Chapter 28

"Who marries her! Then these creatures are married?--Ah! they are married--They are honored, too, are they not? And because they are more easy of approach, they are thought more beautiful and more agreeable than those who are merely honest wives? Ah! it is too silly!--Rosas! I took him for a man of sense!--If I were to tell him myself that she is my husband's mistress, what would the duke answer?"

"He would not believe you, and you would not do that, madame!" said Lissac.

"Why?"

"Because it would be an act of cowardice, and because you are the best, the noblest of women!"

Instinctively he drew near her, lowering his voice, embracing with his glance that fine, charming beauty, that grief heightened by a burning brilliancy.

She raised her fine, clear eyes to Lissac, whose look troubled her, and said:

"And how have these served me?--Kindness, trickery!--Trickery, chastity!--Ask all these men! All of them will go to Mademoiselle Kayser and not to me!"

"To you, madame," murmured Guy, "all that there is of devotion and earnestness, yes, all of the tenderest and the truest will go to you as respectful homage."

"Respect?--Yes, respect to us!--And with it goes the home! But to her! Ah! to her, love! And what if I wish to be loved myself?"

"Loved by him!" said Lissac in a low tone, as if he did not know what he said; and his hands instinctively sought Adrienne's. They trembled.

A woman's perfume and something like the keen odor of flowers assailed his nostrils. He had never felt the impulse of burning compassion which at a sign from this saint, would have driven him to attempt the impossible, to affront the noisy throng yonder.

"Loved by him, yes, by him!" answered Adrienne, with the mournful shake of the head of one who sees her joy vanish in the distance like a sinking bark.

She had been so happy! She had thought herself so dearly loved! Ah! those many cowardly lies uttered by Sulpice!

"Do not speak to me of him!" she suddenly said. "I hate him, too!--I do more than that! I despise him! I never wish to see him again!--never. You hear! never!"

"What will you do?" Lissac asked.

"I know nothing about it!--I wish to leave! Now, I have no more parading to make in this ball, I think, I have no longer to receive the guests whose insulting smiles were like blows! I will go, go!"

"Adrienne!"

"Will go at once!"

She felt no astonishment at hearing the name Adrienne spoken suddenly and unreflectingly by Guy de Lissac.

She looked at him with a glance that reached his soul, not knowing what she said:

"Leave now! While the ball is in progress. To leave solitude to him, suddenly--here! And that woman, if he wishes her, and if the other who is marrying her will yield her to him!"

She was carried away, her mind wandered, as if unbalanced by her grief, all her efforts at self-control ending in a relaxation of her strained nerves.

"I will leave!--I do not wish to see him again!"

"Leave to-night?"

"For Grenoble--I don't know where!--But to fly from him; ah! yes; to escape from him! Take me away, Monsieur de Lissac!" she said distractedly, as she seized his hand. "I should go mad here!"

She had unconsciously taken refuge, as it were, in the arms of the man who loved her, and Lissac felt the exquisite grace of the body abandoned to him, without the woman's reflecting upon it, without loving him, lost--

It is quite certain that in her nervous, heart-broken condition, Adrienne was not considering whether his affection for her sprung from friendship or from love.

For a moment this master skeptic, Guy, felt that he was committing the greatest folly of his life.

The young woman did not understand; nevertheless, even without love, he clearly felt that this chasteness and grace, all that there was exquisitely seductive about her, belonged to him--if he dared--

"You are feverish, Adrienne," he said, as he took her hands as he would a child's.

"I am choking here!--I wish to leave!--take me away!"

"Nonsense," said Lissac. "What are you thinking about? They are calling for you, yonder."

"It is because they call for me that I wish to escape. Don't you see that I abhor all those people; that I detest them as much as I despise them? Take me away!"

Lissac had become very pale. He tried to smile at Adrienne--the heroic smile of a wounded man undergoing amputation--and he whispered:

"Don't you know very well, madame, that you would not have taken two steps in the street, on my arm, before you would become a lost woman?"

