Chapter 27

Adrienne's repressed grief had pained Lissac. While to the other guests she appeared to be only somewhat fatigued, to him the open wound and sorrow were visible. He plunged into the crowd. Beneath the streaming light the diamonds on the women's shoulders gleamed like the lustres' crystals. Within a frame of gobelins and Beauvais tapestry taken from the repository, was an improvised scene that looked like a green and pink nest of camellias, dracænas and palms. The bright toilettes of the women already seated before this scenic effect presented a wealth of pale blue, white or pink silk, mother-of-pearl shoulders, diamonds, and bows of pink or feather headdresses. Guy recognized Madame Marsy in the front row, robed in a very low-cut, sea-green satin robe with a bouquet of flowers at the tip of the shoulder, who while fanning herself looked with haughty impertinence at the pretty Madame Gerson, her former friend. Madame Evan was numerously surrounded, she was the most charming of all the stylish set and the woman whom all the others tried to copy.

Behind this species of female flower-bed the black coated ranks crowded, their sombre hue relieved here and there by the uniform of some French officer or foreign military attaché. There was a profusion of orders, crosses and strange old faces, with red ribbons at the neck, deputies evidently in dress, youthful attachés of the ministry or embassy, correct in bearing and officious, their crush-hats under their arms and holding the satin programme of the _musicale soirée_ in their hands, some numbers of which were about to be rendered. Under the ceilings that were dappled with painted clouds, surrounded by brilliant lights and a wealth of flowers, this crowd presented at once an aspect of luxury and oddity, with its living antitheses of old parliamentarians and tyros of the Assembly.

Intermingled with strains of music, were whisperings and the confused noise of conversations.

Guy watched with curiosity, as a man who has seen much and compares, all this gathering of guests. From time to time he greeted some one of his acquaintance, but this was a rare occurrence. He was delighted to see Ramel whom he had often met at Adrienne's _Wednesdays_, and whom he liked. He appeared to him to be fatigued and sick.

"I am not very well, in fact," said Ramel. "I have only come because I had something serious to say to Vaudrey."

"What then?" asked Lissac.

"Oh! nothing! some advice to give him as to the course to be followed. There is decidedly much underhand work going on about the President."

"Who is it?"

"Most of them are here!"

"His guests?"

"You know very well that when one invites all one's friends, one finds that three-quarters of one's enemies will be present."

"At least," said Lissac.

He continued to traverse the salons, always returning instinctively toward the door at which Adrienne stood, with pale face and wandering look, and scarcely hearing, poor woman, the unfamiliar names that the usher uttered at equal intervals, like a speaking machine.

"Monsieur Durosoi!--Monsieur and Madame Bréchet!--Monsieur the Minister of Public Works!--Monsieur the Prefect of the Aube!--Monsieur the Count de Grigny!--Monsieur Henri de Prangins!--Monsieur the General d'Herbecourt!--Monsieur the Doctor Vilandry!--Monsieur and Madame Tochard!"

She had vowed that she would be strong, and allow nothing to be seen of the despair that was wringing her heart. She compelled herself to smile. In nightmares and hours of feverish unrest, she had suffered the same vague, morbid feeling that she now experienced. All that passed about her seemed to be unreal. These white-cravatted men, these gaily-dressed women, the file of guests saluting her at the same spot in the salon, with the same expression of assumed respect and trite politeness, appeared to her but a succession of phantoms. Neither a name nor an association did she attach to those countenances that beamed on her with an official smile or gravely assumed a correct seriousness. She felt weary, overwhelmed and heavy-headed at the sight of this continued procession of strangers on whom it was incumbent that she should smile and to whom she must bow out of politeness, in virtue of that duty of state which she wished to fulfil to the last degree, poor soul!

The distant music of Fahrbach's polkas or Strauss's waltzes seemed like an added accompaniment that mocked the sadness of her unwholesome dream.

"And yet, in all that crowd of women who salute her, there are some who are jealous of her! Many envy her!" thought Guy, who was looking on.

