Chapter 22

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 _maître d'hôtel_ directed the service admirably. The soirée 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 Élysée 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 _crêpe 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 Émile 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 Opéra! 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 _londrès_. 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_:

Résultat très négatif, Ballottage positif! Badiche est ballo-- Bâté, Est ballotté! Oui, Badiche est ballotté; C'est papa qu'est ballotté!

Happy precocity! genuine frightful gamins!"

"_Du Gavarni_!"

"Apropos, on what majority do you count, Monsieur le Président?"

"One hundred and thirty-nine."

"That is a large one."

"I! my dear fellow,"--it was old Prangins speaking to Senator Crépeau,--"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 Crépeau 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 _blasé_ 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 Opéra 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 this Parisian establishment where all was superficial, glittering and _chic_.

She was in a hurry to get away. She saw that Sulpice was growing weary, and took advantage of the first opportunity to whisper to him:

"Would you like to go?"

"Yes, let us go!" he said.

He sought Lissac and repeated to him that he would have something to say to him, and Guy bowed to the Minister and Madame Vaudrey, who left too early to please the Gersons.

Adrienne, out of heart and discouraged by commonplace gossip and slander, was eager to be again with her husband, to tell him that nothing could compensate her for the deep joy of the tête-à-tête, their evenings passed together as of old--he remembered them well,--when he read to her from the works of much-loved poets.

"Poetry!" said Vaudrey. "Will you be quiet! The Gersons would find me as antiquated as Ramel. It is old-fashioned."

"I am no longer surprised," added the young wife, "at being so little fashionable. Morally speaking, those hot-houses of platitudes stifle one. Never fear, Sulpice, I shall not be the one to ever again drag you into salons. Are you tired? Are you weary?"

"No, I was thinking of something else," replied Vaudrey, who really was thinking of Marianne.

Madame Vaudrey had not left Madame Gerson's salon before that pretty little Parisian whispered imprudently enough in the ear of a female friend:

"Our ministers' wives are always from Carpentras, Pont-à-Mousson, or Moulins; don't you think so?"

"And what would you have!" said Lissac, who on this evening heard everything that he ought not to hear, "it is as good as being from the _Moulin-Rouge_!"

Madame Gerson smiled, thought the expression charming, very apt, very happy, but again reflected that Lissac was exceedingly considerate toward Adrienne and that Madame Vaudrey was a little too indulgent toward Monsieur de Lissac.

V

Since the moment when it had entered her mind that she might find something more than a lover in Monsieur de Rosas, Marianne had been sorely puzzled. She was playing a strong hand. Between the minister and the duke she must make a choice.

She did not care seriously for Vaudrey. In fact she found that he was ridiculously unreserved. "He is a simple fellow!" she said to Claire Dujarrier. But she had sufficient _amour-propre_ to retain him, and she felt assured that Sulpice was weak enough to obey her in everything: such an individual was not to be disdained. As to Rosas, she felt a sentiment which certainly was not love, but rather a feeling of astonishment, a peculiar affection. Rosas held her in respect, and she was flattered by his timid bearing, as he had in his veins the blood of heroes. He spoke almost entirely of his love, which, however, he never proposed to her to test, and this platonic course, which in Vaudrey's case she would have considered _simple_, appeared to her to be "good form" in the great nobleman's case. The duke raised her in her own eyes.

He had never repeated that word, doubtless spoken by him at random: marriage, and Marianne was too discreet and shrewd to appear to have specially noticed it. She did not even allude to it. She waited patiently. With the lapse of time, she thought, Rosas would be the more surely in her grasp. Meantime it was necessary to live and as she was bent on maintaining her household, she kept Vaudrey, whom she might need at any moment.

Her part was to carry on these two intrigues simultaneously, leading Rosas to believe that the minister was her friend only, nothing more, the patron of Uncle Kayser, and making Vaudrey think that since she had dismissed the duke he had become resigned and would "suppress his sighs." She could have sworn, in all sincerity, that José was not her lover.

To mislead Vaudrey was not a very difficult task. Sulpice was literally blinded by this love.--For a moment, he had been aroused by Jouvenet's intimation that his secret was known to others. For a while he seemed to have kept himself away from Marianne; but after taking new precautions, he returned trembling with ardent passion to Mademoiselle Vanda's hôtel, where his mistress's kiss, a little languid, awaited him.

