddered under her glance,--"it is better to be
frank, and if you love me as you say you do, you should know me
thoroughly; you can then decide what course to take. For myself, I am
accustomed to deception."

Ah! although this woman were ready to tell him everything, Vaudrey felt
sure that her confidence could only intensify the love that he felt. She
had risen, her arms were crossed over her black gown whose red velvet
trimming suggested open wounds, her ardent eyes were in strong contrast
with her pale face, her lips of unusually heightened color expressed a
strange sensuality that invited a kiss, while her nostrils dilated under
the impulse of bitter anger--standing thus, she began to narrate her
life to Vaudrey who was seated in front of her, looking up to her--as if
at her knees. Her story was a sad one of a wicked childhood, ignorant
youth, wasted early years, melancholy, sins, outbursts of faith, falls,
returns of love, pride, virtue, restitution through repentance, scourged
hopes, dead confidences, the entire heartrending existence of a woman
who had left more of her heart than of the flesh of her body clinging to
the nails of her calvaries:--all, though ordinary and commonplace, was
so cruel in its truth that it appealed at once to Sulpice's heart, a
heart bursting with pity, to that credulous man who was attracted by all
that seemed to him so exquisitely painful and new about this woman.

"Perhaps I am worrying you?" she asked abruptly.

"You!" said he.

He looked at her with a tear in his eye.

Marianne's eyes gleamed with a sudden light.

"Well!" she said, "such is my life! I have loved, I have been betrayed.
I have had faith in some one and I awakened one fine morning with this
prospect before me: to sink in the deep mud or to do like so many
others,--to take a lover and save myself through luxury, since I could
not recover myself through passion. Bah! the world shows more leniency
toward those who succeed than toward those who repent. All that is
necessary is to succeed, and on my word--you know Monsieur de Rosas
well?"

"No," stammered Vaudrey, before whose mind the duke's blond face
appeared.

"You heard him the other evening!"

"I mean that I have never spoken to him. Well! what of Monsieur de
Rosas?"

"Monsieur de Rosas loved me. Oh!" she said, interrupting a gesture made
by Vaudrey, "wait. He said that he loved me. He is rich. Why should I
not have been Rosas's mistress? Deal for deal, that was a good bargain,
at least! I accept Rosas! It was to receive him that I was foolish
enough to make my purchases without reckoning, without knowing. What's
that for a Rosas?" she said, as she crushed the bundle of bills between
her fingers.

"And--Monsieur de Rosas?" asked Vaudrey, who was quite pale.

"He?"

Marianne laughed.

"Well, he has gone--I have told you as much. He has, moreover, perhaps,
done wisely. I regretted him momentarily--but, bah! I should have sent
him away--yes, very quickly, just so! without even allowing him to
touch the tips of my fingers."

"Rosas?" repeated the minister, looking keenly into Marianne's eyes.

"Rosas!" she again said, lowering her voice. "And do you know why I
would have done that?"

"No--" answered Sulpice trembling.

"Simply because I no longer loved him, and that I loved another."

She had spoken these last words slowly and in such passionate, vibrating
tones that Sulpice felt himself shudder with delight.

"Ah," he said, as he went toward her, "is that the reason? Truly,
Marianne, is that the reason?"

She had not confessed whom she loved, she had spoken only by her looks.
But Sulpice felt that he belonged to her, he was burning with passion,
transported, insane from this avowal; his hands sought hers and drew her
to him. He clasped her to his bosom, intoxicated by the pressure of this
body against his own, and added in a very low tone while his fingers
alternately wandered over her satiny neck and her silky hair:

"How can I help loving you, Marianne? Is it true, really true? You love
me?--Ah! what the great nobleman has not done, do you think I cannot do?
You are in your own home, you understand, Marianne.--Then, as he touched
the young woman's exquisite ears with his lips, he added:

"Our home--will you have it so?--Our home!--"

He felt, as she remained in his embrace with her body leaning against
his, that she quivered throughout her frame; his lips wandered from her
ear to her cheek and then to her lips, there they rested long in a
ravishing kiss that filled him with the languishing sensation of
swooning, he holding her so tightly that, with a smile, she disengaged
herself, pink with her blushes, and bright-eyed, said, with an
expression of peculiar delight:

"It is sealed now!"

Sulpice, even in his youthful days, had never felt so intoxicating a
sensation as that which he enjoyed to-day. It was a complete abandonment
of himself, a forgetfulness of everything in the presence of his
absolute intoxication. All the realities of life that were ready to take
possession of him on leaving this place melted before this dream: the
possession of that woman. He forgot the assembly, the foyer, that human
crowd that he ruled from the height of the tribune, and Adrienne, who
was seated yonder at the window, awaiting him. He forgot everything.
Like those who possess the singular faculty of easily receiving and
losing impressions, he fancied that his horizon was limited to these
walls with their silken hangings, these carpets, this feminine salon,
opening on a boudoir, a retreat whence escaped the odors of flowers and
perfume bottles.

Then, too, a special feeling of pride entered his heart. He felt his joy
increased tenfold at the thought that he, the petty bourgeois from
Grenoble, had snatched this woman from a duke and, like a great
nobleman, had paid the debts that she had contracted. He raised his head
proudly from an instinctive impulse of vanity. Rosas! He, the son of
honest Dauphiny folks, would crush him with his liberality.

"What shall I do to silence those creditors?" he said to
Marianne,--whose hands he held and whose face grazed his in a way that
almost made him frantic.

"Nothing," she replied. "What you have promised me is enough. Now I feel
that I am saved. Our house, you said so, we are in our own house here.
If the creditors will not believe me when I tell them to have
patience--"

"They will believe you," said Vaudrey. "Come, we will find the means--On
my signature, any one will lend me money."

It seemed that Marianne was expecting this word _money_, coarse but
eloquent, in order to tell Vaudrey that an old friend, Claire Dujarrier,
was on intimate terms with a certain Adolphe Gochard, who upon the
endorsement of a responsible person, would certainly advance a hundred
thousand francs that he had at this moment lying idle. Gochard only
needed a bill of exchange in his favor for one hundred thousand francs
at three months' date, plus interest at five per cent. This Gochard was
a very straightforward capitalist, who did not make it a business to
lend money, but merely to oblige. It was Madame Dujarrier who had
introduced him and Marianne would have already availed herself of his
courtesy, if she had believed herself able to repay it at the appointed
date.

"And where does this Monsieur Gochard live?" Vaudrey promptly asked.

"Oh! it would not be necessary for you to go to see him," replied
Marianne. "On receipt of a bill of exchange from me, Madame Dujarrier
would undertake to let me have a hundred thousand francs from hand to
hand."

"A hundred thousand francs!--In three months," said Vaudrey to himself,
"in a vast placer like Paris, one can find many veins of gold."

He had, besides, his personal property and land in Dauphiny. If need be,
without Adrienne's even knowing it, he could mortgage his farms at
Saint-Laurent-du-Pont!

"Monsieur de Rosas would not have hesitated. But in his case there would
have been no merit," said Mademoiselle Kayser.

At the name of that man, coupled with the recollection of him, Sulpice
felt himself spurred to a decision. Clearly the great millionaire noble
would not have delayed before snatching this woman from the claws of her
creditors. A hundred thousand francs, a mere trifle for the count! Well,
Vaudrey would give it as the Spaniard would have done. He would find it.
Within three months, he would have put everything right; he did not
know how, but that mattered little.

"Have you a pen, Marianne?"

The minister had not noticed the sheet of white paper that was lying on
the blotting pad of Russia leather, among the satin finished envelopes
and the ivory paper-cutters.

"What are you going to do, my friend?"

She pretended to put away the green, sharkskin penholder lying near the
inkstand, but drew it imperceptibly nearer to Sulpice, who with a quick
movement had already seated himself in front of the secretaire.

"A minister's signature is sufficient, I suppose?" he said with a smile.

He commenced to write.

"What did you say?--Gochard?--"

She was quite pale as she looked over Sulpice's shoulder and saw him
rapidly write several lines on the paper, then she spelled:

"Adolphe Gochard--Go-go-c-h-ar-d."

"There it is!" he said, as he handed her the sheet of paper.

"I wish to know what is thereon, or I would never consent."

She took the paper between her fingers as if to tear it to pieces.
Sulpice prevented her.

"No," he said, "I request you to keep it; it is the best reply you can
give to those people.--Rely on me!"

"Do you wish it?" asked Marianne, with a toss of her head, speaking in a
very sweet voice.

"Decidedly. It is selfish, but I wish to feel myself not a little at
home here," Sulpice replied.

He seized her hands, her plump, soft, coaxing hands, and as he clasped
them within his own, he carried them to his lips and kissed them, as
well as her face, neck, ear and mouth, which he covered with kisses; and
Marianne, still holding the satin paper that the minister had just
signed, said with a laugh as she feebly defended herself:

"Come--come--have done with it! Oh! the big boy!--You will leave nothing
for another time!"

He left the house, his head was swimming, and he was permeated with
strong odors. He flung to the coachman an address half-way to the
ministry.

"Place de la Madeleine."

He shut his eyes to picture Marianne.

As soon as she was alone, her lips curled as a smile of satisfied vanity
played over them. She began by reading the lines that he had so hastily
written: _I guarantee to Monsieur Adolphe Gochard a bill of exchange at
three months, if he agrees to advance that amount to Mademoiselle
Dujarrier who will hand it to Mademoiselle Marianne Kayser_.

"Well! the Dujarrier was right," she said; "a woman's scheming works
easier than a sinapism."

Then, after a slight toss of the head and still smiling, she opened one
of the drawers of the small Inaltia cabinet and slipped into it the
satin paper to which the minister had affixed his signature and which
she had carefully folded four times. She considered that autograph worth
a thousand times more gold than the few pieces that remained scattered
about the drawer, like so many waifs of luxury. Then, slowly returning
to her armchair, she sank into it, clasping her two hands behind her
head and gazing at the ceiling, her thoughts wandered in dreams--a crowd
of little ambitious thoughts passed through her brain like drifting
clouds across the sky--and while with the top of her foot she again beat
her nervous march on the hem of her petticoat, her lips, the lips whose
fever had been taken away by Vaudrey, still preserved the strange turn
of the corners that indicated the unsatiated person who sees, however,
his opportunity arrive.

She was as fully mistress of herself as Vaudrey was embarrassed and
unbalanced. He seemed to hear voices laughing and singing within him and
his brain was inflamed with joy. Before him opened the immense prospects
of his dreams. Glorious as it was to be all-powerful, it was better to
be loved. Everything whirled about within his brain, he thought he still
heard Denis Ramel talking to him, and in a twinkling, Marianne's smiling
face appeared, and with a kiss she interrupted the old journalist's
sallies, and Sulpice saw her, too, as it were half-fainting, through the
window of her fiacre, like a pastel half-hidden beneath the glass.

He was delighted to walk about for a moment when the carriage had set
him down on the asphalted space that surrounds the Madeleine. The walk
was beneficial. He raised his head instinctively, expanded his lungs
with the air, and threw out his chest. He thought that people looked at
him attentively. Some passers-by turned round to see him. He would have
felt prouder to have heard them say: "That is Mademoiselle Kayser's
lover!" than: "That is Monsieur Vaudrey, the minister!"

He felt a kind of annoyance on returning to Place Beauvau. He was still
with Marianne. He recalled her attitudes, her smile, the tone of her
voice. Public matters now fastened their collar on him, there were
signatures to be subscribed, reports to be read, telegrams, routine
work; in a word, vulgar professional duties were to be resumed. He did
not at once go to his cabinet. Warcolier, the Under Secretary of State,
received and despatched ordinary matters.

Through some strange caprice, he felt a desire to see Adrienne very soon
after leaving Marianne, perhaps to know how he would feel and if "_cela
se voyait_" as they say. There was also a feeling of remorse involved in
this eagerness. He wished to satisfy himself that Adrienne was not
suffering, and as formerly, to smile on her as if redoubled affection
would, in his own eyes, obliterate his fault.

Adrienne was in her salon. Sulpice heard the sound of voices beyond the
door. Some one was talking.

"Madame has a visitor?" he inquired of the domestic.

"Yes, Monsieur le Ministre--Monsieur de Lissac."

"What! Guy! what chance brings him here!" Sulpice thought.

He opened the door and entered, extending his hand to his friend.

"How lucky! it is very kind of you to come."

Guy stood, hat in hand, while Vaudrey stooped toward Adrienne to kiss
her brow unceremoniously in the presence of his friend.

"Oh!" said Lissac, "I have not come to greet Your Excellency. It is your
charming wife that I have called on."

"I thank you for it," said Sulpice, "my poor Adrienne does not receive
many visits outside the circle of official relations."

"And she does not get very much entertainment! So I promise myself to
come and pay court to her--or such court as you would wish--from time to
time. Madame," said Lissac jocosely, "it is a fact that this devilish
minister deserves that you should receive declarations from morning to
night while he is over yonder ogling his portfolio. Such a husband as he
is, is not to be found again--"

Adrienne, blushing a little, looked at Vaudrey with her usual expression
of tender devotion as profound as her soul. Sulpice made an effort to
smile at Lissac's pleasantries.

"No, take care, you know!" added Guy. "As Madame Vaudrey is so often
alone, I shall allow myself to come here sometimes to keep her company,
and I won't guarantee to you that I won't fall in love with her."

He turned respectfully toward Adrienne and added, with the correct
bearing of a gentleman:

"Madame, all this is only to make him comprehend that nothing in the
world, not even a rag of morocco,--is his portfolio a morocco one?--is
worth the happiness of having such a wife as you. And the miserable
fellow doesn't suspect it. You see, I speak of you as the Opposition
journals do."

Sulpice tried to smile but he divined under Guy's jesting, a serious and
truthful purpose. Perhaps Adrienne had just been allowing herself to
complain of the sadness and dreariness of her life. He was hurt by it.
After all, he did all that he could to gratify his wife. But a man like
him was not, in fact, born to remain forever tied down. The wife of a
minister must bear her part of the burden, since there must be a burden.

As if Adrienne had divined Sulpice's very thoughts, she quickly added,
interrupting the jester who had somewhat confused the minister:

"Don't pay any attention to Monsieur de Lissac. I am very happy just as
I am."

Vaudrey had taken her hand to clasp it between his fingers with a
slightly nervous grasp. The trustful, good-natured, pure smile that
Adrienne gave him, recalled the anxious, distracted expression on
Marianne's lip.

"Dear wife!"

He sought to find a word, a cry, some consolation, a sort of caress,
proceeding from one heart and penetrating the other. He could find none.

"Come!" said Guy. "I am going to leave you, and if you will allow me,
madame, I will occasionally come here and tell you all the outside
tittle-tattle."

"You will always be welcome, Monsieur de Lissac," Adrienne said, as she
extended her hand to him.

Guy bowed to Madame Vaudrey in a most profoundly respectful way.