Adrienne did not look at Vaudrey. She was afraid that if her eyes met her husband's fixed on her own, she would lose her sang-froid and suddenly burst into sobs, there before the guests. That would have been ridiculous. This blonde, so feebly gentle, isolated herself, therefore, with surprising determination and seemed to see nothing save her own thought, the unique thought: "Be strong. You shall weep at your ease when you are alone, far away from these people, far away from this crowd, alone with yourself, entirely alone, entirely alone!"

Vaudrey was very pale, but carried away, in spite of himself, by the joy which he felt in receiving all the illustrious and powerful men of the state, foreign ambassadors, the Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, the ministers, his colleagues, deputies, wealthy financiers, renowned publicists, in fact, everything that counts and has a name in Paris,--this minister, happy to see the crowd running to him, at his house, bowing, paying homage to him, for a moment forgot the crushing events of that day, the sudden thunderbolt falling on him and perhaps, as he had said, crushing his hearthstone.

He no longer thought of anything but what he saw: salutations, bowed heads, inclinations that succeeded each other with the regularity of a clock, that succession of homages to the little Grenoble advocate, now become Prime Minister.

Oblivious of everything else, he had lost the recollection of his mistress, and he suddenly grew pale and looked instinctively with terror at Adrienne, who was as pale as a corpse.--A visitor had just been announced by the usher, in his metallic voice, and the name that he cried mechanically, as he had uttered all the others, echoed there like an insult.

Guy de Lissac shook through his entire frame, as he too heard it.

"Monsieur Simon Kayser and Mademoiselle Kayser!"--cried the usher.

Still another name rang out from that clarion voice:

"Monsieur le Duc de Rosas!"

Neither Vaudrey nor Adrienne heard this name. Sulpice felt urged to rush toward Marianne to entreat her to leave. It is true, he had invited her. In spite of Jouvenet who knew all, and in spite of so many others who suspected the truth, she desired to be present at that fête at the ministry and to show herself to all. Vaudrey had warned her, however. He had written to her a few hours before, entreating her, nay, almost commanding, her, not to come, and she was there. She entered, advancing with head erect, leaning on the arm of her uncle, his white cravat hidden by his artist's beard and on his lips a disdainful smile.

Adrienne asked herself whether she was really dreaming now. Approaching her, she saw, crossing the salon with a queenly step, that lovely, insolent creature, trailing a long black satin skirt, her superb bosom imprisoned in a corsage trimmed with jet, and crossed, as it were, with a blood-red stripe formed by a cordon of roses. Marianne's fawn-colored head seemed to imperiously defy from afar the pale woman who stood with her two hands falling at her side as if overwhelmed.

The vision, for vision it was, approached like one of the nightmares that haunt people's dreams. Adrienne's first glance encountered the direct gaze of Marianne's gray eyes. Behind Mademoiselle Kayser came De Rosas, his ruddy Castilian face that was ordinarily pensive beamed to-day, but Madame Vaudrey did not perceive him. She saw only this woman, the woman who was approaching her, in her own house, insolently, impudently, to defy her after having outraged her, to insult her after having deceived her!

Adrienne felt a violent wrath rising within her and suddenly her entire being seemed longing to bound toward Marianne, to drive her out after casting her name in her teeth.

Instinctively she looked around her with the wild glance of a wretched woman who no longer knows what to do, as if seeking for some assistance or advice.

Vaudrey's wan pallor and Lissac's supplicating gesture appealed to her and at once restored her to herself. It was true! she had no right to cause a scandal. She was within the walls of the ministry, in a common salon into which this girl had almost a right to enter, just like so many others lost in the crowd of guests. For Adrienne, it was not merely a question of personal vanity or honor that was at stake, but also Vaudrey's reputation. She felt herself _in view_, ah! what a word:--in view, that it to say, she was like an actress to whom neither a false step nor a false note is permitted; compelled to smile while death was at her heart, to parade while her entrails were torn with grief, forced to feign and to wear a mask in the presence of all who were there, and to lie to all the invited guests, indifferent and inimical, as Ramel said, and who were looking about ready at any moment to sneer and to hiss.

She recovered, by an effort that swelled her heart, strength to show nothing of the feeling of indignant rebellion that was stifling her.

She closed her eyes.

Marianne Kayser passed onward, losing herself with Simon and De Rosas in the human furrow that opened before her and immediately closed upon her, and followed by a murmur of admiration.

