His Excellency the Minister Part 11

"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 G.o.d! 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, n.o.body, n.o.body, 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 n.o.ble 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 soiree. 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 Felicien 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?"