"Well," she said, "what of that, since it is they who are loved!--"

"No, madame," Guy replied, "I love you. I may say so, because you are a virtuous woman, and I have no right to take you away, do you understand? because I love you."

He, too, had summoned all his strength to impart to his confession, which he would have expressed with ardor, the cold tone of a phrase.

But that was enough. Adrienne recoiled before this avowal.

He loved her. He told her so!

It is true, she could not leave the mansion on his arm.

She rested her glance on Lissac and extended her hand to him, saying, as she felt suddenly recalled to herself:

"You are an honest man!"

"According to my moods," said Guy, with a sad smile.

The door of the little salon opened, and Ramel entered.

"I have called in a doctor," he said.

"For me?" asked Adrienne. "Thanks! I am quite strong!"

Then boldly going to Ramel:

"Will you have the goodness to take me to Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, Monsieur Ramel?"

"Why?"

"Because I will not remain one hour longer in a house where my husband has the right to receive his mistress!--Monsieur de Lissac refuses to accompany me. Your arm, Ramel!"

"Madame," Ramel answered gently, "I knew that Monsieur de Lissac was a man of intelligence. It seems to me that he is a man of heart. You should remain here for your own sake, for your name's sake, for your husband's. It is your duty. As to Mademoiselle Kayser, you can return to the salons, for she has just left with Monsieur de Rosas."

Adrienne remained for a moment with her sad eyes fixed on Ramel; then shaking her head:

"You knew it also? Everybody knew it then, except me?"

"Well!" said Ramel, a good-natured smile playing in his white mustache, "now it is necessary to forget."

"Never!" replied Adrienne.

Then proudly drawing herself up, she took Denis's arm and without even glancing in her mirror, she went off toward the salons.

"Your bouquet, madame," said Lissac, who was still pale and his voice trembled.

"True!" said Adrienne.

She fastened her bouquet of drooping roses to her corsage and without daring to look at Lissac again, she re-entered, leaning on Ramel's arm.

Left alone in the salon, Guy remained a moment to shake his head.

"Poor, dear creature!" he said. "If I had been young enough not to understand the position in which her madness placed me, or base enough to profit by it, what a pretty little preface to a great folly she was about to commit this evening! Well! this attack of morality will perhaps count in my favor some day."

He stooped down and picked up a rose that had fallen from Adrienne's bouquet to the carpet.

He smiled as he took up the flower and looked at it.

"One learns at any age!" he thought, as he put the flower in his coat. "That, at least, is a love souvenir that they will not send the police to rob me of."

VII

On rising the following morning, after a feverish night, Sulpice realized a feeling of absolute moral destruction. It seemed to him that he had lost a dear being. In that huge, silent hôtel one would have thought that a corpse was lying. He did not dare to present himself to Adrienne. He could not tell what to say to her. He went downstairs slowly, crossing the salons that were still decorated with the now fading flowers, to reach his cabinet. The carpet was littered with the broken leaves of dracænas and petals that had fallen from the azaleas, and presented the gloomy, forsaken aspect peculiar to the morrow of a fête. The furniture, stripped of its coverings, offered the faded tint of old maids at their rising. With heavy head, he sat at his desk and looked at the piled-up documents with a vague expression. Always the eternal pile of despatches, optimistic reports, and banal summaries of the daily press. Nothing new, nothing interesting, all was going well. This tired world had no history.

The minister still remained there, absorbed as after an unhealthy insomnia, when Warcolier entered, ever serious, with his splendid, redundant phrases and his usual attitude of a pedantic rhetor. He came to inform the minister that a matter of importance, perhaps of a troublesome nature, loomed on the horizon. Granet was preparing an interpellation. Oh! upon a matter without any real importance. An affair of a procession that had taken place at Tarbes, accompanied by some little disturbance. It was only a pretext, but it was sufficient, perhaps, to rally a majority around the _minister of to-morrow_. Old Henri de Prangins, with his eye on a portfolio, and always thirsting for power, was keeping Granet company: the man who would never be a minister with the man who was sure to be.

