Chapter 30

That very evening Adrienne was to leave. He endeavored to dissuade her from her plan. She did not even reply to him. She stood looking at a crystal vase on the chimney-piece in which were some winter roses, Christmas roses, fresh and milk-white, that had been sent as a souvenir from yonder Dauphiny. Her glance rested fixedly on that fair bouquet that seemed like a bursting cloud of whiteness.

"Then," said Vaudrey, "it is settled--quite settled--you are going?"

"I am."

"In three hours?"

"In three hours!"

"I know where those roses were gathered," said Sulpice tenderly. "It was at the foot of the window where we leaned elbow to elbow and dreamed."

"Yes," Adrienne answered, in a broken voice whose sound was like that which might have been given out by the vase had it been struck and shattered. "We had lovely dreams! The reality has indeed belied them!"

"Adrienne!" he murmured.

She made no reply.

He tried to approach her, feeling ashamed as he thought that he had similarly wished to approach Marianne.

She instinctively drew back.

"You remember," she said coldly, "that one day when we were speaking about divorce, I told you that there was a very simple way of divorce? It was never to see each other again, never, to be nothing more to each other from the day on which confidence should die?--You have deceived me, it is done. I am a stranger to you! If I were a mother, I should have duties to fulfil. I would not have failed therein. I would have endured everything for a son!--Nothing is left to me. I have not even the joy of caressing a child that would have consoled me. I am your widow while you yet live. Well, be it so. You have willed it, there, then, is divorce!"

For the third time since Adrienne had learned everything, he tried to stammer the word _pardon_. He felt it was useless. This sensitive being had withdrawn within herself and wrapped herself, as with a cloak, in all her outraged chastity. He could only humiliate himself without softening her. All Adrienne's deceived trustfulness and insulted love strengthened her in her determination never to forgive.

She would go.

Vaudrey in despair returned to his study, where the books that had been sent from the ministry were piled upon the carpet in all the confusion attending an entry into occupation. The servant at once brought him his lamp and handed him a package of cards in envelopes,--cards of condolence as for a death--and a large card, saying: "That gentleman is here!"

"Molina!" said Vaudrey, becoming very pale. "Show him in!"

The fat Salomon entered puffing and smiling, and spread himself out on an armchair as he said to the former minister:

"Well, how goes it?--Not too badly crushed, eh?--Bah! what is it after all to quit office?--Only a means for returning to it, sometimes!"

"All the same," he said with his cackling laugh that sounded like the jingling of a money-bag, "there are too many changes of ministers! They change them like shirts! It puts me out. I get used to one Excellency and he is put aside! So it is settled, henceforth I will not say Excellency save to the usher or an office-boy!"

He accompanied his clumsy jests with a loud laugh, then, changing his tone:

"Come, that is not all. I came to speak of business to you."

He looked Vaudrey full in the face with his piercing glance, took from his pocketbook a printed sheet and said in a precise tone:

"Here is an opportunity where your title of former minister will serve you better than that of minister. So much is being said of Algeria, its mines and its fibre. Well, read that!"

Vaudrey took the paper. It was the prospectus, very skilfully drawn, of a company established to introduce gas into Algeria, almost as far as the Sahara. They promised the subscribers wonders and miracles: acres upon acres of land as a bonus. There was a fortune to be made. Meantime, they would issue six thousand shares of five hundred francs. It was three millions they were asking from the public. A mere trifle.

"They might ask ten," said Molina, smiling. "They would give it!"

"And you wish me to subscribe to your Algerian gas?" asked Vaudrey.

The fat Molina burst out into loud laughter this time.

"I? I simply wish to give you the opportunity to make a fortune!"

"How?"

"That is one scheme. I will bring you four, five, ten of them! I have another, the Luxemburg coal. A deposit equal to that of Charleroi. You have only to allow me to print in the list of directors: Monsieur Sulpice Vaudrey, former President of the Council."

Vaudrey looked the fat man squarely in the face.

"Besides you will be in good company!" said the banker as he read over the names of deputies, senators, statesmen, coupled with those of financiers.