Sulpice accompanied him through the salons as far as the hall.

"Do you want me to tell you?" said Lissac. "Your wife is very weary,
take care! This big mansion is not very cheerful. One must inevitably
catch colds in it, and then a woman to be all alone here! A form of
imprisonment! Do not neglect to wheedle the majority, my dear minister,
but don't forget your wife. Come! I will not act traitorously toward
you, but I warn you that if I often find your wife melancholy, as she is
to-day, I will tell her that I adore her. Yes! yes! your wife is
charming. I would give all the orders in the world for a lock of her
hair. Adieu, Monsieur le Ministre."

"Great idiot," said Vaudrey, giving him a little friendly, gentle tap on
the neck.

"Be it so, but if you do not love her well enough, I shall fall in love
with her, and I forewarn you that it is much better that I should than
any other. Au revoir."

"Au revoir!" Sulpice repeated.

He tried now to force a smile and went down to his cabinet, where he
found heaped-up reports awaiting his attention and he turned the pages
over nervously and read them in a very bad humor.


       *       *       *       *       *

_She was quite pale as she looked
over Sulpice's shoulder and saw him rapidly write several lines on the
paper, then she spelled:

"Adolphe Gochard--Go-go-ch-a-r-d."_

[Illustration: SULPICE BECOMES SURETY FOR MARIANNE]




II


Madame Vaudrey drew no real pleasure from the commonplace receptions at
the ministry, or at her Wednesday _at homes_, except when by chance,
Denis Ramel permitted himself to abandon the Batignolles to call at
Place Beauvau, or when Guy enlivened this dull spot by recounting the
happenings of the outside world.

Adrienne felt herself terribly isolated; she knew hardly any one in
Paris. Since Vaudrey had installed himself in Rue de la
Chaussee-d'Antin, she had not had time to form acquaintances among the
wives of the deputies to the Assembly, the majority of whom lived in the
provinces or dwelt at Versailles for economical reasons.

Evidently the residence at the ministry had only brought her ready-made
relations, depressingly inevitable visitors who resembled office-seekers
or clients. These official receptions filled her with sadness. The
conversation always took the same hackneyed tone, disgusting in its
flattery or disquieting by reason of its allusions. People discussed
coming interpellations of ministers; government majorities, projected
legislation; the same phrases, as dreary as showers, fell with all the
regularity of drops of rain. Even young girls, brought up in this centre
of infuriated politicians, spoke of the breaking up of the majority,
reports or ballots, in the same manner as shopkeepers talk of their
trade.

Poor Adrienne exerted herself to acquire an interest in these matters.
Since her husband's very existence was involved therein, hers should
also be. She had, however, formerly dreamed of an entirely different
youth and on bright, sunshiny days she reflected that yonder on the
banks of the Isere, it was delightful in her sweet, little, provincial
house.

Besides, she carefully concealed her melancholy. She knew that she was
already reproached for being somewhat sad. A minister's wife should know
how to smile. This was what Madame Marsy never failed to repeat to her
as often as possible when she visited her at Place Beauvau. This woman
who hardly concerned herself at all about her son, allowing him to grow
up badly enough and committing all her maternal duties to the
grandmother, was perpetually cheerful, notwithstanding that her life had
been chequered by chance and her widowhood of sufficiently dramatic
character, as was said. She endeavored to play the part of an adviser,
an intimate friend to Adrienne. She frequently said to Madame Gerson,
who rarely left her, that Madame Vaudrey would be altogether charming if
she had _chic_.

"Unfortunately, she is provincial; not in her element. She still smacks
of Dauphiny. And then--what is the funniest thing: she knows nothing of
politics."

"She does not even concern herself about it," said the pretty Madame
Gerson, laughing heartily.

According to these ladies she did not take the trouble to fulfil the
role of a minister's wife faultlessly. Ah! if only Sabine or Blanche
Gerson occupied the position filled by this _petite bourgeoise_ of
Grenoble! Well! Paris would have seen what an Athenian Republic was.

Sabine Marsy was decidedly clever. She politely advised Adrienne,
without appearing to do so, as to many matters, in such a way as to
convey reproof under the guise of kindness. Madame Vaudrey would have
done well, as Madame Gerson also observed, to have studied the _Code du
Ceremonial_ on reaching Place Beauvau.

Like Madame Marsy, Madame Gerson had gradually gained Adrienne's
friendship. From an ostentatious desire to be able to tell of what
happened at the ministry; to be on the first list of guests, when the
minister received or gave a ball, Sabine Marsy, who had suffered from
the mania of aspiring to become an artist, patronized the
_intransigeant_ painters and exhibited at the salon, now set her mind on
playing the role of a political figure in Paris. Madame Gerson,
_Blanche_, as Sabine called her, had a similar ambition, but simply from
a desire to be in fashion.

She wished to bring herself into notice. Everything attracted her,
tempted her. She belonged, body and soul, to that machine with its
manifold gearing, brilliant, noisy, active, puffing like a locomotive,
that is called _chic_. _Chic_, that indefinite, indefinable word,
changeable and subtle like a capillary hygrometer, is a Parisian tyranny
that grinds out more fashionable lives than the King of Dahomey offers
as victims on his great feast days. For Blanche, everything in this most
stimulated, over-excited, feverishly deranged life, was reduced to these
two inevitable conclusions: what was _chic_ and what was not _chic_. Not
only was this the inevitable guide in reference to style, clothing, hat,
gloves, costume, material, jewelry, the dress that she should wear, but
also the book that should be read, the play that should be heard, the
operatic score that should be strummed on the piano, the bonbon that
should be presented, the opinion that one should hold, the picture one
should comment upon, all was hopelessly a question of _chic_.

Madame Gerson would have preferred to be compromised in the matter of
her honor rather than to be ridiculed as to her opinions or to express
an idea that was not chic. The necessary result was that all this
woman's conversation--and she often came to see Madame Vaudrey,--was on
well-known topics; so that Adrienne knew in advance what Blanche's
opinion was upon such and such a matter, and that ideas could only pass
muster with Madame Gerson when they bore the stamp of chic, just as a
coin, to escape suspicion of being counterfeit, must bear the stamp of
the mint.

Blanche would have been heartbroken if she had not been seen in the
President's salon on the occasion of a great reception at the Elysee; at
the ministry, on the evening of a comedy; if she had not been in the
front rank of the ladies' gallery on the day of interpellation at the
Assembly; if she had not been greeted from the top of the grand stand by
some minister, on Grand Prix day; if she had not been the first at the
varnishing; the first at the general rehearsals, a little _chic_,--the
first everywhere. Slender, delicate, but hardy as a Parisian, she
dragged her exhausted husband, with her hand of fine steel, through
receptions, balls, soirees, salons, talking loudly, judging everything,
chattering, cackling and haranguing, delighted to mount, with head
erect, the grand staircase of a minister and feel the joy of plunging
her little feet into the official moquettes as if her heels had been
made for state carpets; swelling with pride when she heard the usher,
amid the hubbub of the reception, call loudly the name which meant the
fashionable couple, a couple found at every fete:

"Monsieur and Madame Gerson!"

While the husband, fatigued, weary, left his office heavy-headed, after
having eaten a hasty meal, put on his dress coat and white tie in
haste, got into his carriage in haste, hurriedly accompanied his wife,
left her in order to take a doze on an armchair during the height of the
ball, woke in haste, returned home in haste, slept hurriedly, rose the
same, dragging this indefatigable creature about with him like a
convict's chain, she smiled at others, enticed others, waltzed with
others, adorned herself for others, keeping for him only her weariness,
her yawns, her pallor and her sick-headaches.

For these two galley-slaves of _chic_, the winter passed in this manner,
as fatiguing as months of penal servitude, and they went none too soon,
when the summer arrived, to breathe the sea air or enjoy the sunshine of
the country, in order to restore their frames, wan, worn-out, seedy and
"gruelled," as Sabine Marsy said, when she recalled her connection with
the artists.

"Ah! how much better I like my home!" thought Madame Vaudrey.

Sabine and Madame Gerson, with the wives of the ministers, those of the
chiefs of departments, and the regular visitors, were the most assiduous
in their attentions to Adrienne, whom they considered decidedly
provincial. She, stupefied, was alarmed by these Parisian bustlers, that
resembled machines in running order, jabbering away as music-boxes play.

"Do they tire you?" said Guy de Lissac to her bluntly one evening,
succumbing to a feeling of pity for this pensive young woman,--who was a
hundred times prettier than Madame Gerson, whose beauty was so highly
extolled in the journals,--this minister's wife, who voluntarily kept
herself in the background with a timidity that betrayed no awkwardness,
but was in every way attractive, especially to a man about town like
Guy.

"They do not tire me, they upset me," Adrienne replied.

"Ah! they are in full _go_, as it is called. An express train. But they
amuse themselves so much that they have not even time to smile. When the
locomotive spins along too rapidly, try to distinguish the scenery!"

Adrienne instinctively felt that under his irony this sceptic disguised
a sort of sincerity. Lissac's wit pleased her. He surprised her somewhat
at times, but the probably assumed raillery of the young man compensated
for the insipid nonsense of the conversation to which she listened
daily.

At first from mere curiosity and after from a sentiment of respectful
devotion, Guy was impelled to study that delicate and sensitive nature,
entirely swayed by love of Sulpice, that suffered at times a vague
pressure as of some indefinable anguish at the throat, as if a vacuum--a
choking vacuum--had been created about her by some air-pump.

This huge mansion seemed to her to be entirely innocent of all memories,
and though peopled with phantoms, was as commonplace and vulgar as an
apartment house. There were no associations save dust and cracks. These
salons, built for the Marechal de Beauvau, these walls that had
listened to the sobs of Madame d'Houdetot at the death-bed of
Saint-Lambert, appeared to Adrienne to exude ennui, strangling and
inevitable ennui, solemn, official, absolute ennui, nothing but ennui in
the very decorum of the place, and isolation in the midst of power.

She cursed her loneliness, she felt lost amid the salons of this
furnished ministerial mansion, whose cold, gloomy apartments, with the
chairs symmetrically arranged along the walls, she wandered through, but
evidently without expecting any one: state chairs lacking
occupants,--ordinary chairs, domestic chairs seem to have tongues--that
never exchanged conversation. Vast, deserted rooms where the green
curtains behind the glass doors of the bookcases were eternally drawn,
bookcases without books, forever open, mournful as empty sepulchres.

Yes, this immense gilded dwelling with its Gobelins tapestries stifled
her with its terrifying gloom, where nothing, not a single article,
recalled her charming provincial home, her Grenoble house with its
garden filled with lilacs where she was often wont to read while Sulpice
worked upstairs, bent over his table crowded with papers, before his
open window. Ah! those cherished rooms, in the humble corner of the
provincial home, their happy crouching in the peaceful nest; aye, even
the happy first days in Paris, in the Chaussee-d'Antin apartments, in
which Adrienne at least felt herself in her own home, free in her
actions and thoughts, and where she could talk aloud without feeling
that an eye was constantly watching her, and ears were always strained,
in fact, a perpetual espionage upon all her actions and a criticism of
all her words.

She had reached a point when she asked herself if, even for Sulpice,
happiness was not far removed from this life of slavery, of feverish
politics, which for some time past had been visibly paling his cheeks
and rendering him nervous and altogether different from of old.

"If you did not love me so much," she said with a sweet smile, "I could
believe that you loved me no longer."

"What folly! you have only one rival, Adrienne."

"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 fetes, 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 employes, 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."

"Bless me!" replied Warcolier, "entirely logical."

"Be it so! but there are places and places. I cannot, however, retire a
whole staff of employes to give place to a new one. That's precisely
what they want. There is not a deputy who has not one candidate to
recommend to me."

"That's very natural, Monsieur le Ministre, seeing that there is not a
deputy who may not himself be a candidate."

"Still, he should be independent of his electors, but in truth, it is
not the rights of those who have elected them that my colleagues defend,
it is their own interests."

"Every man for himself, Monsieur le Ministre. Yesterday, even yesterday,
one of my electors whose wife has just given birth to a child, wrote me,
asking for a good nurse. That is like one of our colleagues, Perraud--of
the Vosges.--One of his electors commissioned him to take back an
umbrella with him upon his early return. The electors regard their
deputies in the light of commission merchants."

"And as tobacco bureaus! Well, I wish to have more morality than that in
State affairs. I like giving, but I know how to refuse," said Vaudrey.

"That will be easy enough so long as you are popular and solid in
Parliament; but on the day that it is clearly proved that such and such
a future minister can make himself more useful than you to the personal
interests of everybody--and there are such ministers in sight--"

"Granet, yes, I know! He promises more butter than bread, to cry quits
later in giving more dry crusts than fresh butter. But I don't care to
deceive any one."

"As you please, Monsieur le Ministre, as you please," answered
Warcolier, in a mocking and gentle tone.

Sulpice did not like this man. He was a phrase-maker. He had a vague
feeling that this Warcolier who in public affected strictly severe
principles was privately undermining him and that he yielded to favors
in order to win support. It was enough for the minister to discourage
coarse, greedy ambitions, provided that the Under Secretary of State
encouraged unsavory, eager hopes by shrewd smiles and silence that
assented to all that was desired. This little underhand work going on in
his office was unknown to Vaudrey; he did not know that out of every
refusal he gave, Warcolier secured friends; but he maintained a watchful
distrust for this republican who had become so stanch a supporter of the
Republic only since that form of government had triumphed. Besides, what
had he to fear? The President of the Council, Monsieur Collard, of
Nantes, had the unbounded confidence of the head of the State and of the
Chamber; and he was Collard's intimate friend. The majority of the
cabinet was compact. The perfect calm of the horizon was undisturbed by
a cloud. Vaudrey could rule without fear, without excitement and give
all his spare time to that woman whose piercing glance, wandering smile,
palpitating nostrils, dishevelled, fair hair, kisses, fondness, cries,
and tones pursued him everywhere.

Marianne, how he loved her! From day to day, how his love of her
increased like a madman's! It seemed to him that he suddenly found
himself in the presence of the only woman who could possibly understand
him, and in the only world in which he could live; his petty bourgeois,
sensual inexperience flourished in the little hotel of the courtesan.

He had doubtless loved; often enough he had thought himself once more in
love; the poor grisettes, to whom he had written in verse, as he might
have sung songs to them, were gone from his thoughts, though they had
occupied his heart for a short time. He had profoundly loved her who
bore his name, perhaps he loved her still as warmly, as sincerely--the
unfortunate man!--as of old. He sometimes recalled with tearful eye, how
his whole frame trembled with love in the presence of that young girl
who had given herself entirely to him, in all her trust and sincerity,
in all her candor, and all her chastely-timid innocent modesty. But
Adrienne's love was insipid compared with the intoxicating and
appetizing voluptuousness of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite
luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her
attitudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared
everything, mocked, caressed, beginning with a pout and ending with some
drollery, and challenged passion by exasperating it with refusals and
mockery that changed into distracting lasciviousness.