Adrienne had not however seen the pale, insolent countenance of the young woman so closely approach her suffering and disconsolate face. Above all, she had not seen the jealous, rapid glance that flashed unconsciously in Vaudrey's eyes when he saw José de Rosas triumphantly following the imperious Marianne. Ah! that look of sorrowful anger would have penetrated like a red-hot iron into Adrienne's soul. That glance that Guy caught a glimpse of told eloquently of wounded love and bruised vanity on the part of that man who, placed here between these two women, his mistress and the other, suffered less from the sorrow caused to Adrienne than from Marianne's treason in deserting him for this Spaniard.

Lissac was exasperated. He felt prompted to rush between Marianne and Rosas and say to him:

"You are mad to accompany this woman! Mad and ridiculous! She is deceiving you as she has deceived Vaudrey, as she has deceived me, and as she will deceive everybody."

He purposely placed himself in Mademoiselle Kayser's way. She had appeared scarcely to recognize him and had brushed against him without apparent emotion, but with a disdainful pout. Her arm had sought that of Rosas, as if she now were sure of her duke.

Guy too, felt that he could not cause a scene at the ball, for this would have brought a scandal on Vaudrey. He had just before repeated to Adrienne: "Courage." This was now his own watchword, and yet he sought out Jouvenet to whisper to the Prefect of Police what he thought of his conduct. Jouvenet had come and gone. Granet, as if he had divined Lissac's preoccupation, looked at him sneeringly as he whispered to the fat Molina who was seated near him:

"Alkibiades!"

The soirée, moreover, was terribly wearisome to Lissac. He wandered from group to group to find some one with whom to exchange ideas but he hardly found anyone besides Denis Ramel. The same political commonplaces retailed everywhere, at Madame Gerson's or at Madame Marsy's, as in the corridors of the Chamber, were re-decocted and reproduced in the corners of the salon of the Ministry, and around the besieged buffet attacked by the most ferocious gluttony. _Interpellation_, _Majority_, _New Cabinet_, _Homogeneous_, _Ministry of the Elections_, _Ballot_, _One Man Ballot_. Guy went, weary of the conflict, to the room in which the concert was given and listened to some operatic piece, or watched between the heads, the hidden profile of some female singer or an actor and heard the bursts of laughter that greeted the new monologue _The Telephone_, rendered in a clear voice with the coolness of an English clown, by a gentleman in a dress coat: _See! I am Monsieur Durand--you know, Durand--of Meaux?--Exactly--A woman deceives me--How did I learn it?--By the telephone. My friend Durand--Durand--of Etampes--We are not related--Emile Durand said to me: Durand, why haven't you a telephone?--It is true, I hadn't one--Durand--the other Durand--Durand--of Etampes--has one--Then--_And Lissac, somewhat listless, left this corner of the salon and stumbled against a group of men who surrounded an old gentleman much decorated, wearing the _grand cordon rouge_ crosswise, a yellow ribbon at his neck, who, with the gravity of an English statesman, said, thrusting his tongue slightly forward to secure his false teeth from falling:

"I like monologues less than chansonnettes!--I, who address you, have taken lessons from Levassor."

"Levassor, Your Excellency?" answered in chorus a lot of little bald-headed young men--diplomats.

"Levassor," replied the old gentleman who was the very celebrated ambassador of a great foreign power. "Oh! I was famous in the song: _The Englishman Who Was Seasick_!"

While the little young men smiled, approved and loudly applauded, the old ambassador to whom the interests of a people were entrusted, hummed in a low tone, amid the noise of the reception:

"Aoh! aoh! Je suis _mélède_, Bien _mélède_! Très _mélède_!"

Guy de Lissac shrugged his shoulders. He had heard a great deal of this man. This diplomat of the chansonnette evoked his pity. Where was he then? At Paris or at Brives-la-Gaillarde? At a ball at the Hôtel Beauvau or in some provincial sub-prefecture?

Just before, he had heard Warcolier utter this epic expression:

"If I were minister, I would give fireworks. They are warlike and inoffensive at the same time!"