Sulpice knew most of them.

He despised nearly all of them. It was such that Molina styled _good company!_

"And those mines, are you certain they will produce what you promise?"

"Ah!" said Salomon, "that is the engineers' matter! Here is the report of a mining engineer who is perhaps straining after effect and doing a little puffing up! But one must go with the times! He who ventures nothing, has nothing. In war, one risks one's skin; in business, one risks one's money. That is war."

Vaudrey debated with himself whether he should tear the prospectus in pieces and throw them in the face of the fat man.

"My dear Vaudrey," said the _Tumbler_, "you have a vein that is entirely your own. A former minister remains always a former minister. Well, such a title as that is turned to account. It is quoted, like any other commodity. You are not rich, that fact proves your honesty, although in America, and we are Americanizing ourselves devilishly much, that would only be the measure of your stupidity. You can become rich, I have the means of making myself agreeable to you and you have the opportunity of becoming useful to us."

"In a word, you buy my name?"

"I hire it from you! Very dearly," said Molina, still laughing.

"Certainly," said Vaudrey, "you did not understand me on the first occasion that you called on me to speak about money, and when I questioned with myself whether I should ask you not to call again."

Molina interrupted him abruptly by rising. He felt that an insult was about to be uttered. He parried it by anticipating it.

"Stupidity!" he said. "Here is the prospectus. There are the names of the directors. You will consider. It has never injured any one to take advantage of his position. The puritans, in an age of trickery, are idiots; I say so. What I propose to you surprises you. To place your name beside that of Monsieur Pichereau or Monsieur Numa de Baranville! It is as simple as saying good-day. Perhaps you think then that you will be the only one? They all do it, all those who are extravagant and shrewd. It is a matter of coquetting in these days over a hundred-sou piece! Come, I will wager that Monsieur Montyon would not mince matters--especially if he had transferable paper in circulation!"

"You know that?" said Vaudrey, turning pale.

"Ah! I know many others in like condition! Come, no false modesty! It is a matter of business only! I tell you again, I have many other cases. All this is in order to have the pleasure of offering you certificates for attendance fees. I will open a credit for you of two hundred thousand francs, if you wish. We will arrange matters afterwards."

"I will leave you these declarations of faith!" added Molina, showing the prospectus of the gas undertaking. "Fear nothing! It is not more untruthful than the others! It is unnecessary to show me out. _A la revista!_"

He disappeared abruptly, Vaudrey hearing the floor of the hall creak under this man's hippopotamus feet, and the unhappy Sulpice who had spun so many, such glorious and grand dreams, dreams of liberty, freedom and virtue, civic regeneration, reconstructed national morals and character, the sacredness of the hearth and the education of the conscience; this Vaudrey, bruised by life, overthrown by his vices, was there under the soft light of his lamp, looking with staring eye, as a being who wishes to die contemplates the edge of an abyss, looking at that printed paper soliciting subscriptions, beating the big drum of the _promoter_ in order to entrap the vast and ever-credulous horde.

His name! To put his name there! The name of Vaudrey that he had dreamed of reading at the foot of so many noble, eternal and reforming laws, to inscribe it upon that paper beneath so many cunning names, jugglers, habitual drainers of the public cash-box. To fall to that! To do that!

To lend himself?

To sell himself!

And why not sell himself? Who would discharge this bill of exchange? The Gochard paper! The debt of the past! The price of the nights spent with Marianne! The hundred thousand francs for that girl's kisses!

Sulpice felt in the weakness increased by a growing fever, that his self-possession was leaving him. All his ideas clashed confusedly. Amid the chaos, only one clear idea remained; a hundred and sixty thousand francs had to be found. Where were they to be found? Yes, where? Through Molina, who offered him two hundred thousand! This open credit seemed to him like an opened-up placer in which he had only to dig with his nails. The cunning and thick voice of the Hebrew banker echoed in Sulpice's ears: "They all do it!" It was not so difficult to give his name, or to _hire_ it, as Salomon said. Who the devil would notice it at a time when indifference passes over scandals as the sea covers the putrid substances on the shore and washes them with its very scum?