"Well, what has this to do with me?" asked Vaudrey indifferently.

Granet! Prangins! He was thinking of a very different matter. Adrienne knew all and Marianne deceived him. She was to marry Rosas.

The very serious Warcolier manifested much surprise at the little energy displayed by Monsieur le Ministre. He expected to see him bound, in order to rebound, as he said, believing himself witty. Was Vaudrey himself giving up the game? Was Granet then sure of the game? He surmised it and had already taken the necessary measures in that direction. But surely if Granet were the rising sun, Vaudrey was himself abandoning his character of the setting sun. He was not setting, he was falling. A sovereign contempt for this man entered Warcolier's lofty soul, Warcolier the friend of success.

"Then you do not understand, Monsieur le Président?"

Vaudrey drew himself up with a sudden movement that was frequent with him. He struck the table on which his open portfolio rested, and said:

"I understand that Granet wants that portfolio! Well, be it so! I set little store by it, but he does not have it yet!"

"That is something like it! It is worthy of a brave man to show a resolute front to his enemies! It is in battle that talent is retempered, as formerly in the Styx were tempered--"

"I know," said Sulpice.

Warcolier's intelligent smile was not understood by the minister.

Sulpice, who was in despair over his shattered domestic joys, had no wish to enter on a struggle except to bring about a reaction on himself. To hold his own against Granet, was to divert his own present sadness.

"All right," he said to Warcolier. "Let Granet interpellate us when he pleases--In eight days, to-morrow, yes, to-day even, I am ready!"

"Interpellate _us_!" thought Warcolier. "You should say, interpellate _you_."

He had already got out of the scrape himself.

Vaudrey debated with himself as to whether he would try to see Adrienne. No? What should he say to her? It would be better to let a little time shed its balm upon the wound. Then, too, if he wished to bar the way to Granet, he had not too much time before him. The shrewd person should act promptly.

"I shall see him on the Budget Committee!" thought Vaudrey.

He found it necessary now to force an interest in the struggle which a few months before would have found him eagerly panting to enter on. The honeymoon of his love of power had passed. He had too keenly felt, one after another, the discouragements of the office that he sought in order to _do good_, to reform, to act, in the pursuit of which he found himself, from the first moment, clashing with routine, old-fashioned ideas, petty ambitions, the general welfare, all the brood of selfish interests. It had been his to dream a sort of Chimera bearing the country toward Progress on outstretched wings: he found himself entangled in the musty mechanism of a worn-out and rancid-smelling engine, that dragged the State as a broken-winded horse might have done. Then, little by little, weariness and disgust had penetrated the heart of this visionary who desired to live, to assert himself in putting an end to so many abuses, and whom his colleagues, his chiefs of division, his chief of service, the chief of the State himself cautiously advised: "Make no innovations! Let things go! That has gone on so for so long! What is the use of changing? It will still do very well!"

Ah! it was to throw off the shackles and to try the impossible! Vaudrey found himself hemmed in between his dearest hopes and the most disheartening realities. He was asked for offices, not reforms. The men charged with the fate of the country were not straggling after progress, they were looking after their own interests, their landed and shopkeeping interests. He felt nauseated by all this. He held those deputies in contempt who besieged his cabinet and filled his antechamber in order to beg, claim and demand. All of them sought something, and they were almost strangled by the solicitations of their own constituents. They appeared to Sulpice to be rather the commissionaires of universal suffrage than the servants. This abasement before the manipulators of the votes made Vaudrey indignant. He felt that France was becoming by degrees a vast market for favors, a nation in which everyone asked office from those who to keep their own promised everything, and the thought filled him with terror. The ministers, wedded to their positions, became the mere servants of the deputies, while the latter obeyed the orders of their constituents. All was kept within a vast network of office-seeking and trafficking. And with it all, a hatred of genuine talent, bitter selfishness and the crushing narrowness of ideas!