The voice of a young man with a Russian accent who talked politics in a corner, pleased him:

"I am," he said aloud, "from a singular country: the Baltic provinces, where society is governed by deputies who, by birth, have the right to make laws, and I consider politics so tiresome, fatiguing and full of disgust and weariness as an occupation, that one ought to consider one's self most fortunate that there are people condemned to take hold of this rancid pie, while others pass their lives in thinking, reading, talking and loving."

"That is good," thought Lissac. "There is one, at least, who is not so stupid. It is true, perhaps because I think just the same."

Nevertheless, he went and listened, mixing with the crowd, haphazard. His preoccupation was not there. In reality, he thought only of Adrienne. How the poor woman must suffer!

With a feeling of physical and moral overthrow, she had left the threshold of the salon, where she had been standing since the commencement of the soirée. She was mixing with the crowd in her desire to forget her sorrows amid the deafening of the music, the songs, the laughter, and the murmur of the human billows that filled her salons. She had taken her place in front of the little improvised theatre, beside all those ladies who dissected her toilette, scanned her pallid face, analyzed and examined her piece by piece, body and soul. But there, seated near the stage, exactly in front of her, exposing, as in a stall, her blonde beauty, and radiant as a Titian, was that Marianne whose gleaming white shoulders appeared above her black satin corsage. Again she saw her, as but a little while before, unavoidable, haughty and bold, smiling with insolence.

At every minute she was attracted by a movement of a head, or fan, or a laugh from this pretty creature, who leaned toward Sabine Marsy, then raised her brow and showed, in all the brilliancy of fatal beauty, her black corsage, striped with those fine red roses. And now Adrienne's anger, the grief that she had trampled under for some hours, increased from moment to moment, heightened and stung by the sight of this creature, by all kinds of bitter thoughts and by visions of treason and baffled love. She felt that she was becoming literally mad at the thought that, upon those red and painted lips, Sulpice had rested his, that his hands had stroked those shoulders, unwound that hair, that this woman's body had been folded in his arms. Ah! it was enough to make her rise and cry out to that creature: "You are a wretch. Get you gone! Get you gone, I say!"

And if she did so?

Why not? Had they the right to scorn her thus in public because she owned an official title and position? Was not this vulgar salon of a furnished mansion _her_ salon then?

Now it seemed to her that they were whispering about her; that they were sneering behind their fans, and that all these women knew her secret and her history.

Why should they not know them? All Paris must have read that mocking, offensive and singular article: _The Mistress of an Archon_! All these people had, perhaps, learned it by heart. There were people here who frequented the salons and who probably kept the article in their pockets.

Yes, that would be to commit a folly, to brave everything and to destroy all!

Sulpice, then, did not know her; he believed her to be insignificant because she was gentle, resigned to everything because she was devoted to his love and his glory?--Ah! devoted even to the point of killing herself, devoted to the extent of dying, or living poor, working with her own hands, if only he loved her, if only he never lied to her!

"And here was his mistress!"

His mistress! His mistress!

She repeated this name with increasing rage, reiterating it, inwardly digesting it, as if it were something terribly bitter. His mistress, that lovely, insolent creature! Yes, very lovely, but manifestly terrible and capable of driving a feeble being like Vaudrey to commit every folly, nay, worse, infamy.

"And it is such women that are loved! Ah! Idiots! idiots that we are!"

The first part of the concert was terminating. Happily, too, for Adrienne was choking. The minister must, as a matter of politeness, express his thanks to the cantatrices from the Opéra, and to the actresses from the Comédie Française, the artistes whose names appeared on the programme. Vaudrey was obliged to pass the rows of chairs in order to reach the little salon behind the stage, which served as a foyer. Adrienne saw him coming to her side, and looking very pale, though he made an effort to smile. He was uncomfortable and anxious. In passing before Marianne, he tried to look aside, but Mademoiselle Kayser stopped him in spite of himself, by slightly extending her foot and smiling at him, when he turned toward her, with a prolonged, interested and strange expression.

Adrienne felt that she was about to faint. She took a few tottering steps out of the salon, then she stopped as if her head were swimming. Some one was on hand to support her. She felt that a hand was holding her arm, she heard some one whisper in her ear:

"It is too much, is it not?"