"They all do it!"

No, despite the irony of the handler of money, there are some consciences that refuse to yield: and then, what then?--Vaudrey had desired virtue of a different kind and other morals! Ah! how he had suffered the poison to penetrate him; even to his bones! How Marianne had deformed and moulded him at her fancy, and he still thought of her only with unsatisfied longings for her kisses and ardor! Ah! women! Woman! Yes, indeed, yes, woman was the great source of moral weakness and inactivity. She used politics in her own way, in destroying politicians. If he had only left office with head erect and not dragging the chain-shot of debt! But that bill of exchange! Who would pay that?

"Eh! Molina, _parbleu!_ Molina! Molina!"

He was right, too, that triumphant Jew with his insolent good humor. It is an absurd thing, after all, to be prudish and to thrust away the dish that is offered you. To be rich is, in fact, quite as good as to be powerful! Money remains! That is the only real thing in the world! It would be a fine sight to see a man refuse the opportunity to make a fortune, and to refuse it--why? For a silly, conscientious scruple. And after all, business was the very life of modern society. This Molina, circulating his money, was as useful as many others who circulate ideas.

"His Algerian gas is a work of civilization just like any other!"

Urged by the necessity of escaping from that debt that strangled him like a running noose, Sulpice gradually arrived at argumentative sophistries, which were but capitulations to his own probity, cowardly arrangements with his own conscience. His name? Well, he would turn it into money since it was worth a gold ingot! The journalist who sells his thought, the artist who sells his marble, the writer who sells his experiences and his recollections, equally sell their names and for money, the flesh of their flesh. Like a living answer and a remorse, he saw the lean face and white moustache of Ramel, who was seated at the window, breathing the warm rays of the sun, in the little room on Rue Boursault, but he answered, speaking aloud:

"Well, what?--Ramel is a saint, a hero!--But I am no saint. I am a man and I will live!"

Somewhat angered, he took the prospectus that Molina had left him and rereading it again and again, he relapsed into a sitting posture and with haggard eyes scanned the loud-swelling lines of that commercial announcement, seeking therein some pretext for accepting. For he would accept, that was done. Nothing more was to be said, his conscience yielded. He was inclined to laugh.

"Still another victim caught and floored by Molina the _Tumbler!_"

He remained there, terrified at the prospect of the quasi-association he had determined on and by his complicity with a jobber of questionable business.

With his eye fixed upon this solicitation for capital, wherein were the words which would formerly have repelled him: _joint stock company_, _capital stock_, _public subscription_, _subscription certificate_, and at the head of which he was about to inscribe his name as one of the directors, at the foot of a capitulation, as it were, Sulpice had not seen, standing in the doorway of his half-lighted study, a woman in travelling costume, who stopped for a moment to look at the unfortunate, dejected man within the shade of the lamp which made him look more bald than he was, then advanced gently toward him, coughing slightly--for she did not dare to call him by his name or touch him with her gloved hand--to warn him that she was there.

Vaudrey turned round abruptly, instinctively pushing aside Molina's prospectus, as if he already felt some shame in holding it in his hands.

He flushed as he recognized Adrienne.

The young woman's reserved attitude showed absolute firmness. She came to say adieu, she was about to leave.

He had not even the energy to keep her. He was afraid of an unbending reply that would have been an outrage.

"Do you intend to become associated with Molina?" Adrienne asked in a clear voice, as she looked at Sulpice, who had risen.

"What! Molina?" he stammered.

"Yes, oh! he understands business. On leaving, he called on me. He thought that I had still sufficient influence over you to urge you, as he says, to make your fortune. He told me that you were in want of money, and after having been sharp enough to try the husband, he offered me, as you might give a commission to a courtesan, I do not know what emerald ornament, if I would advise you to accept his proposals!--That gentleman does not know the people with whom he is dealing!"

"Wretch!" said Vaudrey. "He did that?"

"And I thanked him," Adrienne replied calmly. "I did not know that you had debts and that, in order to pay them, you had come so near accepting the patronage of such a man. He told me so and he rendered me and you a service."