Vaudrey recalled a story that had been told him, how during the Empire, the Emperor, terrified, feeling himself isolated, asked and searched for a man, and how a certain little bell in the Tuileries was especially provided to warn the chamberlains of the entry into the château of a new face, of the visit of a stranger, in order that the camarilla, warned by the particular ring, would have time to place themselves on their guard, and to send the newcomer to the right about if he might become an aid to the master and a danger to the servants. Well! Sulpice did not hear that invisible and secret bell, but he guessed its presence, he divined its presence around him, warning the interested, always ready to chase away the stranger; he felt that its secret thread was everywhere thrown around the powerful, the mighty of four days or a quarter of a century and that, so long as influence existed in the world, there would be courtiers and that these courtiers, eager for a crumb, would prevent the stranger, that is to say, truth, from reaching the light, fearing that this stranger might play the part of the lion and chase the flies away from the honeycomb.

Thus, how much nausea and contempt he felt for that transient power which in spite of himself was rendered useless! A power that placed him at the mercy of the bawling of a colleague or an enemy, and even at the mercy of that all-powerful master so readily dissatisfied: everybody. He had seen, at too close quarters, the vile intrigues, the depressing chafferings, the grinding of that political kitchen in which so many people,--this Warcolier with his voluble rhetoric, this Granet with his conceited smile of superiority,--were hungering to hold the handle of the saucepan. He recalled a remark that Denis Ramel had often repeated to him: "What is the use of putting one's self out in order to bask in the sunshine? The best are in the shade."

He was seized with lawful indignation against his own ambitions, against the lack of energy that prevented him from sweeping away all obstacles,--men, and routine,--and he recalled with afflicting bitterness his entry on public life, in the blaze of divine light, and his dreams, his poor noble dreams! "A great minister! I will be a great minister!"

"Ah! yes, indeed! one is a minister, that is all! And that is enough! It is often too much! We shall see indeed what he will do, that Granet who ought to do so much!"

Vaudrey laughed nervously.

"What he will do? Nothing! Nothing! Still nothing! That is very easy! To do anything, one should be a great man and not a politician captivated with the idea of reaching the summit of power. Ah! _parbleu!_ to be a great man! 'That is the question.'"

He grew very excited over the proud rebellion of his old faith and shattered hopes against the negative success he had obtained. Besides, there was no reason for giving up the struggle. There was a council to be held at the Élysée. He went there, but at this moment of disgust, disgust of everything and himself, this palace like all the rest, seemed to him to be gloomy and mean. An usher in black coat and white cravat, wearing a chain around his neck, wandered up and down the antechamber, according to custom, his shoes covered with the dust from the carpet trodden upon by so many people, either applicants or functionaries. The gaslight burning in broad day as in the offices in London was reflected on the cold walls that shone like marble. Doors ornamented with gilt nails and round, ivory knobs and without locks, were noiselessly swinging to and fro. Wearied office-seekers with tired countenances were spread out upon the garnet-colored velvet chairs, which were like those of a middle-class, furnished house.

From time to time, the tiresome silence was broken by the sound of near or distant electric bells. Vaudrey, who arrived before his colleagues, studiously contemplated the surroundings ironically. An estafette, a gendarme, arrived with a telegram; the usher signed a receipt for it. That was all the life that animated this silent palace. A man with a military air, tall, handsome and in tightly-buttoned frock-coat, passed and saluted the President of the Council; then, Jouvenet, the Prefect of Police, looking like a notary's senior clerk, his abundant black hair plastered on his head, a large, black portfolio under his arm, approached the minister and bowed. Vaudrey, having Lissac in mind, returned his salutation coldly.

"I will speak to you presently, Monsieur le Préfet."

"Good! Monsieur le Ministre!"

In spite of the foot-soldier and the Parisian guard on duty at the door of the palace, all that now seemed to Vaudrey to lack official solemnity, and resembled rather a temporary and melancholy occupation.