When she extended to Vaudrey her little hand, covered with rings, and
indolent and soft, he felt as if he had received an electric shock and
that his marrow had been touched. This man of forty felt all the
enthusiasm and distraction of a youth. It seemed to him that this was
the only woman that he possibly could love, and in truth she was the
only one that he could have loved as he did, with his forgetfulness of
self, his outbursts of madness, the distracted sentiment of a love for
which he would have braved and risked everything.

When he confessed it frankly, she had a way of answering with a
questioning manner full of doubt, which conveyed the delicacy of the
woman's self-love and the intentionally refined doubt of the coquette, a
questioning _yes_:

"Yes?"

Simply that.

And in this _yes_, there was a world of tenderness, excitement and
burning promises for Sulpice.

Then he drew her to him:

"Yes, yes, yes, yes!" he repeated in burning tones, as he thrust his
head between her shoulders that emerged from her embroidered chemise,
and her neck perfumed and satiny, that he covered with eager kisses.

Yes! And he would have uttered this _yes_ before every one like a
bravado. _Yes!_ It was his delight to give himself wholly to Marianne
and to tell her again and again that nothing in the whole world could
take the place of this mistress who made him forget everything:
politics, the home, the ambition that had been his life, and his
affection for Adrienne that had been his joy.

Thanks to the Dujarrier, Marianne had paid the rent of the house, the
servants and the pressing debts. Claire Dujarrier advanced the hundred
thousand francs demanded by Mademoiselle Kayser, and which she had
apparently--in reality she took them from her own funds--borrowed from
Adolphe Gochard, her lover, who had not a sou, and in whose favor
Vaudrey signed in regular legal form, a bill of exchange at three
months' date _value received in cash_. The Dujarrier merely retained
twenty thousand francs as her commission and handed only eighty thousand
to Marianne.

"But Vaudrey's acceptance to Gochard is for one hundred thousand!"

"You are silly, my girl! What if I lose the balance? If your minister
should not pay?"

"What do you mean?"

"Stranger things have happened, my little one."

Vaudrey having paid, given his name, signed this bill of exchange, felt
the extreme joy arising from the base self-love of the man who pays a
lovely creature and who, nevertheless, believes himself loved.

In the early days, Sulpice went to Rue Prony only during the day or at
night after dinner, or on leaving a reception or the theatre. Marianne
awaited him. He came stealthily, distracted with joy. There, in the
closed chamber he remained with Marianne, who was full of pride at the
complete subjugation of the will of this man in her embrace. She amused
herself occasionally by calling him _Your Excellency_, in reading to him
from some book which spun out the ceremonial necessary in applying for
an interview with a minister:

"If ever I ask you for an audience, do you know how I must address
myself to the secretary? Listen to this book, it is funny: 'Ordinary
toilet. The etiquette for the toilet is not very strict, but it is,
however, in good taste to appear dressed as for a ceremonious call. For
women, the toilet should be simple and the gloves new.'"

She laughed as she rested almost naked in Sulpice's arms, and repeated,
looking into his eyes:

"A simple toilet!"

"And again, listen!" she said, as she resumed the book. "'In speaking to
a minister as in writing to him, one should address him as _Monseigneur_
or _Your Excellency_. On reaching the door as you leave the salon, you
should again bow respectfully.' That is amusing, ah! how amusing it
is!--Then they respect you as much as that? Your Excellency!
Monseigneur! Shall I be obliged to courtesy to you?--Your lips, give me
your lips, Monseigneur! I adore you!--You are my own minister; my
finance minister, my lover, my all! I do not respect you, but I love
you, I love you!"

He trembled to the very roots of his hair when she spoke to him thus. He
felt transports of joy in clasping her in his arms and genuine despair
when he left her. Leave her! leave her there under that lamp alone, in
that low bed where he had just forgotten that there existed anything
else in the world besides that apartment, warm with perfumes. He would
have liked to pass the whole night beside her, separating only when
satiated and overwhelmed with caresses. But how could he leave Adrienne
alone over there in the ministerial mansion? However trustful this young
wife might be, and innocent, credulous and incapable of suspicion, if he
had passed a night absent from her, she would have been terrified and
warned.

He easily invented prolonged receptions and night sessions that detained
him until an advanced hour.

"One would say that the evening sessions grow more frequent than
formerly," Adrienne remarked gently at breakfast.

"Don't talk to me about it," replied Sulpice. "In order to reach the
vacation sooner, the deputies talk twice as long."

Adrienne never opened the _Officiel_, which Vaudrey received in his
private office, pretending that the sight of a newspaper too vividly
recalled the fatiguing political life that absorbed him. One day,
however, he allowed the journals to be brought into the salon and to lie
about in Madame's room. He informed Adrienne that he was going to pass
the day in Picardy, at Guise or at Vervins, where an important deputy
had invited him to visit his factory. He would leave in the morning and
could not return until the following day toward noon.

"What a long time!" said Adrienne.

"It is still longer for me than for you, since you remain here, in our
home."

"Oh! our home! we have only one home: in Chaussee-d'Antin, or the house
at Grenoble, you know."

"Dear wife!" cried Vaudrey, as he embraced her tenderly,--sincerely,
perhaps.

And he left. He set out for Guise, returned in the evening and ordered
the Director of the Press to send to all the journals by the Havas
agency, a message which ran: _The Minister of the Interior passed the
entire day yesterday at Guise, at Monsieur Delair's, the deputy from
L'Aisne. He dined and slept at the house of his host. Monsieur Vaudrey
is to return to Paris this morning, at eleven o'clock._

Then he showed the news to Adrienne, and laughed as he said:

"It is surprising! one cannot take a single step without it appears in
print and the entire population is informed at once!"

"Tell me everything," Adrienne replied, as she embraced him with her
glance. "Are you tired? You look pale. How did you spend the day? You
made a speech? Were you applauded?"

It was mainly by kisses that Vaudrey answered. What could he say to
Adrienne? She knew perfectly well how similar all these gatherings were,
with their official routine. Monsieur Delair had been very agreeable,
but the minister had necessarily had to endure much talk, much
importunity.

"The day seemed very long to me!"

"And to me also," she said.

Sulpice indeed returned from Guise, but the last train on the previous
night had taken him to Rue Prony, at Marianne's. He had then found out
the secret of remaining at her side undisturbed for a long time, and the
telegraph, managed by the Director of the Press, enabled him to prove an
alibi to Adrienne from time to time. He had taken to Marianne a huge
bouquet of fresh flowers gathered in the park at Guise for Madame
Vaudrey by Monsieur Delair's two daughters. That appeared to him to be
quite natural.

Marianne, who was waiting for him, put the flowers in the Japanese vases
and said to him as she threw her bare arms around him:

"Very good! You thought of me!----"

The next morning Vaudrey left, more than ever enchained by the delight
of her embraces. He sometimes returned on foot, to breathe the
vivifying freshness of the roseate dawn, or taking a cab, he stretched
himself out wearily therein, as he drove to the ministry, musing over
the hours so recently passed and striving to arrest them in their
flight, to enjoy again their seductive joy and to squeeze as from a
delicious fruit, all their intoxicating poetry, delight and fascination.

He closed his eyes. He saw Marianne again with her eyes veiled as he
kissed her, he drank in the odor of her hair that fell like a sort of
fair cover over the lace pillow. It seemed that he was permeated with
her perfume. He breathed the air with wide-open nostrils to inhale it
again, to recover its scent and preserve it. His whole frame trembled
with emotion at the recollection of that lovely form that he had left
whiter than the sheet of the bed, in the dim light that filtered through
the opal-shaded lamp.

Then he thought that he must forget, and invent some tale for Adrienne.
Again he opened his eyes and trembled in spite of himself, as he saw, on
both sides of the cab, workmen slowly trudging along the sidewalks with
their hands in their pockets, their noses red, a wretched worn-out silk
scarf about their necks and swinging on their arms the supply of food
for the day, or again with their fingers numb with the cold, holding
some journal in their hands in which they read as they marched along,
the speech of "Monsieur le Ministre de l'Interieur," that magnificent
speech not made during the night session as Sulpice had told Adrienne,
but the day before yesterday, in broad day, when the majority,
faithfully grouped about him, had applauded this phrase: _I, whose hours
are consecrated to the amelioration of the lot of the poor and who can
say with the poet,--I shall be pardoned for this feeling of vanity:_

"What I steal from my nights, I add to my days!"

Sulpice heard again the applause that he received. He saw those devoted
hands reached out to him as he descended from the tribune; he again
experienced a feeling of pride, and yet he felt dissatisfied with
himself now that he saw the other hands, the servile hands of the
applauders, hidden by the red, cold hands of a mason who held this
speech between his horny fingers.

Sulpice returned to the ministry, shaking himself as if to induce
forgetfulness, busy, weary, and still,--eternally,--as if immovably
fixed in an antechamber of Place Beauvau, he found the inevitable
place-hunters, the hornets of ministries.

Vaudrey caused these urgent people, as well as some others, to be
received by Warcolier, who asked nothing better than to make tools, to
sow the seed of his clientage. Guy de Lissac and Ramel had
simultaneously called Vaudrey's attention to the eagerness which
Warcolier manifested in toying with popularity.

"He is not wholly devoted to you, is this gentleman who prefers every
government!" said Guy.

"He will undermine you quietly!" added Ramel.

"I am satisfied of that. But I am not disturbed: I have the majority.
Oh! faithful and compact."

"Woman often changes," muttered Ramel.

Guy was troubled about Vaudrey for another reason. He vaguely suspected
that Sulpice was neglecting Adrienne. Political business, doubtless.
Vaudrey unquestionably loved his wife, who adored him and was herself
adorable. But he manifestly neglected her.

Lissac found them one day smilingly discussing a question that was
greatly occupying the journalists: divorce. Apropos of a trifle, of a
suit for separation that Adrienne had just read in the _Gazette
Tribunaux_. It referred to an adulterous husband, a pottery dealer in
Rue Paradis, Monsieur Vauthier, the lover of a singer at a rather
notorious _cafe-concert_, named Lea Thibault. The wife had demanded a
separation. Adrienne had just read the pleadings.

"Poor woman!" she said. "She must have suffered, indeed."

Sulpice did not reply.

"Do you know that if that were my case, I could never forgive you?"

"You are mad! What are you thinking of?"

"Oh! it is true, the idea that you could touch another woman, that you
could kiss her as you kiss me, that would make me more than angry,
horrified and disgusted. I tell you, I would never forgive you."

"Who puts all this stuff in your head? Come, I will do as I used to do,"
said Vaudrey. "Not another paper shall enter your house! What an idea,
to read the _Gazette des Tribunaux_!"

"It is because this name: _Vauthier_, somewhat resembles your own that I
was induced to read it. And then this very mournful title: _Separation
de corps_. I would prefer divorce myself. A complete divorce that severs
the past like a knife-cut."

"But what an idea!" repeated Sulpice, who was somewhat uneasy.

Vaudrey was delighted to hear Guy announced in the midst of this
discussion. They would then change the topic. But Adrienne, who was much
affected by her reading, returned to the same subject in an obstinate
sort of way and Lissac commenced to laugh.

"What a joke! To speak of divorce between you two! Never fear, madame,
your husband will never present to the Chamber a law in favor of
divorce."

"Who knows?" Sulpice answered. "I am in favor of divorce myself, yes,
absolutely."

"And I cannot understand, for my part, how a woman can belong to two
living men," said Adrienne.

"You reason for yourself. But the unhappy women who suffer--and the
unhappy men--The existing law, in fact, seeing that it admits
separation, permits divorce, but more cruel, heartrending, and unjust.
Divorce without freedom. Divorce that continues the chain."

"Sulpice is right, madame, and sooner or later, we shall certainly
arrive at that frightful divorce."

"After all, what does it matter to me?" Adrienne replied.

She threw the accursed _Gazette des Tribunaux_ into the waste basket
with its _Suit of Vauthier vs. Vauthier_. "We are not interested,
neither my husband nor I; he loves me and I love him. I am as sure of
him as he is sure of me. He may demand all the laws that are possible:
it would not be for selfish interest, for he would not profit by them."

"Never!" said Sulpice with a laugh, delighted to be released from the
magnetic influence of Adrienne's strange excitement.

There was, however, a somewhat false ring in this laugh. Face to face
with the avowed trustfulness of his wife, Sulpice experienced a slight
pricking of conscience. He thought of Marianne. His passion increased
tenfold, but this very increase of affection made him afraid. He
hastened to find himself again at Rue Prony. The Hotel Beauvau depressed
him. It became more than ever a prison. How gladly he escaped from it!

Yes, it was a prison for him as it was for Adrienne; a prison that he
fled from to seek Marianne's boudoir, to enjoy her kisses and mirth,
while, at the same moment, his wife, the dear abandoned, disdained
creature, sad without being cognizant of the cause of her melancholy,
terrified by the emptiness of that grand ministerial mansion, that
"sounded hollow," as she said, quietly and stealthily took the official
carriage that Vaudrey sent back to her from the Chamber, and had herself
driven--where?--only she knew!

"You ought to make a great many calls," the minister had frequently
said. "It would divert your mind and it is well to appear to know a
great many persons."

But she only found pleasure in making one visit, she gave the coachman
the address of the apartments on Chaussee-d'Antin, where she had lived
long, happy years with Sulpice, sweet and peaceful under the clear light
of the lamp. She entered this deserted apartment, now as cold as a tomb,
and had the shutters opened by the concierge in order that she might see
the sunlight penetrate the room and set all the motes dancing in its
cheerful rays. She shut herself in and remained there happy, consoled;
sitting in the armchair formerly occupied by Sulpice, she pictured him
at the table at which he used to work, his inkstand before him and
surrounded by his books, his cherished books! She lived again the
vanished life. "Return!" she said to the dream, the humble dream she had
at last recovered. She rambled about those deserted rooms that on every
side reminded her of some sweet delight, here it was a kiss of chaste
and eternal love, there a smile. Ah! how easy life would have been there
all alone, happy for ever!

The Ministry! Power! Popularity! Fame! Authority! What were they worth?

Is all that worth one of the blessed hours in this little dwelling,
where the cup of bliss would have been full if the wife could have heard
the clear laugh or the faint cry of a child?

Poor Sulpice! how he was exhausting himself now in an overwhelming task!
He was giving his health and life to politics, while here he only
experienced peace, consoling caresses and the quieting of every
excitement. On the study-table there still remained some pens and some
books that were formerly in constant use.

Adrienne went away with reddened eyes from these pilgrimages, as it
were, to her former happiness. She returned to her carriage and
moistened her cambric pocket handkerchief with her warm breath, in order
to wipe her eyes so that Sulpice might not see that she had been
weeping. Then when her well-known carriage passed before the shops in
the Faubourg Saint-Honore, the wives of mercers or booksellers,
dressmakers, young girls, all of whom enviously shook their heads, said
to each other:

"The minister's wife!--Ah! she has had a glorious dream!--She is
happy!"