"Me?"

Vaudrey snatched up the prospectus of the Algerian gas and angrily tore it in pieces.

"We shall probably not see each other again," said Adrienne, in a firm voice that contrasted strangely with her gentle grace; "but I shall never forget that I bear your name and that being mine, I will ever honor it."

She handed Sulpice a document.

"Here is a power of attorney to Monsieur Beauvais, my notary. All that you need of my dowry to free yourself from liabilities is yours. I do not wish to know why you have incurred debts, I am anxious only to know that you have paid them, and my signature provides you with the means to do so."

Dejected, his heart burning, and his sobs rising, Sulpice uttered a loud cry as he rushed toward her:

"Adrienne!"

She withdrew her hand slowly while he was trying to seize it.

"You have nothing to thank me for," she said. "I am a partner, saving, as I best can, the honor of the house. That association is better than Molina's."

"Adieu," she added bitterly.

"Are you going--? Going away?" asked Sulpice, trying to give to his entreaty something like an echo of the love of the former days.

"Whose fault is it?" replied the young woman, in a voice as chilly as steel.

She was no longer the Adrienne of old, the little timid provincial with blushing cheek and trembling gesture. Sorrow, the most terrible of disillusions, had hardened and, as it were, petrified her. Vaudrey felt that to ask forgiveness would be in vain. Time only could soften that poor woman, obstinately unbending in her grief. He needed but to observe her attitude and cutting tones to fully realize that.

"It is quite understood," she continued, treating this question of her happiness as if she were cutting deep into her flesh and severing the tenderest fibres of her being, but without trembling,--"it is quite understood, is it not, that we shall make no scene or scandal? We are separated neither judicially nor even in appearance. We live apart by mutual consent, far from each other, without anything being known by outsiders of this definitive rupture."

"Adrienne!" Sulpice repeated, "it is impossible, you will not leave!"

"Oh!" she said. "I gave myself and I have taken myself back. Your entreaties will not now alter my determination. I am eager to leave Paris. It seems to me that I have regained myself and that I escape from falsity, lies, and infamy, and from a swarm of insects that crawl over my body!--I bid you farewell, and farewell it is!"

"Well, let it be so!" exclaimed Vaudrey. "Go! But if it is a stranger who leaves me, I will accept nothing from her. Here is the authority. Will you take it back?"

"I? No, I will not take it back! If you desire me to be worthy of the name that you have given me, keep it honored, at least, in the sight of the world, since to betray a woman, to mock and insult her, is not dishonoring. I alone have the right to save you from shame. Do not deny me the privilege that I claim. I do not desire that the man who has been my husband should descend to the questionable intrigues of a Molina. You have outraged me enough, do not impose this last insult on me!"

"For the last time, adieu!"

She went out, and he allowed her to disappear, overwhelmed by this living mourning of a faith. She fled and he allowed her to descend the stairway, followed by her femme de chambre. She entered the carriage that was waiting for her below, in Rue Chaussée-d'Antin, but he had not the courage, hopeless as he was, to follow the carriage whose rumbling he heard above the noise of the street as it rolled away more quickly and more heavily than the others, and it seemed to him that its wheels had crushed his bosom.

"Ah! what a wretch I have been!" he said as he struck his knee with his closed fist. "How unhappy I am! Adrienne!"

He rose abruptly, as if moved by a spring, and bounded toward a window which he threw wide open to admit the cold wind of this November evening, and tried to distinguish among the many carriages that rolled through the brownish mud, with their lighted lamps shining like so many eyes, to discover, to imagine the carriage that was bearing Adrienne away. He believed that he recognized it in a vehicle that was threading its way, loaded with trunks, almost out of sight yonder.

He leaned upon the window-sill, and like a shipwrecked sailor who sees a receding ship, he called out, with a loud cry lost in the tempest of that bustling and busy street:

"Adrienne! Adrienne!"

No reply! The carriage had disappeared in the distance, in the fog.