She recognized Lissac's voice.

Guy looked at her for a moment, quite prepared for this great increase of suffering.

"Take me away," she murmured. "I can bear no more!--I can bear no more!"

She was longing to escape from all that noise, that atmosphere that lacked air, and from Marianne's look and smile that pierced her. She went, as if by chance, instinctively guiding Lissac, led by him to a little, salon far from the reception rooms, and which was reserved for her and protected by a door guarded by an usher. It might have been thought that she expected this solitude would be necessary to her as an escape from the fright of that reception, to which her overstrained and sick nerves made her a prey.

In passing, Lissac had whispered to Ramel, who was at his elbow:

"Tell Sulpice that Madame Vaudrey is ill!"

"Ill?"

"You see that she is!"

When Adrienne was within the little salon hung with garnet silk draperies, in which the candelabras and sconces were lighted, she sank into an armchair, entirely exhausted and overwhelmed by the fearful resistance she had made to her feelings. She remained there motionless, her eye fixed, her face pale, and both hands resting on the arms of her chair, abstractedly looking at the pattern of the carpet.

Guy stood near, biting his lips as he thought of the madman Vaudrey and that wretched Marianne.

"She at least obeys her instincts! But he!"

"Ah! it is too much; yes, it is too much!" repeated Adrienne, as if Lissac were again repeating that phrase.

It seemed to her that she had been thrust into some cowardly situation; that she had been subjected to a shower of filth! It was hideous, repugnant. She now saw, in the depths of her life, events that she had never before seen; her vision had suddenly become clear. Dark details she could now explain. Vaudrey's falsehoods were suddenly manifested.

"He lied! Ah! how he had lied!"

She recalled his anxiety to hide the journals from her, his oft-repeated suggestions, his precautions, the increasing number of his night-sessions that made him pale. Pale from debauchery! And she pitied him! She begged him not to kill himself for the politics that was eating his life. Again she saw on the lips of her _Wednesday's_ guests the furtive smiles that were hidden behind muffs when she spoke of those nocturnal sessions of the Chamber, which were only nights passed in Marianne's bed! How those Parisians must have laughed at her and ridiculed the credulity of the woman who believes herself loved, but who is deceived and mocked at! Madame Gerson, Sabine! How overjoyed they must have been when, in their salons, they referred to the little, stupid Provincial who was ignorant of these tricks!

She felt ridiculed and tortured, more tortured than baffled, for her vanity was nothing in comparison with her love, her poor, artless and trusting love!

"Sulpice, I should never have believed--Never!--"

Why had they left Grenoble, their little house on the banks of the Isère? They loved each other there, it was Paris that had snatched him away! Paris! She hated it now. She hated that reputation that had carried Vaudrey into office, the politics that had robbed her of a kind and loving husband,--for he had loved her, she was sure of that,--and which had made him the lover of a courtesan, the liar and coward that he was!

"Do you see?" she said to Lissac suddenly. "I detest these walls!"

She pointed to the gilded ceilings with an angry gesture.

"Since I entered here, my life has come to a close!--It is that, that which has taken him from me!--Ah! this society, this politics, these meannesses, this life exposed to every one and everything, to temptation and to fall, I am entirely sick of, I am disgusted with. Let me be snatched from it, let me be taken away! Everywhere here, one might say, there is an atmosphere of lying!"

"Do you hear? She laughs, she is happy! She! And I, ah! I!"

She had risen to her feet, suddenly recovering all her energy, as if stirred by the air of a Hungarian dance, whose strains dimly reached them from the distant, warm salons, where Marianne was disporting her beauty--

"Ah! I hate this hôtel, the noise and the women!" said Adrienne. "This horde ranged about the buffet, this salon turned into a restaurant, the false salutations, the commonplace protestations,--this society, all this society, I detest it!--I will have no more of it!--It seems to me that it all is mocking me, and that its smiles are only for that courtesan!--But if I had driven her out?--Who brought her?"

"Her uncle and Monsieur de Rosas!"

"Monsieur de Rosas?"

"Who marries her!"

Adrienne nervously uttered a loud, harsh laugh, as painful as if it were caused by a spasm.