III


Marianne was contented. Not that her ambition was completely satisfied,
but after all, Sulpice in place of Rosas was worth having. Though a
minister was only a passing celebrity, he was a personage. From the
depths of the bog in which she lately rolled, she would never have dared
to hope for so speedy a revenge.

Speedy, assuredly, but perhaps not sufficient. Her eager hunger
increased with her success. Since Vaudrey was hers, she sought some
means of bringing about some adventure that would give her fortune. What
could be asked or exacted from Sulpice? She recalled the traditions of
fantastic bargains, of extensive furnishings. She would find them. She
had but to desire, since he had abandoned himself, bound hand and foot,
like a child.

She knew him now, all his candor, all his weakness, for, in the presence
of this blase woman, weary of love, Vaudrey permitted himself to confide
his thoughts with unreserved freedom, opening his heart and disclosing
himself with a clean breast in this duel with a woman:--a duel of
self-interest which he mistook for passion.

She had studied him at first and speedily ranked him, calling him:

"An innocent!"

She felt that in this house in Rue Prony, where she was really not in
her own home but was installed as in a conquered territory, Sulpice was
dazzled. Like a provincial, as Granet described him so often, he entered
there into a new world.

Uncle Kayser frequently called to see his niece. Severe in taste, he
cast long, disdainful looks at the tapestries and the artistic trifles
that adorned the house. In his opinion, it was rubbish and the luxury of
a decaying age. He never changed his tune, always riding the hobby-horse
of an aesthetic moralist.

"It lacks severity, all this furnishing of yours," was his constantly
repeated criticism to Marianne, as he sat smoking his pipe on a divan,
as was his custom in his own, wretched studio.

Then, in an abrupt way, with his eye wandering over the ceiling as if he
were following the flight of a chimera, he would say:

"Why! your minister must do a great deal, if all this comes from the
ministry!"

Marianne interrupted him. It was no business of his to mix himself up
with matters that did not concern him. Above all, he must hold his
tongue. Did he forget that Vaudrey was married? The least indiscretion--

"Oh! don't alarm yourself," the painter broke in, "I am as dumb as a
carp, the more so since your escapade is not very praiseworthy!--For you
have, in fact, deserted the domestic hearth--yes, you have deserted the
hearth.--It is pretty here, a little like a courtesan's, perhaps, but
pretty, all the same.--But you must acknowledge that it is a case of
interloping. It is not the genuine home with its dignity, its virtuous
severity, its--What time does your minister come? I would like to speak
to him--"

"To preach morality to him?" asked Marianne, glancing at her uncle with
an ironical expression.

"Not at all. I am considered to be ignorant--No, I have a plan to
decorate in a uniform way, all the mayors' offices in Paris and I want
to propose it to him--_The Modern Marriage_, an allegorical
treatment!--_Law Imposing Duty on Love_. Something noble, full of
expression, moralizing. Art that will set people thinking, for the
contemplation of lofty works can alone improve the morals and the
masses--You understand?"

"Perfectly. You want a commission!"

"Ah! that's a contemptible word, hold! A commission! Is a true artist
commissioned? He obeys his inspiration, he follows his ideal--A
commission! a commission! Ugh!--On my word, you would break the wings of
faith! Little one, have you any of that double zero Kummel left, that
you had the other day?"

Marianne sought to spare Sulpice the importunities of her uncle. She
wished to keep the minister's entire influence for herself.

She had nothing to fear, moreover. Sulpice was hers as fully as she
believed. Like so many others who have lived without living, Sulpice
did not know _woman_, and Marianne was ten times a woman, woman-child,
woman-lover, woman-courtesan, woman-girl, and every day and every night
she appeared to her lover renewed and surprising, freshly created for
passion and pleasure. Everything about her, even the frame that
surrounded her beauty, the dwelling, perfumed with passionate love,
distractedly captivated Sulpice. Behind the dense curtains in the
dressing-room upholstered like a boudoir, with its carpet intended only
for naked feet, as the reclining chair with its extra covering of
Oriental silk was adapted to moments of languishing repose, Sulpice saw
and contemplated the vast wardrobe with its three mirrors reflecting the
huge marble washstand with its silver spigots, its silver bowl, wherein
the scented water gleamed opal-like with its perfumes, the gas
illuminating the brushes decorated with monograms, standing out against
the white marble, the manicure sets of fine steel, the dark-veined
tortoise-shell combs, the coquettish superfluity of scissors and files
scattered about amongst knickknacks, inlaid enamels, and Japanese ivory
ornaments, and there, stretched out and watching Marianne, who came and
went before him with a smile on her face, her hair unfastened, sometimes
with bare shoulders, Sulpice saw, through a half-open door in the middle
of a bathroom floored with blue Delft tiles, the bath that steamed with
a perfumed vapor, odorous of thyme, and the water which was about to
envelop in its warm embrace that rosy form that displayed beneath the
lights and under the full blaze of the gas, the nudity of her flesh
beneath a transparent Surah chemise, silky upon the living silk.

Milk-white reflections seemed to play on her shoulders and Sulpice never
forgot those ardent visions that followed him, clung to him, thrust
themselves before his gaze and into his recollections, never leaving
him, either at the Chamber, the Council Board or even when he was with
Adrienne.--The young woman, seeing his absorption, hesitated to disturb
his thoughts, political as they were, no doubt, while he mused upon his
hours of voluptuous enjoyment, forever recalling the youthful roundness
of her shoulders, and the inflections of her body, the ivory-like curve
of her neck, whose white nape rested upon him, and her curls escaped
from the superb arrangement of her hair, held in its place at the top by
a comb thrust into this fair mass like a claw plunged into flesh.

Vaudrey must have had an active and prompt intelligence at times to
forget suddenly these passionate images, when he unexpectedly found
himself compelled to ascend the tribune during a discussion or to
express his opinion clearly at the Ministerial Council. He increased his
power, finding, perhaps, a new excitement, a new spur in the love that
renewed his youth. He had never been seen more active and more stirring
in the Chamber, though he was somewhat nervous. He determined to put
himself in evidence at the Ministry and to prove to the phrase-monger
Warcolier that he knew how to act. The President of the Council,
Monsieur Collard--of Nantes--said several times to Sulpice:

"Too much zeal, my dear minister. A politician ought to be cooler."

"I shall be cooler with age!" Sulpice replied with a laugh.

From time to time he went to seek advice from Ramel, as he had promised.
The little shopkeepers and laundresses of Rue Boursault hardly suspected
when they saw a coupe stop at the door of the old journalist, that a
minister alighted from it.

Sulpice felt amid the bustle of his life, amid the spurring and
over-excited events of his existence, the need of talking with his old
friend. Besides, Rue Boursault was on the way to Rue Prony. As Marianne
was frequently not at home, Sulpice would spend the time before her
return in chatting with Ramel.

"Well! Ramel, are you satisfied with me?"

"How could I be otherwise? You are an honest man and faithful and
devoted to your ideas. I am not afraid of you, but I am of those by whom
you are surrounded."

"Warcolier?"

"Warcolier and many others, of those important fellows who ask me--when
they deign to speak to me--with an insignificant air of superiority and
almost of pity, the idiots: 'Well! you are no longer doing anything!
When will you do something?' As if I had not done too much already,
seeing that I have made them!"

Denis Ramel smiled superciliously and the minister looked with a sort of
respect at this vanguard warrior, this laborer of the early morn who had
never received his recompense or even claimed it.

"I should like you to resume your journal in order to announce all these
truths," Vaudrey said to him.

"Do you think so? Why, a journal that would proclaim the truth to
everybody would not last six months, since no one would buy it."

As Sulpice was about to go, there was a ring at Ramel's door.

"Ah! who can it be? A visit. I beg you will excuse me, my dear Vaudrey."

Denis went to open the door.

It was a man of about fifty, dressed in the garb of a poor workman,
wearing a threadbare greatcoat and trousers that were well polished at
the knees, who as he entered held his round, felt hat in his hand. He
was thin, pale and tired-looking, with a dark, dull complexion and a
voice weak rather than hoarse. He bowed timidly, repeating twice: "I
earnestly ask your pardon;" and then he remained standing on the
threshold, without advancing or retiring, in an embarrassed attitude,
while a timid smile played beneath his black beard, already sprinkled
with gray.

"Pardon--I disturb you--I will return--"

"Come in, Garnier," said Ramel.

The man entered, saluting Vaudrey, who was not known to him, and at a
gesture from Denis, he took a seat on the edge of a chair, scarcely
sitting down and constantly twirling his round-shaped hat between his
lean fingers. From time to time, he raised his left hand to his mouth to
check the sound of a dry cough which rose in his muscular throat, that
might be supposed to be a prey to laryngitis.

"You ask for the truth--Listen a moment, a single moment," Ramel
whispered in the ear of the minister.

Without mentioning Sulpice's name, he began to question Garnier, who
grew bolder and talked and gossiped, his cheek-bones now and then
heightened in color by small, pink spots.

"Well! Garnier, about the work?--Oh! you may speak before monsieur, it
interests him."

The man shrugged his shoulders with a sad, somewhat bitter smile, but
resigned at least. He very quietly, but without any complaint,
acknowledged all that he was enduring. Work was in a bad way. It
appeared that it was just the same everywhere in Europe, in fact, but
indeed that doesn't provide work at the shop. The master, a kind man, in
faith, had grown old, and was anxious to sell his business of an art
metal worker. He had not found a purchaser, then he had simply closed
his shop, being too ill to continue hard work, and the four or five
workmen whom he employed found themselves thrown into the street. There
it is! Happily for Garnier, he had neither wife nor child, nothing but
his own carcass. One can always get one's self out of a difficulty, but
the others who had households and brats! Rousselet had five. Matters
were not going to be very cheerful at home. He must rely on charity or
credit, he did not know what, but something to stave off that distress,
real and sad distress, since it was not merited.

"Do you interest yourself in politics?" asked Vaudrey curiously,
surmising that this man was possessed of strong and quick intelligence,
although he looked so worn and crushed and his cough frequently
interrupted his remarks.

Garnier looked at Ramel before replying, then answered in a quiet tone:

"Oh! not now! That is all over. I vote like everybody else, but I let
the rest alone. I have had my reckoning."

He had said all this in a low tone without any bitterness and as if
burdened with painful memories.

"It is, however, strange, all the same," added the workman, "to observe
that the more things change, the more alike they are. Instead of
occupying themselves over there with interpellations and seeking to
overthrow or to strengthen administrations, would it not be better if
they thought a little of those who are dying of hunger? for there are
some, it is necessary to admit that such are not wanting! What is it to
me whether Pichereau or Vaudrey be minister, when I do not know at the
moment where I shall sleep when I have spent my savings, and whether
the baker will give me credit now that I am without a shop?"

At the mention of Vaudrey's name, Ramel wished to make a sign to this
man, but Sulpice had just seized the hand of his old friend and pressed
it as if to entreat him not to interrupt the conversation. The voice
that he heard, interrupted by a cough, was the voice of a workman and he
did not hear such every day.

"Note well that I am not a blusterer or a disturber, isn't that so,
Monsieur Ramel? I have always been content with my lot, myself--One
receives and executes orders and one is satisfied. Everything goes on
all right--My politics at present is my work; when I shall have broken
my back to bring journalists into power--I beg your pardon, Monsieur
Ramel, you know very well that it is not of you that I speak thus--I
shall be no fatter for it, I presume. I only want just to keep life and
soul together, if it can be done. I suppose you could not find me a
place, Monsieur Ramel? I would do anything, heavy work if need be, or
bookkeeping, if it is desired. I would like bookkeeping better, although
it is not my line, because the forge fire, the coal and heat, as you
see, affect me there now--he touched his neck--it strangles me and
hastens the end too quickly. It is true for that I am in the world."

Vaudrey felt himself stirred even to his bones by the mournful, musical
voice of the consumptive, by this true misery, this poverty expressed
without phrases and this claim of labor. All the questions _yonder_, as
Garnier said, in the committees and sub-committees, in the tribune and
in the lobbies, discussions, disputes, personal questions cloaked under
the guise of the general welfare, suddenly appeared to him as petty and
vain, narrow and egotistical beside the formidable question of bread
which was propounded to him so quietly by this man of the people, who
was not a rebel of the violent days, but the unfortunate brother, the
eternal Lazarus crying, without threat, but simply, sadly: "And I?"

He would have liked, without making himself known, to give something to
this sufferer, to promise him a position. He did not dare to offer it or
to mention his name. The man would have refused charity and the
minister, in all the personnel of bustling employes, often useless, that
fill the ministry, had not a single place to give to this workman whose
chest was on fire and whose throat was choking.

"I will return and we will talk about him," he said to Ramel, as he
arose, indicating Garnier by a nod. "Do not tell him who I am. On my
word, I should be ashamed--Poor devil!"

"Multiply him by three or four hundred thousand, and be a statesman,"
said Ramel.

Vaudrey bowed to the workman, who rose quickly and returned his salute
with timid eagerness, and the minister went rapidly down the stairs of
the little house and jumped into his carriage, making haste to get
away.

He bore with him a feeling akin to remorse, and in all sincerity, for he
still heard ringing in his ears, the poor consumptive's voice saying:

"What is it to me, who am suffering, whether Vaudrey or Pichereau be
minister?"

On reaching Place Beauvau, he found a despatch requesting his immediate
presence at the Elysee. At the Palace he received information that
surprised him like a thunderbolt. Monsieur Collard--of Nantes--had just
been struck down by apoplexy in the corridors of the ministry. The
President of the Council was dead and the Chief of the State had turned
to Vaudrey to fill the high position which, but two hours before, had
been held by Monsieur Collard.

President of the Council! He, Vaudrey! Head of the Ministry! The first
in his country after the supreme head? The joyful surprise that such a
proposition caused him, so occupied his mind that he was unable to feel
very much moved by the loss of Monsieur Collard--of Nantes--. Sulpice,
moreover, had never profoundly cared for this austere advocate, although
he had been much associated with him. His liking for this man who
brought to the Council old-time opinions and preconceived ideas was a
merely political affection. The President's offer proved to him that his
own popularity, as well as his influence over parliament, had only
increased since his recent entry on public life. He was then about to be
in a position to assert his individuality still better. What a glorious
time for Grenoble and what wry faces Granet would make!

Sulpice hastened to announce this news to Adrienne, although it would
not become official until after Collard's funeral obsequies. He returned
almost triumphantly to the Hotel Beauvau. Only one thought, a sombre
image, clouded his joy: it was not the memory of Collard, but the sad
image of the man whom he had met at Ramel's, and who, when the
_Officiel_ should speak, should make the announcement, would shrug his
shoulders and say ironically:

"Well! and what then?"