Months passed thus, the entire summer, the vacation of the Chamber, the dull season in Paris. Adrienne set out for Dauphiny, where Vaudrey was to preside over the Conseil-Général, and she felt a childish delight on finding herself once more in the old house at Grenoble, where she had formerly been so happy! Yet even beneath this roof, within these walls, the mute witnesses of his virtuous love, especially when alone, Vaudrey thought of Marianne, he had but one idea, that of seeing her again, of clasping her in his arms, and he wrote her passionate letters each day, which she hardly glanced over and with a shrug of her shoulders burned as of no importance.

In the depths of his province he grew weary of the continual bustle of fêtes, receptions held in his honor, addresses delivered by him, ceremonies over which he had to preside, deputations received, statues inaugurated. Statues! always statues! In the lesser towns, at Allevard or Marestel, he was dragged from the _mairie_ to the _Grande Place_, between rows of firemen, in noisy processions, whose accompanying brass instruments split his ears, under pink-striped tents, draped with tricolor flags, before interminable files of gymnastic societies, glee clubs, corporate bodies, associations, Friends of Peace, or Friends of War societies! Then wandering harangues; commonplace remarks, spun out; addresses, sprinkled with Latin by professors of rhetoric; declarations of political faith by eloquent municipal councillors, all delighted to grab at a minister when the opportunity offered. How many such harangues Vaudrey heard! More than in the Chamber. More thickly they came, more compressed, more severe than in the Chamber. What advice, political considerations and remonstrances winding up with demands for offices! What cantatas that begged for subsidies! Everywhere demands: demands for subsidies, demands for grants, demands for help, demands for decorations! Nothing but harass, enervation, lassitude, deafening clamor. They wished to kill him with their shouts: _Vive Vaudrey!_

The Prefect and the Commandant General of the division were constantly on guard about Vaudrey, who was dragged about in torture between these two coat-embroidered officers. From the lips of the prefect, Vaudrey heard the same commonplace utterances: progress, the future, the fusion of parties and interests, the greatness of the department, the cotton trade and the tanneries, the glory of the minister who--of the minister whom--of the glorious child of the country--of the eagle of Dauphiny. _Vive Vaudrey! Vive Vaudrey!_ The general, at least, varied his effects. He grumbled and wrung his hands, and on the day of the inauguration of the statue of a certain Monsieur Valbonnans, a former deputy and celebrated glove manufacturer,--also the glory of the country,--Vaudrey heard the soldier murmur from morning till night, with a movement of his jaw that made his imperial jerk: "_I love bronze! I love bronze!_" with a persistency that stupefied the minister.

This was, perhaps, the only recollection of a cheerful nature that Vaudrey retained of his trips in Isère. This eternal murmuring of the general: _I love bronze! I love bronze!_ had awakened him, and he gayly asked himself what devilish sort of appetite that soldier had who continually repeated his phrase in a ravenous tone. Seated beside him on the platform, while the glee-club sung an elegy in honor of the late Monsieur Valbonnans, which was composed for the occasion by an amateur of the town:

Monsieur Valbonnans' praise let's chant, yes, chant! His gloves the best, as all must grant, The best extant!

while the flourish of trumpets took up the refrain and the firemen unveiled, amid loud acclamations, the statue of Monsieur Valbonnans, which bore these words on the pedestal: _To the Inventor, the Patriot, the Merchant_; while, too, the prefect still poured in Vaudrey's left ear his inexhaustible observations: the glove trade, the glory of Isère; the progress, the interest, the greatness of the department, the minister who--the minister whom--(_Vive Vaudrey!_) Sulpice still heard, even amid the acclamations, the mechanical rumbling of the general's voice, repeating, reasserting, rehearsing: "_I love bronze! I love bronze!_"

On the evening of the banquet, the minister at length obtained an explanation of this extraordinary affection. The general rose, grasping his glass as if he would shiver it, and while the _parfait_ overflowed on to the plates, he cried in a hoarse voice, as if he were at the head of his division:

"I love bronze--I love bronze--because it serves for the erection of statues and the casting of cannon. I love bronze because its voice wins battles, the artillery being to-day the superior branch, although the cavalry is the most chivalrous! I love bronze because it is the image of the heart of the soldier, and I should like to see in our country an army of men of bronze who--whom--"

He became confused and muddled, and rolled his white eyes about in his purpled face and to close his observations brandished his glass as if it had been his sword, and amid a frenzy of applause from the guests, he valiantly howled: "I love bronze! I love bronze!"