"Bah! And if I should never set my foot in this place again," he thought, as he remembered Granet's interpellation, "what would it matter to me?"

He was informed first at the Council and then at the Chamber, that Granet would not introduce his question until the next day. Vaudrey had the desired time to prepare himself. In the Budget Committee, where he met Granet, the _minister of to-morrow_ asked him an inopportune question concerning the expenses of the administration. Vaudrey was angered and felt inclined to treat it as a personal question. It now only remained for his adversaries to begin to suspect him! To appear so was even now too much. Sulpice took Granet up promptly, the latter assured him that "his colleague and friend, the President of the Council," had entirely misconstrued the meaning of his words.

"Well and good!" said Vaudrey.

He was not sorry that the interpellation was not to take place at once. Before to-morrow, he would have placed his batteries. And then he would think of quieting Adrienne, of regaining her, perhaps. On returning to the ministry, he caused some inquiries to be made as to whether Madame were not sick. Madame had gone out. She had gone out as if she were making a pilgrimage to a cemetery, to the apartment in Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, whereon might have been written: _Here lies_. It was like the tomb of her happiness.

She would not see Sulpice again. In the evening, however, she consented to speak to him.

Her poor, gentle face was extremely pale, and as if distorted by some violent pain.

"You will find some excuse," she said, "for announcing that I am ill. I am leaving for Grenoble. I have written to my uncle, the Doctor expects me, and all that now remains to me is a place in his house."

"Adrienne!" murmured Sulpice.

She closed her eyes, for this suppliant voice doubtless caused her a new grief, but neither gesture nor word escaped her. She was like a walking automaton. Even her eyes expressed neither reproach nor anger, they seemed dim.

There was something of death in her aspect.

After a few moments, she said: "I hope that my resolve will not work any prejudice to your political position. In that direction I will still do my duty to the full extent of my strength. But people will not trouble themselves to inquire whether I am at Grenoble or Paris. They trouble themselves very little about me."

By a gesture, he sought to retain her. She had already entered her room, and Vaudrey felt that between this woman and him there stood something like a wall. He had now only to love Marianne.

To love Marianne, ah! yes, the unhappy man, he still loved her. When he thought of Marianne, it was more in wrath, when he thought of Adrienne, it was more in pity; but, certainly, his wife's determination to leave Paris caused him less emotion than the thought that his mistress was to wed Rosas.

That very evening he went to Marianne's.

They told him that Madame was at the theatre. Where? With whom? Neither Jean nor Justine knew.

Vaudrey despised himself for jealously questioning the servants who, when together, would burst with laughter in speaking of him.

"Oh! miserable fool!" he said to himself. "There was only one woman who loved you:--Adrienne!"

Nevertheless, he recalled Marianne in the hours of past love, and the recollection of her kisses and sobs still made his flesh creep. The tawny tints that played in her hair as it strayed unfastened over the pillow, the endearing caresses of her bare arms, he wished to see and feel again. He calculated in his ferocious egotism that Adrienne's wrath would afford him more complete liberty for a time, and that he would have Marianne more to himself, if she were willing.

He had written to Mademoiselle Kayser, but his letter had remained unanswered. He thought that he would go to Mademoiselle Vanda's house the next day, after the Chamber was up. Very late, he added, since the sitting would be prolonged. Long and decisive, as the fate of his ministry was at stake.

Granet's interpellation did not make him unusually uneasy. He had acquainted himself in the morning with a résumé of the journals. Public opinion seemed favorable to the Vaudrey ministry, _except in the case of some insufferable radical organs, and with which he need not in anyway concern himself_, read the report. Vaudrey did not remember that it was in almost these very terms that the daily résumé of the press expressed itself on the eve of Pichereau's fall, to the Minister of the Interior, in speaking of Pichereau's cabinet.

"I shall have a majority of sixty votes," he said to himself. "Everything will be carried--save honor!"

He thought of Adrienne as he thus wished.