He had scarcely whispered these words to Adrienne: "President of the
Council! I am President of the Council!" when, without being astonished
at the faint, almost indifferent smile that escaped the young wife, he
suddenly thought that he was under obligation to make a personal visit
to the Ministry of Justice where Collard was lying dead.

He ordered himself to be driven quickly to Place Vendome.

At every moment, carriages brought to the ministry men of grave mien,
decorated with the red ribbon, who entered wearing expressions suitable
to the occasion and inscribed their names in silence on the register,
passing the pen from one to another just as the aspergillus is passed
along in church. Everybody stood aside on noticing Vaudrey. It seemed to
him that they instinctively divined that Collard being out of the way
it was he who must be the man of the hour, the necessary man, the
President of the Council marked out in advance, the chief of the coming
_ministry_.

"Poor Collard!" thought Sulpice, as he inscribed his name on the
register. "One will never be able to say: the _Collard Administration_.
But it would be glorious if one day history said: the _Vaudrey
Administration_."

He re-entered the Hotel Beauvau, inflated with the idea. In the
antechamber, there were more office-seekers than were usually in
attendance. One of them, on seeing Vaudrey, rose and ran to him and said
quickly to Sulpice, who did not stop:

"Ah! Monsieur le Ministre--What a misfortune--Monsieur Collard--If there
were no eminent men like Your Excellency to replace him!--"

Vaudrey bowed without replying.

"What is the name of that gentleman?" said he as soon as he entered his
cabinet, to the usher who followed him. "I always find him, but I cannot
recognize him."

"He! Monsieur le Ministre? Why, that is, _Monsieur Eugene_!"

"Ah! very good! That is right! The eternal Monsieur Eugene!"

Just then Warcolier opened the door, looking more morose than sad, and
holding a letter that he crushed in his hand, while at the same time he
greeted Vaudrey with a number of long phrases concerning the dreadful,
unexpected, sudden, unlooked-for, crushing death--he did not select his
epithets, but allowed them to flow as from an overrunning cask--the
dramatic decease of Collard--of Nantes--. From time to time, Warcolier,
while speaking, cast an involuntary, angry glance at the paper that he
twisted in his fingers, so much so that Vaudrey, feeling puzzled, at
last asked him what the letter was.

"Don't speak to me about it--" said the fat man. "An imbecile!"

"What imbecile?"

"An imbecile whom I received with some little courtesy the other
morning--I who, nevertheless, go to so much trouble to make myself
agreeable."

"And that is no sinecure!--Well, the imbecile in question?"

"Left furious, no doubt, because of the reception accorded him--and to
me, me, the Under-Secretary of State, this is the letter that he writes,
that he dares to write! Here, Monsieur le Ministre, listen! Was ever
such stupidity seen? '_Monsieur le Secretaire d'Etat, you have under
your orders a very badly trained Undersecretary of State, who will make
you many enemies, I warn you. As you are his direct superior, I permit
myself to notify you of his conduct_,' etc., etc. You laugh?" said
Warcolier, seeing that a smile was spreading over Vaudrey's
blond-bearded face.

"Yes, it is so odd!--Your correspondent is evidently ignorant that there
are only Under-Secretaries of State in the administration!--unless this
innocent is but simply an insolent fellow."

"If I thought that!" said Warcolier, enraged. "No, but it is true," he
said with astonishing candor, a complete overflowing of his satisfied
egotism, "there are a lot of people who ask for everything and are good
for nothing!--Malcontents!--I should like to know why they are
malcontents!--What are they dreaming about, then? What do they want? I
am asking myself ever since I came into office: What is it they want?
Doesn't the present government carry out the will of the majority?--It
is just like those journalists with their nagging articles!--They squall
and mock! What they print is disgusting! Granted that we have demanded
liberty, but that does not mean license!"

While Warcolier, entirely concerned about himself, with erect head and
oratorical gesture, spoke as if in the presence of two thousand hearers,
Sulpice Vaudrey again recalled, still sad and sick, the dark and sunken
cheeks and the colorless ears, the poor projecting ears of the
consumptive Garnier with whom he had come in contact at Ramel's.

He was anxious to be with Adrienne again, and above all, with Marianne.
What would his mistress say to him when she knew of his reaching the
presidency of the Council?

Adrienne had certainly received the news with little pleasure.

"If you are happy!"--was all she said, with a sigh.

It was the very expression she had used at the moment when, on the
formation of the "Collard Cabinet," he had gone to her and cried out: "I
am a minister!"

Adrienne was impassive.

In truth, Sulpice was beginning to think that she was too indifferent to
the serious affairs of life. The delightful joys of intimacy, now,
moreover, discounted, ought not to make a woman forget the public
successes of her husband. Instinctively comparing this gentle, slender
blonde, resigned and pensive, with Marianne, with her tawny locks and
passionate nature, whom he adored more intensely each day, Vaudrey
thought that a man in his position, with his ambition and merit, would
have been more powerfully aided, aye, even doubled in power and success
by a creature as strongly intelligent, as energetic and as fertile in
resource as Mademoiselle Kayser.

He still had before him a peculiar smile of indefinable superiority
expressed by his mistress when Adrienne and Marianne chanced to meet one
evening at the theatre, which made him feel that his mistress was
watching and analyzing his wife. The next day, Marianne with exquisite
grace, but keen as a poisoned dart, said to him:

"Do you know, my dear, Madame Vaudrey is charming?"

He felt himself blush at these words hurled at him point-blank, then his
cheeks grew cold. Never, till that moment, had Mademoiselle Kayser
mentioned Adrienne's name.

"You like blondes, I see!" said Marianne. "I am almost inclined to be
jealous!"

"Will you do me a great favor?" then interrupted Sulpice. "Never let us
speak of her. Let us speak of ourselves."

"Yes," continued the perfidious Marianne in a patronizing tone, as if
she had not heard him, "she is certainly charming! A trifle--just a
trifle--bourgeoise--But charming! Decidedly charming!"

Knowing Vaudrey well, she understood what a keen weapon she was plunging
straight into him. A little _bourgeoise_! This conclusion rendered by
the Parisienne with a smile now haunted Sulpice, who was annoyed at
himself and he sought to discover in his wife, the dear creature whom he
had so tenderly loved, whom he still loved, some self-satisfying excuse
for his passion and adultery.

"Bah!" he thought. "Is it adultery? There is no adultery save for the
wife. The husband's faithlessness is called a caprice, an adventure, a
craving or madness of the senses. Only the wife is adulterous."

In all candor, what sin had he committed? Was Adrienne less loved? He
would have sacrificed his life for her. He overwhelmed her with
presents, created surprises for her that she received without emotion,
and simply said in a doleful tone:

"How good you are, my dear!"

He was ruining neither her nor his children! Ah! if he but had children!
Why had not Adrienne had children? A woman should be a mother. It is
maternity that in the marriage estate justifies a man in abandoning his
freedom and a woman her shame.

A mother! And was Marianne a mother?

No, but Marianne was Marianne. Marianne was not created for the domestic
fireside and the cradle. Her statuesque and seductively lovely limbs
only craved for the writhings of pleasure, not the pangs of maternity.
Adrienne, on the contrary, was the wife, and the childless wife soon
took another name: the friend. No, he robbed her of nothing, Adrienne
lost none of his affection, none of his fortune. The money squandered at
Rue Prony, Vaudrey had acquired; it was the savings of the honest people
of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, the parents, the _old folks_, that he
threw--as in smelting--into the crucible of the girl's mansion.

Adrienne expressed no desire that was not fulfilled, and Sulpice who
was, moreover, confident and lulled by her quietude, felt no remorse. He
did not enquire if his passion for Marianne would endure. He flung
himself upon this love as upon some prey; nor was desire the only
influence that now attached him to this woman, he was drawn to her also
by the admiration that he felt for her boldness of thought, her
singular opinions, her careless expressions, her devilish spirit; her
appetizing and voluptuous attractions surprised and ensnared him--

What a counselor and ally such a woman would be!

Well and good! When Vaudrey informed her that he was about to become
first minister, to preside over the Council, to show his power--this was
his eternal watchword--Marianne immediately comprehended the new
situation and what increase of influence in the country such a fortunate
event would give him.

He observed with pleasure that something like a joyful beam gleamed in
Mademoiselle Kayser's gray eyes.

She also doubtless thought that it was desirable to take advantage of
the occasion, to seize and cling to the opportunity.

"Then it is official?" she asked.

"Not yet. But it is certain."

What could Marianne hope for? Again, she had no well-defined object; but
she watched her opportunity, and since Vaudrey's power was enlarged,
well, she was to profit by it. Claire Dujarrier, who had already served
her so well, could be useful to her again and advise her advantageously.
That will be seen.

"Are you desirous of attending Collard's funeral?" Vaudrey asked
Marianne.

She laughed as she asked:

"Why! what do you think that would be to me?"

"It will be very fine. All the authorities, the magistrates, the
Institute, the garrison of Paris will be present."

"Then you think it is amusing to see soldiers file past? I am not at all
curious! You will describe it all to me and that will be quite
sufficient for me."

Vaudrey walked at the head of the cortege that accompanied through Place
Vendome and Rue de la Paix, black with the crowd, the funeral procession
of Collard--of Nantes--to the Madeleine. Troops of the line in parade
uniforms lined the route. From time to time was heard the muffled roll
of drums shrouded in crepe. The funeral car was immense and was crowded
with wreaths. As with bowed head he accompanied the funeral procession
of his colleague, almost his friend,--but, bah! friendship of committees
and sub-committees!--Sulpice was sufficiently an artist to be somewhat
impressed with the contrast afforded by the display of official pomp
crowning the rather obscure life of the Nantes advocate. He had ever
obtrusively before him, as if haunted by the spectre of the Poor Man
before Don Juan, the lean face of Garnier and the white moustache of
Ramel. Which of the two had better served his cause, Ramel vanquished or
Collard--of Nantes--dying in the full blaze of success?

He pondered over this during the whole of the ceremony. He thought of it
while the notes of the organ swelled forth, while the blue flames of the
burning incense danced, and while the butts of the soldiers' muskets
sounded from time to time on the flagstones, as the men stood around
the bier and followed the orders of the officer who commanded them.

On leaving the ceremony, Granet approached Sulpice while gently stroking
his waxed moustache, and said in an ironical tone:

"Do you know that it is suggested that a statue be raised in Collard's
honor?"

"Really?"

"Yes, because he is considered to have shown a great example."

"What?"

"He is one of those rare cases of ministers dying in office. Imitate
him, my dear minister,--to the latest possible moment."

Sulpice made an effort to smile at Granet's pleasantry. This cunning
fellow decidedly displeased him; but there was nothing to take offence
at, it was mere diplomatic pleasantry expressed politely.

Before returning to the ministry, Vaudrey had himself driven to Rue
Prony. Jean, the domestic, told him that Madame had gone out; she had
been under the necessity of going to her uncle's. After all, Sulpice
thought this was a very simple matter; but he was determined to see
Marianne, so he ordered his carriage to be driven to the artist's
studio. Uncle Kayser opened the door, bewildered at receiving a call
from the minister and, at the same time, showing that he was somewhat
uneasy, coughing very violently, as if choked with emotion, or perhaps
as a signal to some one.

"Is Mademoiselle Kayser here?" asked Sulpice.

"Yes--Ah! how odd it is--Chance wills that just now one of our
friends--a connoisseur of pictures--"

Vaudrey had already thrust open the door of the studio and he perceived,
sitting near Marianne and holding his hat in his hand, a young man with
pale complexion and reddish beard, whom Mademoiselle Kayser, rising
quickly and without any appearance of surprise, eagerly presented to
him:

"Monsieur Jose de Rosas!"

In the simple manner in which she had pronounced this name, she had
infused so triumphant an expression, such manifest ostentation, that
Vaudrey felt himself suddenly wounded, struck to the heart.

He recalled everything that Marianne had said to him about this man.

He greeted Rosas with somewhat frigid politeness and from the tone in
which Marianne began to speak to him, he at once realized that she had
some interest in allowing the Spaniard to surmise nothing. She unduly
emphasized the title by which she addressed him, repeating a little too
frequently: "Monsieur le Ministre."--Whenever Vaudrey sought to catch
her glance she looked away in a strange fashion and managed to avoid
carrying on any formal conversation with Sulpice. On the contrary, she
addressed Rosas affably, asking what he had done in London, what he had
become and what he brought back new.

"Nothing," Jose answered with a peculiar expression that displeased
Vaudrey. "Nothing but the conviction that one lives only in Paris
surrounded by persons whom one vainly seeks to avoid and toward whom one
always returns--in spite of one's self, at times."

Vaudrey observed the almost proud, triumphant expression that flashed in
Marianne's eyes. He vaguely realized an indirect confession expressed in
that trite remark made by Rosas. The Spaniard's voice trembled slightly
as he spoke.

Marianne smiled as she listened.

"You have taken a new journey, monsieur?" asked Sulpice, uncertain what
bearing to assume.

"Oh! just a temporary absence! A trip to London--"

"Have you returned long?"

"Only this morning."

His first call was at Simon Kayser's house, where perhaps, he expected
to see Marianne. And the proof--

Vaudrey instinctively thought that it was a very hasty matter to call so
soon on Uncle Kayser. This man's first visit was not to the painter's
studio, but in reality to the woman who--Sulpice still heard Marianne
declare that--who would not become his mistress. There was something
strange in that. Eh! _parbleu!_ it was perhaps Monsieur de Rosas who had
sent for Marianne.

She endeavored to make it clear that only chance was responsible for
bringing them together here, but Sulpice doubted, he was uneasy and
angry.

He felt almost determined to declare, if it were only by a word, the
prize of possession, the conquest of this woman, whom he felt that Rosas
was about to contend with him for.

She surmised everything and interrupted Sulpice even before he could
have spoken and, with a sort of false respect, displayed before Rosas
the friendship which Monsieur le Ministre desired to show her and of
which she was proud.

"By the way, my dear minister, as to your appointment as President of
the Council?"

Vaudrey knit his brows.

"That is so! I ask your pardon. I am betraying a state secret. Monsieur
de Rosas will not abuse it. Isn't that so, Monsieur le Duc?"

Rosas bowed; Vaudrey was growing impatient.

"Madame Vaudrey will, of course, be delighted at this appointment,
Monsieur le Ministre?" continued Marianne.

She smiled at Sulpice who was greatly astonished to hear Adrienne's name
mentioned there; then, turning to Rosas, she charmingly depicted a
quasi-idyllic sketch of the affection of Monsieur le Ministre for Madame
Vaudrey. A model household. There was nothing surprising in that,
moreover. "Monsieur le Ministre" was so amiable--yes, truly amiable,
without any flattery,--and Madame Vaudrey so charming!

Sulpice, who was very nervous and had become slightly pale, endeavored
to discover the meaning of this riddle. He asked himself what Marianne
was thinking about, what she meant to say or dissimulate.