For a moment, Sulpice remained there crushed but drawn by the noise of the street, as if by some whirlpool in the deep sea. Had he been thrown out and been dashed upon the pavements, he would have been happy. Only a void seemed about him, and before him that black hollow in which moved confusedly only strangers who in no way formed part of his life.

This isolation terrified him. At last, he went downstairs in haste, threw himself into a carriage and had himself driven to the railway, intending to see Adrienne again.

"Quickly! quickly! at your best speed!"

The driver whipped up his horses and the carriage-windows clattered with the noise of old iron.

Vaudrey arrived too late. The train had left twenty minutes before. He had reflected too long at his window.

"Besides," he said to himself sadly, "she would not have forgiven me! She will never forget!"

Buried in the corner of the coach that took her away, and closing her eyes, recalling all her past life, so cruelly ironical to-day, Adrienne, disturbed by the noise and rolling of the train that increased her feverish condition, felt her heart swell, and poor, broken creature that she was, called all her strength to her aid to refrain from weeping, from crying out in her grief. She was taking away, back to the country, the half-withered Christmas roses received from Grenoble, and in the morbid confusion of the ideas that clashed in her poor brain, she saw once more Lissac's blanched face and heard Guy tell her again: "It is because you are a virtuous woman that I love you!"

"A virtuous woman! Does he know how to love as well as the others?" she murmured, as she thought of Vaudrey whom she would never see again, and whom she no longer loved.

"See! I am a widow now, and a widow who will never love anyone, and who will never marry again."

VIII

Alone in Paris now, a body without a soul, distracted, and the prey of ennui, with sad and bitter regret for his wasted life, repeating to himself that Adrienne, far away from him, would never forgive, and was doubtless, at this moment, saying and saying again to herself in her solitude at Grenoble, that these politicians, at least, owed her divorce, Vaudrey, not knowing what to do after a weary day of troubled rest, mechanically entered the Opéra House to distract his eyes if not his mind.

They were rendering _Aida_ that evening, and a débutante had been announced as a star.

Sulpice Vaudrey, since Adrienne's departure,--already two weeks!--had wandered about Paris like a damned soul when he did not attend the Chamber, where he experienced the discomforts and the weakness of a fallen man. Weary, disgusted and melancholy, Vaudrey took his seat in the theatre to kill an evening.

There was what was called in the language of a Paris editor, a _swell house_. In front of the stage there was literally a shower of diamonds and the boxes were gaily adorned. The _fauteuils_ were occupied by Parisian glories and foreign celebrities. Not a stall in the amphitheatre without its _celebrity_. Chance had placed in this All-Paris gathering, Madame Sabine Marsy and Madame Gerson, the two friends who detested each other. The pretty little Madame Gerson occupied and filled with her prattle, the box of the Prefect of Police--No. 30, in which Monsieur Jouvenet showed his churchwarden's profile. She was talking aloud about her salon, her receptions, her acquaintances. She was eclipsing Madame Marsy with her triumphs. At the back of the box, Monsieur Gerson was sleeping, overcome by fatigue. Madame Gerson laughed on observing Sulpice in the orchestra-stalls.

"See! there is Monsieur Vaudrey! He still looks a little _beaten!_" she said.

And she told her friends, crowded in the box, leaning over her and looking at the pretty, plump bosom of this little, well-made brunette, how Vaudrey was to dine at her house on the very evening when he fell from power.

"Of course, he did not come!" she said. "I remember what Madame Marsy advised me, one day,--she has passed through that in her time: one should think of the invitations to dinner before dismissing a ministry! Oh! it is tiresome; think of it!--One invites the Secretary of the President of the Council to dinner. He is named on the card. He comes. It is all over; he is no longer Secretary of the President, the President of the Council is no longer President, there is no longer a President, perhaps not even a Council; one should be certain of one's titles and rank before accepting an invitation to dinner!"

She laughed heartily and loud, and Madame Marsy, who was half dethroned, fanned herself nervously in her box, or levelled her glass at some one in the audience, affecting a little disdainful manner toward her fair neighbor. A friendship turned to acid.