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His Excellency the Minister

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Title: His Excellency the Minister

Author: Jules Claretie

Translator: Henri Roberts


        
Release date: May 29, 2005 [eBook #15934]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HIS EXCELLENCY THE MINISTER ***




Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Jonathan Niehof and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.






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

NUMBER 358


THE ROMANCISTS
JULES CLARETIE
HIS EXCELLENCY THE MINISTER


BIBLIOTHÈQUE
DES CHEFS-D'OEUVRE
DU ROMAN
CONTEMPORAIN

_HIS EXCELLENCY
THE MINISTER_

JULES CLARETIE

OF THE ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE


PRINTED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY BY

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

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

THE ETCHINGS ARE BY
EUGENE WALLET
AND DRAWINGS BY
ADRIEN MARIE




TO ALPHONSE DAUDET


My dear friend,

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

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

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

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

Your devoted,

JULES CLARETIE.




PREFACE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_"'Nonsense! Monsieur Vaudrey?'_

_"'Yes, Monsieur Vaudrey--'_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_"'And that is all!'_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Doubtless. But they did not remember him._

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

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

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

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

_Be, then, a Cabinet Minister!_

_JULES CLARETIE._

_Viroflay, September 1, 1886._




HIS EXCELLENCY THE MINISTER

PART FIRST

I


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Thank you, Louis!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It is the new Minister of the Interior!"

"Nonsense! Monsieur Vaudrey?"

"Monsieur Vaudrey."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The licentiates and the pensioners," whispered Vaudrey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Malady of the knee?" inquired Vaudrey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What the devil is that?" asked Molina.

"Let us go and see," said Granet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She held it out towards him timidly.

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

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

"Solomon Molina, 500 francs."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Granet began to laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Realized!" said Vaudrey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guy de Lissac was no longer laughing.

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

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

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

"Here?" said Vaudrey.

"Yes, here!"

"Really?"

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

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

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

Sulpice could not restrain his laughter.

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

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

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

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

Vaudrey drew Lissac away, saying with a suppressed laugh:

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

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

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

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

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


       *       *       *       *       *

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

[Illustration: IN THE GREENROOM OF THE OPERA]




II


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paris is a town of guests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Granet's impatience had upset all her plans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What! you know the minister so intimately?"

"Very intimately."

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

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

"I have guessed it," she exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

Madame Marsy began to laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A reunion?" replied Vaudrey, still smiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sabine asked Vaudrey as he escorted her to her carriage:

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

The Minister bowed a gracious acquiescence.

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

"Good-bye," said Lissac to Vaudrey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"With pleasure!"

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

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

"You have succeeded!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sulpice recognized the writing.

It was from Collard of Nantes.

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

"It is done! Read!"

Adrienne turned pale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Madame Vaudrey?"

"The minister's wife!"

"Charming!"

"Quite young!"

"Somewhat provincial!"

"So much the more attractive!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within a year!




IV


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It is not a borrower, monsieur!"

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

"Show her in!"

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

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

"Good-morning, Guy!"

Lissac went straight toward her with outstretched hands.

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

"You did not expect me, eh?"

"I confess--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marianne shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

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

"Yes, rejuvenated."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marianne Kayser!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She eloped with this man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guy was somewhat surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marianne laughed.

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

"Melancholy, nothing more."

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

"You are making fun of me."

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

Guy could not refrain from smiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And you were sincere?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lissac smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who told you that?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh! that is it?" Guy began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But--?"

"Love--"

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

She extended her small firm hand as rigid as steel.

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

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

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




V


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

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

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

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

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

"Oh! I am not superstitious!"

She beamed with satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Delightful!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It is the minister's wife."

"Madame Vaudrey?"

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

"Ravishingly pretty! Fresh-looking!"

Then in lowered tone:

"Too fresh!"

"Rather provincial!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she looked in her turn.

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

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

Ah! that was Vaudrey?

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

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

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

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

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

"At last! ah! it is he!"

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

"Yes, yes, it is he!"

"He is charming!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Suppose we call for the clôture?"

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

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

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

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

He hastened to offer his arm to Marianne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She smiled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"With the greatest happiness, your Excellency."

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

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

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

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

"By whom?" said Vaudrey.

"Monsieur de Rosas!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Really?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You are still a pessimist, Ramel?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ideal sought was the same, but the temperaments we

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