Monsieur de Rosas sat motionless on his chair, very cool, looking calmly
on without speaking a word.

He seemed to await an opportunity to leave the studio, and since Vaudrey
had arrived he had only spoken a few brief phrases in strict propriety.

Marianne, all smiles and happy, with beaming eyes, interrogated Vaudrey
and sought to provide a subject of conversation for the unexpected
interview of these two men. Was there a great crowd at Collard's
funeral? Who had sung at the ceremony? Vaudrey answered these questions
rapidly, like a man absorbed in other thoughts.

After a moment's interval, Monsieur de Rosas arose and bowed to Marianne
with gentlemanly formality.

"Are you going, my dear duke?"

"Yes, I have seen you again. You are getting along well. I am
satisfied."

"You will come again, at any rate? My uncle has some new compositions to
show you."

"Oh! great ideas," began Kayser. "Things that will make famous
frescoes!--For a palace--or the Pantheon!--either one!"

He had looked alternately at the duke and Vaudrey.

Rosas bowed to the minister and withdrew without replying, followed by
Kayser and Marianne who, on reaching the threshold of the salon, seized
his hand and pressed it nervously within her own soft one and said
quickly:

"You will return, oh! I beg you! Ah! it is too bad to have run away! You
will come back!"

She was at once entreating and commanding him. Rosas did not reply, but
she felt in the trembling of his hand, as he pressed her own, in his
brilliant glance, that she would see him again. And since he had
returned to Paris alone, weary of being absent from her, perhaps, seeing
that he had hastened back after having desired to free himself from her,
did it not seem this time that he was wholly captivated?

All this was expressed by a pressure of the fingers, a glance, a sigh.

Rosas went rapidly away, like one distracted. Marianne, who motioned to
Uncle Kayser to disappear, reappeared in the studio, entirely
self-possessed.

Vaudrey had risen from the divan on which he had been sitting and he was
standing, waiting.

"I believed that I understood that you had dismissed Monsieur de Rosas?"

"I might have told you that I did so, since it is true."

"You smiled at him, nevertheless, just now."

"Yes."

"A man who begged you to be his mistress!"

"And whom I rejected, yes!"

She looked at Sulpice with her winsome, sidelong glance, curling her
lovely pink lips that he had kissed so many times.

"Then you love that man?"

"I! not at all, only it is flattering to me to have him return like
that, just like some penitent little boy."

"I do not understand--"

"_Parbleu!_ you are not a woman, that is all that that proves!--It is
irritating to our self-love to see people too promptly accept the
dismissal one gives them. What! Don't they suffer? Don't they say
anything? Don't they complain? Monsieur de Rosas comes back to me, that
proves that he was hurt, and I triumph. Now, do you understand?"

"And--that joy that I observed is--?"

"It is because Monsieur de Rosas is in Paris."

"And you don't love him? You don't love him?" asked Vaudrey, clasping
Marianne's hands in his.

She laughed and said:

"I do not love him in the least."

"And you love me?"

"Yes, you, I love you!"

"Marianne, you know that it would be very wicked and wrong to lie! It is
not necessary to love me at all if you must cease to love me!"

"In other words, one should never lend money unless one is obliged to
lend one's whole fortune."

He felt extremely dissatisfied with Marianne's ironical remark. She
looked at him with an odd expression which was all the more disquieting
and intoxicating.

"Let us speak no more about that, shall we?" she said. "I repeat to you
that I am satisfied at having seen Monsieur de Rosas again, because it
affords my self-love its revenge. Now, whether he comes back or not, it
matters little to me. He has made the _amende honorable_. That is the
principal thing, and you, my dear, must not be jealous; I find Othello's
role tiresome; oh! yes, tiresome!--The more so, because you have no
right to treat me as a Desdemona. The Code does not permit it."

"You want to remind me again, then, that I am married? A moment ago, you
stabbed me by pin-thrusts."

"In speaking of your household? Say then with knife-thrusts."

"Why did you mention my wife before Monsieur de Rosas?"

"Why," said Marianne, "you do not understand anything. It was for your
sake, for you alone, in order to explain the presence in Marianne's
house, of a minister who is considered to lead a puritan life. Nothing
could be more simple!--Would you have me tell him that you neglect your
wife and that you are my lover? Perhaps you would have liked that
better!"

"Yes, perhaps," said Vaudrey passionately.

"Vain fellow!" the pretty girl said as she placed upon his mouth her
little hand which he kept upon his lips. "Then you would like me to
parade our secrets everywhere and to publicly announce our happiness?"

"I should like," he said, as he removed his lips from the soft palm of
her hand, "that all the world should know that you are mine, mine
only--only mine, are you not?--That man?"

His eyes entreated her and lost their fire.

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

"Let Monsieur de Rosas alone in tranquillity and let us return to my
house, _our house_," she said, with a tender expression in her eyes.

"You do not love him?"

"No."

"And you love me?"

"I have told you so."

"You love me? You love me?"

"I love you!--Ah!" she said, "how unhappy you would be, nevertheless, if
I told you aloud some day in one of the lobbies of the Assembly what you
ask me to repeat here in a whisper."

"I should prefer that to losing you and to knowing that you did not love
me."

"He is telling the truth, however, the great fool!" cried Marianne,
laughing.

"The real, sincere, profound truth!"

He drew her to him, seated on the vulgar divan where Simon Kayser was
wont to display his paradoxes, and encircling her waist with both arms
he felt her yielding form beneath her satin gown, and wished her to bend
her fair face to his lips that were craving a kiss.

Marianne took his face between her soft hands, and looking at him with
an odd smile, tender and ironical at once, at this big simpleton who was
completely dominated by her mocking tenderness, she said:

"You are just the same Sulpice!"--as she spoke, she bent over him
engagingly, and laughed merrily while he kissed her.




IV


Jose de Rosas thought himself much more the master of himself than he
actually was.

This energetic man, firm as a very fine steel blade, had hoped to find
that in living at a distance from Marianne, he might forget her or at
least strengthen himself against her influence. He found on his return
that he was, however, more seduced by her than before, his heart was
wholly filled and gnawed by the distracting image of the pretty girl. He
had borne away with him to London, as everywhere in fact, the puzzling
smile, the sparkling glance of this woman's gray eyes that ceaselessly
appeared to him at his bedside, and beside him, like some phantom.

The phantom of a living creature whose kiss still burned his lips like a
live coal. A phantom that he could clasp in his arms, carry away and
possess. All the virgin sentiments of this man whose life had been the
half-savage one of a trapper, a savant or a wanderer, turned toward
Marianne as to an incarnated hope, a living, palpitating chimera.

Jose felt certain that if he returned to Paris it was all over with him,
and that he was giving his life to that woman. But he returned. His
fight against himself over, the first visit he made, once again, was to
the den where he knew well that he could discover Marianne's
whereabouts. He went to her as he might walk to a gulf. Under his cold
demeanor of a Castilian of former days, he was intensely passionate and
would neither reflect nor resist. He had experienced that delightful
sensation of impulse when, upon the rapids at the other end of the
globe, the river carried into a whirlpool his almost engulfed boat. He
would doubtless have been stupefied had he found Marianne installed in a
fashionable little mansion. She promised herself to explain that to him
when she next saw him while informing him, there and then, that she had
taken up her abode there. A mere whim: Mademoiselle Vanda having gone
away, the idea had attracted her of sleeping within a courtesan's
curtains. "I will tell him that this transient luxury recalls my former
follies when I made him believe that I was spending an inheritance from
my grandmother."

She had, indeed, already lied to him, for the money she had formerly
squandered had been provided by De Lissac, but even then it was
necessary--for the duke was in expectancy--to conceal its source from
Rosas, hence the story of the inheritance that never existed. But she at
once thoroughly realized that the surroundings which were favorable to
the progress of the duke's love were not the bedroom and the
dressing-room of Mademoiselle Vanda. What difference would Rosas have
found between her and the fashionable courtesans whom he had loved, or
rather, enriched, in passing? He would not believe this new lie this
time.

All that luxury might seduce Sulpice Vaudrey; it would have disgusted
Jose. What satisfied the appetite of the little, successful bourgeois
would nauseate the gentleman.

As soon as Rosas returned to her, happy and stupefied at the same time,
extravagantly happy in his joy, her plan of campaign was at once
arranged. She did not wish to receive him in the vulgar hotel, where the
clubmen had wiped their feet upon the carpets. She entreated him, since
he wished to see her again, to see her at her "own house," yes, really,
at her own house, in that little, unknown room, in Rue Cuvier, far from
the noise of Paris and near the Botanical Garden, a kind of hidden cell
into which no one entered.

"No one but me," she said.

The order had been given to Uncle Kayser in advance: in case Rosas
should reappear, Simon was to at once inform his niece and prevent the
duke from discovering Marianne's new address. And this had been done.

The duke was then going to see Mademoiselle Kayser only at Rue Cuvier,
after having rediscovered her at Uncle Simon's.

He felt in advance a kind of gratitude to this woman who thus abandoned
the secret of her soul to him; giving him to understand that it was
there that she passed her days, buried in her recollections, dreaming of
her departed years, of that which had been, of that which might be, a
living death.

Marianne had shrewdly divined the case. For this great soul, mystery
added a new sentiment to the feelings that Rosas experienced. The first
time that he found himself in that little abode where Simon Kayser's
niece awaited him, he was deeply moved, as if he had penetrated into the
pure chamber of a young girl. There, yonder, in that distant quarter, he
found a peaceful retreat for one wounded by life, thirsting for solitude
and passing there secret hours in the midst of loved books; in fact, the
discreet dwelling of a poor teacher who had collected some choice
_bibelots_ that she had found by chance. Rosas there felt himself
surrounded by perfect virtue, amid the salvage of a happier past.
Marianne thus became what he imagined her to be, superior to her lot,
living an intellectual life, consoling herself for the mortification of
existence and the hideous experiences of life by poet's dreams, in
building for herself in Paris itself a sort of Thebais, where she was
finally free and mistress of herself and where, when she was sad, she
was not compelled to wear a mask or a false smile, and was free from all
pretended gaiety. And she was so often sad!

She had occasionally mentioned to Rosas the assumed name under which she
lived at that place.

"Mademoiselle Robert!"

He had manifested surprise thereat.

"Yes, I do not wish them to know anything of me, not even my name. You
should understand the necessity that certain minds have for repose and
forgetfulness. Did not one of your sovereigns take his repose lying in
his coffin? Well! I envy him and when I have pushed the bolt of my
little room in Rue Cuvier, I tremble with delight, just as if I felt my
heart beating in a coffin. Do not tell any one. They would desire to
know and see. People are so curious and so stupid!"

Marianne now seemed to be still more strange and seductive to Rosas. All
this romantic conduct, commonplace as it was, with which she surrounded
herself, exalted her in the estimation of the duke. She became in that
little chamber where she was simply Mademoiselle Robert, a hundred times
more charming and attractive to him than any problem: a veritable
Parisian sphinx.

She was not his mistress. He loved her too deeply, with a holy,
respectful passion, to take her hastily, as by chance, and Marianne was
too skilful to risk any imprudent act, well-knowing that if she yielded
too quickly, it would not be a woman who would fall into the duke's
arms, but an idol that descended from its pedestal.

In the silence of the old house in the deserted quarter, they held
conversations in the course of which Rosas freely abandoned himself, and
through which she gained every day a more intimate knowledge of the
character of that man who was so different from those who hitherto had
sought her for pleasure.

Thus, the very respect that he instinctively felt for her, impelled her
to love him.

She had not been accustomed to such treatment. Every masculine look that
since her puberty she had felt riveted upon her, clearly expressed even
before the lips spoke: "You are beautiful. You please me. Will you?"
Rosas, at least, said: "I love you," before: "I desire you."

Tainted in the body which she had given, offered, abandoned, sold, she
felt that she was respected by him even in that body, and although she
considered him silly, she thought him superior to all others, or at
least different, and that was a sufficient motive for loving him.

One day she said to him in a peculiar tone and with her distracting
smile:

"Do you know, my dear Jose, there is one thing I should not have
believed? You are bashful!"

He turned slightly pale.

"Sincere love is always bashful and clumsy. By that it may be known."

"Perhaps!" said Marianne.

Their conversations, however, only concerned love, so that Rosas might
speak of his passion or of his reminiscences.

She once asked him if he would despise a woman if she became his
mistress.

"No!" he said, with a smile, "it is only a Frenchman who would despise
the woman who surrendered herself. Other nations treat love more
seriously. They do not consider the gift of one's self in the light of a
fall."

Marianne looked at him full in the face with a strange expression.

"What, then, if I love you well enough to become your mistress?"

"I should still esteem you enough to become your husband!"

She felt her color change.

Was it a sport on the part of Monsieur de Rosas? Why had he spoken to
her thus? Had he reflected upon what he had just said?

Jose added in a very gentle tone:

"Will you permit me to ask you a question, Marianne?"

"You may ask me anything. I will frankly answer all your questions."

"What was Monsieur Sulpice Vaudrey doing at your uncle's the other day?
Was he there to see you?"

Marianne smiled.

"Why, the minister simply came to talk of business matters. I hardly see
him except for Uncle Kayser, who is soliciting an official
commission,--you heard him--"

"Does Monsieur Vaudrey pay his addresses to you?"

"Necessarily. Oh! but only out of pure French gallantry. Mere
politeness. He loves his wife and he knows very well that I don't love
any one."

"No one?" asked Rosas.

"I do not love any one yet," repeated Marianne, opening her gray eyes
with a wide stare under the Spaniard's anxious glance.

From that day, her mind was possessed of a new idea that imperiously
directed it. When Rosas had returned to her, she had only regarded him
as a possible lover, rich and agreeable. The mistress of a minister, she
would become the mistress of a duke. A millionaire duke. The change
would be profitable, assuming that she could not retain both. Her
calculations were speedily made. She would only make Rosas pay more
dearly for the resistance he had offered before surrendering himself.

But now, abruptly and without her having thought of it, he had, with the
incautiousness of a soldier who discloses his attack and lays himself
open to a bully who tries to provoke him, the duke showed her the
extent of his violent passion by a single phrase that feverishly
agitated her.

His mistress! Why his mistress, since he had shown her that perhaps?--

"Idiot that I am!" thought Marianne. "Suppose I play my cards for
marriage?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It will cost no more!"

Married! Duchess! and Duchesse de Rosas! At first she laughed. Duchess!
I am asking a little from you! The mistress of Pierre Meran, the
artist's drudge, the wretch who abducted her and debauched her, adding
his depravity to hers, and who died of consumption while quite young,
after having plunged this girl into vice, this Marianne Kayser, born and
moulded for vice: she a duchess!

"It would be too funny, my dear!" she thought.

Never had Vaudrey, whom she saw that evening at Rue Prony, seemed so
provincial, or, as she said, so _Sulpice_. Besides, he was gloomy and
unable to express himself clearly at first, but finally he brought
himself to acknowledge that he was embarrassed about providing for the
bill of exchange--she understood--

"No, I do not know!"

"The bill of exchange in favor of Monsieur Gochard!"

"Ah! that is so. Well! if you cannot pay it, my dear, I will advise--I
will seek--"

There was nothing to seek. Vaudrey would evidently get himself out of
the affair--but the document matured at an unfortunate time. He did not
dare to mortgage La Sauliere, his farm at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont. He had
reflected that Adrienne might learn all about it. And then--

Marianne broke in upon his confidences.

"Don't speak to me about these money matters, my friend, you know that
sort of thing disgusts me!--"

"I understand you and ask your pardon."

They were to see each other again the next day, as parliament was to
take a rest.

"What joy! Not to be away from you for the whole of the day!" remarked
Vaudrey.

"Well then, till to-morrow!"

She felt intense pleasure in being alone again, wrapped in her sheets,
with the light of the lamp that ordinarily shone upon her hours of love
with Sulpice, still burning, and to be free to dream of her Spanish
grandee who had said, plainly, with the trembling of passion on his
lips: "I should esteem you enough to become your husband!"

She passed the night in reverie.

Vaudrey, in spite of the joy of the morrow,--a long tete-a-tete with his
mistress,--thought with increasing vexation of the approaching maturity
of his bill of exchange; within two months he would have to pay the
hundred thousand francs which he had undertaken to pay Marianne's
creditor.

"It is astonishing how quickly time passes!"

At breakfast the following day, Adrienne saw that her husband was more
than usually preoccupied.

"Are political affairs going badly?"

"No--on the contrary--"

"Then why are you melancholy?"

"I am a little fatigued."

"Then," said Madame Vaudrey, "you will scold me."

"Why?"

"I have led Madame Gerson to hope--You know whom I mean, Madame Marsy's
friend,--I have almost promised her that you would accept an invitation
to dine at her house."

For a moment Vaudrey was put out.

Another evening taken! Hours of delight stolen from Marianne!

"I have done wrong?" asked Adrienne, as she rested her pretty but
somewhat sad face on her husband's bosom. "I did it because it is so
great a pleasure to me to spend an entire evening with you, even at
another's house. Remember you have so many official dinners, banquets
and invitations that you attend alone. When the minister's wife is
invited with him, it is a fete-day for the poor, little forsaken thing.
I do not have much of you, it is true, but I see you, I hear you talking
and I am happy. Do not chide me for having said that we would go to
Madame Gerson's. The more so, because she is a charming woman. Ah! when
she speaks of you! 'So great a minister!' Don't you know what she calls
you?--'A Colbert!'"

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 Opera, 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 Canebiere, 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.

His first word as he entered Vaudrey's cabinet, asserting the virginity
of his efforts at solicitation, betrayed his bitterness.

Now, triumphant, powerful, delighted, feasted and fat, his massive form,
his gross flesh and his money were in evidence all over Paris. His huge
paunch, shaking with laughter, filled the stage-boxes at the theatres.
He expanded his broad shoulders as he reclined in the caleche that
deposited him on race-days at the entrance of the weighing-enclosure. He
held by the neck, as it were, everything of the Parisian quarry that
yelps and bounds about money, issues of stock, and the food of public
fortune: bankers, stock-brokers, and jobbers, financial, political and
exchange editors, wretches running after a hundred sous, statesmen in a
fair way to fortune; and he distributed to this little crowd, just as he
would throw food into a kennel, the discounts and clippings of his
ventures, taking malicious pleasure, the insolent delight of a fortunate
upstart, in feigning at the moment when loans were issued, sickness that
had no existence, in order to have the right of keeping his chamber, of
hearing persons of exalted names ringing at his door and dancing
attendance upon him,--powerful, influential and illustrious
persons,--him, the second-hand dealer and chafferer from Marseilles.

It was then that he tasted the joy of supreme power, that delight which
titillated even his marrow, and after having rested all day, the prey of
a convenient neuralgia, he experienced the unlimited pleasure of force
overcoming mind, the blow of a fist crushing a weakling, as with a white
cravat he appeared in some salon, in the greenroom of the ballet, or in
the dressing-room of a _premiere_, saying with the mocking smile of
triumph and the assurance attending a gorged appetite:

"I was sick to-day, I suffered from neuralgia! The Minister of Finance
called on me!--Baron Nathan came to get information from me!"

Among all the pleasures experienced by this man, he valued feminine
virtue occasionally purchased with gold as little in comparison with the
virgin souls, honor and virtue that he often succeeded in humiliating,
in bending before him like a reed, and snuffing out with his irony,
whenever necessity placed at his mercy any of those puritanical beings
who had passed sometimes with haughty brow before the millions of this
man of money. It was then that the clothes-dealer took his revenge in
all its hideousness. There was no pity to be expected from this fat,
smiling and easy-going man. His fat fingers strangled more certainly
than the lean hands of a usurer. Molina never pardoned.

Ah! if this fellow went to see the minister, most assuredly he wanted a
favor from him.

But what?

It was extraordinary, but before Vaudrey, Molina who could hold his own
among rascals, found himself ill at ease. There was in the frank look of
this _ninny_, as Molina the _Tumbler_ had one evening called him while
talking politics, such direct honesty that the banker, accustomed as he
was to dealings with sharks and intriguers, did not quite know how to
open the question, nevertheless a very important matter was in hand.

"A rich plum," thought Molina.

A matter of railways, a concession to be gained. A matter of private
interest, disguised under the swelling terms of the public welfare, the
national needs. Millions were to be gained. Molina was charged with the
duty of sounding the President of the Council and the Minister of Public
Works. Two honest men. The _dodge_, as the _Tumbler_ said, was to make
them swallow the affair under the guise of patriotism. A strategical
railroad. The means of rapid locomotion in case of mobilization. With
such high-sounding words, _strategy_, _frontier_, _safety_, they could
carry a good many points.

Unfortunately, Vaudrey was rather skittish on these particular
questions, besides he was informed on the matter. He felt his flesh
creep while Molina was speaking. Just before, on seeing the banker's
card, the idea of the money of which the fat man was one of the
incarnations, had suddenly dawned upon him as a hope. Who knows? By
Molina's aid, he might, perhaps, free himself from anxiety about the
Gochard bill of exchange!--But from the minister's first words, although
the banker could not get to the point, intimidated as he was by
Sulpice's honest look, it was clear that Vaudrey surmised some repugnant
suggestions in the hesitating words of this man.

What! Molina hesitating? He did not go straight to the point, squarely,
according to his custom, Molina the illustrious _Tumbler_? Eh! no! the
intentionally cold bearing of the minister decidedly discomposed him.
Vaudrey's glance never wandered from his for a moment. When the promoter
pronounced the word Bourse, a disdainful curl played upon Sulpice's
lips, but not a word escaped him. Molina heard his own voice break the
silence of the ministerial cabinet and he felt himself entangled. He
came to propose a combination, a bonus, and he did not suspect that
Vaudrey would refuse to have a hand in it. And here, this devilish
minister appeared not to understand, did not understand, perhaps, or
else he understood too well. Molina was not accustomed to such
hard-of-hearing people. With his fat hand, he had dropped into the hands
of senators and ministers of the former regime, a sum for which the only
receipt given was a smile. He was accustomed to the style of
conversation carried on by hints and ended between intelligent people by
a _shake of the hand_, that in which some bits of paper rested:
bank-notes or paid-up shares. And this Vaudrey knew nothing! So he felt
himself obliged to explain himself clearly, to stoop to dotting every
_i_, at the risk of being shown out of doors.

Molina was too shrewd to run this risk. He would return at another time,
seeing that the minister turned a deaf ear, but _pecaire_! he sweat huge
drops in seeking roundabout phrases, this man who never minced his words
and habitually called things by their proper names. Was the like ever
seen! A pettifogger from Grenoble to _floor_ Salomon Molina!

"It made me warm," said the money-maker, on leaving the cabinet, "but,
deuce take it! I'll have my revenge. One is not a minister always. You
shall pay me dearly, my little fellow, for that uncomfortable little
time."

Vaudrey had thoroughly understood the matter, but he did not intend to
allow it to be seen that he did. That was a simpler way. He had not had
to dismiss the buyer of consciences; he had enjoyed his embarrassment
and that was sufficient.

"What, however, if I had spoken to him of money before he had shown his
hand! If I had accepted from him--!" he said to himself.

He shuddered at the thought as he had previously done while Molina was
talking to him. A single imprudence, a single confidence might easily
have placed him under the hand of this fat man. He must, however, find
some solution. The days were rolling away and the bills signed for
Marianne would in a very short time reach maturity.

"When I think that this Molina could in one day enable me to gain three
times this sum."

Salomon had just told him: "To forestall the news on the Bourse is
sometimes worth gold ingots!" A _forestaller_! As well say the
revelation of a State secret, base speculation, almost treachery! And
yet on hearing these words that covered up an insult, he had not even
rung for the messenger to show Molina out, but had striven to comprehend
nothing!

As the result of this conversation, he felt uncomfortable. The man had
left an odor of pollution, as it were, behind him.

Vaudrey must needs be soon reassured respecting the Gochard paper. In
visiting Marianne, he observed that his mistress was a shrewd woman. She
informed him immediately that Claire Dujarrier whom she had seen, would
secure a renewal from Gochard, who was unknown to Vaudrey, from three
months to three months until the expiration of six months in
consideration of an additional twenty thousand francs for each period of
ninety days.

"I did not understand that at first," Marianne began by remarking.

"Oh!" said Sulpice, "I understand perfectly, it is absolute usury. But
time is ready money, and in six months it will be easier for me to pay
one hundred and forty thousand francs than a hundred thousand to-day. I
have plans."

"What?"

"Very difficult to explain, but quite clear in my mind! The important
part is not to have the date of maturity on the first of June, but on
the first of December."

"Then nothing is more simple. Madame Dujarrier will arrange it."

"Is Madame Dujarrier a providence then?"

"Almost," said Marianne coldly.

Sulpice was intoxicated with joy, realizing that he had before him all
the necessary time in which to free himself from his embarrassment, when
Marianne should have returned him his first acceptance for one hundred
thousand francs against a new one for one hundred and forty thousand. He
breathed again. From the twenty-sixth of April to the first of December,
he had nearly seven months in which to free himself. He repeated the
calculation that he had formerly made when he said: "I have ample time!"

He reentered the Hotel Beauvau in a cheerful mood, Adrienne was
delighted. She feared to see him return nervous and dejected.

"Then you will be brilliant presently at Madame Gerson's."

"Stop! that's so. It is this evening in fact!--"

He had forgotten it.

Marianne, too, was not free. She was going, she said, to Auteuil for
that bill of exchange. Vaudrey did not therefore, regret the soiree. His
going to Madame Gerson's was now a matter of indifference to him.

"As for me, I am so happy, oh! so happy!" said Adrienne, clapping her
little hands like a child.

In undressing, Vaudrey fortunately found this document which he had
folded in four and left in his waistcoat pocket:

     "On the first of June next, I will pay to the order of Monsieur
     Adolphe Gochard of No. 9, Rue Albouy, the sum of One Hundred
     Thousand Francs, value received in cash.

         "SULPICE VAUDREY,
             "Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin, 37."

He turned pale on reading it. If Adrienne had seen it!--

He burned the paper at a candle.

"I am imprudent," he said to himself. "Poor Adrienne! I should not like
to cause her any distress."

She was overjoyed as she made the journey in the ministerial carriage
from Place Beauvau to the Gersons' mansion. At last she had a rapid,
stolen moment in which she could recover the old-time joy of happy
solitude, full of the exquisite agitation of former days.

"Do you recall the time when you took me away like this, on the evening
of our marriage?" she whispered to him, as the carriage was driven off
at a gallop.

He took her hands and pressed them.

"You still love me, don't you, Sulpice?--You believe too, that I love
you more than all the world?"

"Yes, I believe it!"

"You would kill me if I deceived you?--I, ah, if you deceived me, I do
not know what I should do.--Although I think that you are here, that I
hold you, that I love you, you may still belong to another woman--"

"Again! you have already said that. Are you mad?" said Sulpice. "See! we
have reached our destination."

Madame Gerson had brilliantly illuminated her house in Rue de Boulogne
with lights, filled it with flowers, and spread carpets everywhere to
receive the President of the Council. The house was too small to
accommodate the guests, who were about to be stifled therein. She packed
them into her dining-room. For the soiree which was to follow, she had
sounded the roll-call of her friends. She was bent on founding a new
salon, on showing Madame Marsy that she was not alone to be the rival of
Madame Evan.

Madame Gerson was not on friendly terms with Sabine Marsy. People were
ignorant as to the cause. Adrienne, who was not familiar with the
history of such little broils, was very much surprised to learn of this
fact.

"She claims that we take away all her _personnel_," said Madame Gerson.
"It is not my fault if people enjoy themselves at our house. I hope that
you will find pleasure here, Monsieur le President."

Vaudrey bowed. "Madame Gerson could not doubt it."

The guests sat down to dinner. Madame Gerson beamed with joy beside the
minister. Guy de Lissac, Warcolier, some senators and some deputies were
of the dinner party. Monsieur and Madame Gerson never spoke of them by
their names but: _Monsieur le Senateur, Monsieur le Depute!_ They
lubricated their throats with these titles, just as bourgeois who come
in contact with highnesses swell out in addressing a prince as
_Monseigneur_, absolutely as if they were addressing themselves.

Sulpice felt in the midst of this circle in which everything was
sacrificed to _chic_, as he invariably did, the painful sensation of a
man who is continually on show. He never dined out without running
against the same menu, the same fanfare, and the same conversation.

Monsieur Gerson endeavored to draw the President of the Council into
political conversation. He wished to know Vaudrey's opinion as to the
one-man ballet. Sulpice smiled.

"Thanks!" he said. "We have just been dealing with that. I prefer
truffles, they are more savory."

Through the flowers, Adrienne could see her husband who was seated
opposite to her beside Madame Gerson. She conversed but little with Guy
de Lissac, who was sitting on her right, although the formalities of the
occasion would have suggested that Monsieur le Senator Crepeau and
Monsieur de Prangins, the deputy, should have been so placed. Madame
Gerson, however, had remarked with a smile, that Madame Vaudrey would
not feel annoyed at having Monsieur de Lissac for her neighbor. "I have
often met Monsieur de Lissac at the ministry; he is received noticeably
well there."

Not knowing any one among the guests, Adrienne was, in fact, charmed to
have Guy next to her. He was decidedly pleasing to her with his sallies,
his skepticism which, as she thought, covered more belief than he wished
to disclose. For a long time, he had felt himself entirely captivated by
her cheerful modesty and the grace of her exquisite purity. She was so
vastly different from all the other women whom he had known. How the
devil could Vaudrey bring himself to neglect so perfect a creature, who
was more attractive in her fascinating virtue than all the damsels to be
met with in society, among the demi-monde, or those of a still lower
grade? For Vaudrey remained indifferent to Adrienne; and this was a
further and manifest blow. A specialist in matters of observation like
Guy was not to be deceived therein. Madame Vaudrey had not yet
complained, but she was already suffering. Was it merely politics, or
was it some woman who was taking her husband from Adrienne? Guy did not
know, but he would know. The pretty Madame Vaudrey interested him.

"If that idiot Sulpice were not my friend, I would make love to her.
Besides," he said to himself, as he looked at Adrienne's lovely, limpid
eyes, "I should fail; there are some lakes whose tranquillity cannot be
disturbed."

Adrienne, pleased to have him beside her, enquired of him the names of
the guests. On the left of Madame Gerson sat a little, broad-backed man,
with black hair pasted over his temples, long leg-of-mutton whiskers
decorating his bright-colored cheeks, and a keen eye: he was Monsieur
Jouvenet, formerly an advocate; to-day Prefect of Police.

Senator Crepeau sat further away. He was a fat manufacturer, who talked
about alimentary products and politics. In the _Analytical Table of the
Accounts of the Sittings of the Senate_, his name shone brilliantly,
with the following as his record: "CREPEAU, of L'Ain, Life
Senator--Apologizes for his absence--8 January--. Apologizes for his
absence--20 February--. Member of a commission--_Journal Officiel_, p.
1441. Apologizes for not being able to take part in the labors of the
commission--4 March--. Apologizes for his absence--20 March--. Asks for
leave of absence--5 April--." Such were his services during the ordinary
work of that year. Monsieur Crepeau--of L'Ain--had earned the right to
take a rest.

"He eats very heartily," said Lissac. "His appetite is better than his
eloquence."

Next to Crepeau was another legislator, Henri de Prangins, a publicist,
an old, wrinkled, stooping, dissatisfied grumbler.

"Ah! that is Monsieur de Prangins," said Adrienne, "I have heard much
about him."

"He is a typical character," Lissac said, with a smile. "You know
Granet, _the gentleman who will become a minister_; well, Prangins is
the gentleman who would be a minister, but who never will be! Moreover,
he is five hundred times more remarkable than a hundred others who have
been in office ten times, for what reason cannot be said."

For nearly half a century Prangins, the old political wheel-horse, had
plotted and jockeyed in politics, set up and overthrown ministries,
piled up review articles on newspaper articles, contradiction on
contradiction, page on page, spoiled cartloads of paper in his vocation
of daily or fortnightly howler, and withal he was applauded, rich and
popular, famous and surrounded by flatterers, knife-and-fork companions,
without friends but not wanting clients, as he had made and spoiled
reputations, ministers, governments, and although he well knew the
vanity and nothingness of power, he aspired to secure that vain booty,
oft alleging, with bitter enviousness of authority and impatient of
tyranny, that to enjoy popularity uninterruptedly was not worth a
quarter of an hour of power, approaching with greedy eagerness the
desired lot, yet seeing it inevitably, eternally, relentlessly escape
and recede from him, plucked from his grasp as it were, like a shred of
flesh from the jaw of a Molossian. And now, in his unquenchable lust of
power, amid the monuments of combination and deception he had created,
this man was weary, disgusted and irritated,--believing himself
vanquished and smothering the anger of defeat in the luxurious isolation
of his wealth. He was neither officially influential nor liked. Feared
he was, probably, and envied because of his good fortune, recognized,
too, as a _force_, but only as acting in the whirlwind of his ideas and
struggling in the emptiness of his dreams. After having immolated
everything, youth, family, friendship, love, to this chimera: power, he
found himself old, worn-out, broken by his combats, face to face with
the folly of his hopes and the worthlessness of his will. Never had his
nervous hand been able to grasp in its transition, the fragment of
morocco of a portfolio and now that his parchment-like fingers were old
and feeble, they would never cling to that shred of power! And now this
Prangins avenged himself for the contempt or the injustice of his
colleagues and the folly of circumstances, by criticism, defiance,
mockery, denial and by loudly expressing his opinion:

"The defect of every government is that it will try to play new airs on
an old violin! Your violin is cracked, Monsieur Vaudrey! I do not
reproach you for that, you did not make it!"

Vaudrey laughed at the sally, but Warcolier felt that he was choking.
How could the minister allow his policy to be thus attacked at table?
Ah! how Warcolier would have clinched the argument of this Prangins.

Madame Gerson was delighted. The dinner was served sumptuously and went
off without a hitch. The _maitre d'hotel_ directed the service
admirably. The soiree that was to follow it would be magnificent. The
journals would most certainly report it. Gerson had invited one reporter
in spite of his dislike of journalists. Ah! those gossipers and foolish
fellows, they never forgot to describe the toilettes worn by "the pretty
Madame Gerson" at _first nights_, at the Elysee or at Charity Bazaars.
Occasionally, her husband pretended to be angered by the successes of
his wife:

"Those journalists! Just imagine, those journalists! They speak about my
wife just as they would about an actress! 'The lovely Madame Gerson wore
a gown of _crepe de Chine_!' The lovely Madame Gerson! What has my
wife's beauty or her toilette to do with them?"

In truth, however, he felt flattered. He was only sincerely annoyed
when people respected the devilish wall of private life, the cement of
which he would have stripped off himself, in order to show his wife's
beauty. To be quoted in the paper, why! that is _chic_.

Adrienne felt a little stunned by the noise of the conversation which
increased in proportion as the dinner advanced. She was also very much
astonished and not a little grieved when Madame Gerson abruptly spoke in
a loud voice before all the guests concerning Madame Marsy, at whose
house it was, in fact, that she made the acquaintance of Vaudrey. Madame
Gerson showed her pretty teeth in a very charming manner as she tore her
old friend Sabine to pieces, as it were. In a tenderly indulgent tone
which was the more terrible, she repeated the tales that were formerly
current: the affecting death of Philippe Marsy, the painter of
_Charity_, and a particular escapade in which Sabine was involved with
Emile Cordier, one of the leaders of the _intransigeante_ school of
painters.

"What! you did not know that?" said the pretty Madame Gerson in
astonishment.

Adrienne knew nothing. She was delighted moreover to know nothing. She
heard this former friend relate how Sabine had, at one time, exhibited
at the Salon. Oh! mere students' daubs, horrid things! Still-life
subjects that might have passed for buried ones, and yet, perhaps,
Cordier retouched them.

"I thought that Madame Gerson was on the best of terms with Madame
Marsy," whispered Adrienne to Lissac, who replied:

"They have been on better! They perhaps will be so again. That is of
very little importance. Women revile each other and associate at the
same time."

Adrienne decided that she would not listen. She knew Sabine Marsy only
slightly; she was not interested as a friend; but this little execution,
gracefully carried out here by a woman who recently did the honors at
the Salon of Boulevard Malesherbes seemed to her as cowardly as
treachery. This, then, was society! And how right was her choice in
preferring solitude!

Then, in order that she might not hear the slander that was greeted with
applause by those very persons who but yesterday besieged Madame Marsy's
buffet, and who would run to-morrow to pay court to that woman, she
conversed with Lissac. She frankly told him what she suffered at Place
Beauvau. She spoke of Sulpice, as Sulpice was loved by her beyond all
else in the world.

"Fancy! I do not see him, hardly ever! The other week he passed two days
at Laon, where an exposition was held at which he was present."

"An exposition at Laon?" asked Lissac, astonished. "What exposition?"

"I do not know. I know nothing myself. Perhaps it is wrong of me not to
keep myself informed of passing events, but all that wearies me. I
detest politics and journals--I am told quite enough about them.
Politics! that which takes my husband from me! My uncle, Doctor Reboux,
often said to me: 'Never marry a doctor; he is only half a husband.'
Vaudrey is like a doctor. Always absent, with his everlasting
night-sessions."

"Night-sessions?" asked Lissac.

"Yes, at the Chamber--continually--"

Guy determined to betray nothing of his astonishment; but he knew now as
surely as if he had learned everything, why Sulpice neglected Adrienne.
The fool! some girl from the Opera! some office-seeker who was skilfully
entangling His Excellency! That appertained to his functions then? He
was exasperated at Vaudrey and alternately looked at him and at
Adrienne. So perfect a woman! Ravishing. What an exquisite profile, so
delicate and with such a straight nose and a delightful mouth! Was
Vaudrey mad then?

The guests rose from the table, and, as usual, the men went into the
smoking-room, leaving the salon half-empty. Madame Gerson profited
thereby to continue distilling her little slanders about Sabine, which
she did while laughing heartily. In the smoking-room the men chatted
away beneath the cloud that rose from their _londres_. The clarion tones
of Warcolier rung out above all the other voices.

Guy, seated in a corner on a divan, was still thinking of Adrienne, of
those _night-sessions_, of those expositions, of those agricultural
competitions invented by Sulpice, and caught but snatches of the
conversation, jests, and nonsensical stories which were made at the cost
of the colleagues of the Chamber and political friends:

"You know how Badiche learned at the last election that he was not
elected?"

"No, how?"

"He returned to his house, anxious as to the result of the ballot. And
he heard, what do you think? His children, a little boy and a little
girl, who on receipt of the telegram that papa was waiting for and that
mamma in her feverish expectation had opened, had already composed a
song to the air of _The Young Man Poisoned_:

    Resultat tres negatif,
    Ballottage positif!
    Badiche est ballo--
        Bate,
      Est ballotte!
    Oui, Badiche est ballotte;
    C'est papa qu'est ballotte!

Happy precocity! genuine frightful gamins!"

"_Du Gavarni_!"

"Apropos, on what majority do you count, Monsieur le President?"

"One hundred and thirty-nine."

"That is a large one."

"I! my dear fellow,"--it was old Prangins speaking to Senator
Crepeau,--"I do not count myself as likely to be included in the next
ministry, no! I do not delude myself, but I shall be in the second--or
rather in the third--no, in the fourth--yes, in the fourth
ministry--Assuredly!"

An asthmatic cough, the cough of an old man, interrupted his remarks.

Guy heard Warcolier, as he held a small glass of kirsch in his hand, say
with a laugh:

"I have a way of holding my electors in leash. Not only when I visit
them do I address them as _my friend, my brave_, which flatters them,
but from time to time, I write them autograph letters. They look upon
that like ready money. Some of them, the good fellows, are flattered:
'He has written to me, he is not proud!' Others, the suspicious fellows,
are reassured: 'Now--I have his signature, I have him!' And there you
are!"

They laughed heartily.

"How they laugh _afterward_," thought Lissac, "at the electors whose
shoes they would blacken _beforehand_."

"The course that I have followed is very simple," said another. "I
desired to become sub-prefect so as to become a prefect and a prefect to
become a deputy, and a deputy so as to reach a receiver-generalship. The
salaries assured, why, there's the crowning of a career."

"Why, that fellow _plays the whole gamut_," again thought Guy, "but he
is frank!"

"I read very little," now replied Crepeau to Warcolier--"I do not much
care for pure literature--we politicians, we need substantial reading
that will teach us to think."

"I believe you!--" murmured this Parisian Guy, still smoking and
listening. "Go to school, my good man!"

The conversation thus intermingled and confused, horrified and irritated
this _blase_ by its gravity and selfishness. He summed up an entire
character in a single phrase and shook his head as he very shrewdly
remarked: "Suppose _Universal Suffrage_ were listening?"

Lissac did not take any part in these conversations. It was his delight
to observe. He drew amusement from all these wearisome commonplaces,
according to his custom as a curious spectator.

He was about, however, to rise and approach Vaudrey, who was
instinctively coming toward him, when the Prefect of Police, Monsieur
Jouvenet, without noticing it, placed himself between the minister and
his friend.

Jouvenet spoke in a low tone to Vaudrey, smiling at the same time very
peculiarly and passing his fingers through his whiskers. Whatever
discretion the prefect employed, Guy was near enough to him to hear the
name of Marianne Kayser, which surprised him.

Marianne! what question of Marianne could there be between these two
men?

Lissac observed that Vaudrey suddenly became very pale.

He drew still nearer, pretending to finish a cup of coffee while
standing. Then he heard these words very distinctly:

"A reporter saw you leave her house the other evening!"

Guy moved away very quickly. He felt a sort of sudden bewilderment, as
if the few words spoken by the Prefect of Police were the natural result
of his conversation with Adrienne, an immediate response thereto.

"It would be astonishing if Marianne--" thought Lissac.

Besides, he would know soon. He would merely question Vaudrey.

As soon as Jouvenet, always polite, grave and impassive, had left
"Monsieur le Ministre" in a state of visible nervousness, almost of
anxiety, he entered upon his plan.

"You know Mademoiselle Kayser intimately then?" he asked Vaudrey, who,
taken aback, looked at him for a moment without replying and endeavored
to grasp Lissac's purpose.

"Am I imprudent?" further asked Guy.

"No, but who has told you--?"

"Nothing, your Prefect of Police only spoke a little too loud. He seemed
to me to understand."

Vaudrey's hand rapidly seized Lissac's wrist.

"Hush! be silent!"

"Very well! Good!" said Lissac to himself. "Poor little Adrienne."

"I will tell you all about that later. Oh! nothing is more simple! It
isn't what you think!"

"I am sure of that!" answered Lissac, with a smile.

In a mechanical way, and as if to evade his friend, Sulpice left the
smoking-room for the salon, tritely observing:

"We must rejoin the ladies--the cigar kills conversation--"

He felt uncomfortable. It was the first time that Jouvenet had informed
him that there are agents for learning the movements of ministers. The
Prefect of Police, in a chance conversation at the Opera with the
editor-in-chief of a very Parisian journal, had suppressed a rumor which
stated that a minister hailing from Grenoble set propriety at defiance
in his visits to Rue Prony. It would have been as well to print
Vaudrey's name.

Hitherto he had been able to enjoy his passion for Marianne without
scandal and secretly. His mysterious intrigue was now known to the
police, to everybody, to a reporter who had stumbled against him on
leaving a supper-party at the house of a courtesan in the neighborhood.

The minister was bitterly annoyed. The very flattering applause that
the women bestowed upon him when he returned to the salon could not
dissipate his ill-humor. He tried to chat and respond to the affected
remarks of Madame Gerson and to the smiles of the women; but he was
embarrassed and nervous. Adrienne thought he looked ill.

Everything was spoken of in the light but pretentious, easy tone of the
conversation of those second-rate salons where neither ideas nor men are
made, where, on the contrary, they are accepted, ready-made and _en
bloc_. On every question, the picture in vogue, the favorite book, the
man of the hour, they expressed themselves by the same stereotyped,
expected word, borrowed from the ceaseless repetition of current
polemics. Nothing was new. The conversation was as well worn as an old
farthing. Adrienne was pained to see a man of Vaudrey's intelligence
compelled to listen to these truisms and wondered if he would presently
reproach her for having brought him into the suffocating void of