His Excellency the Minister Part 30

With brazen front, Kayser's niece struck her bosom, looking at the same time at the reflection of her fine bust and pale face in the mirror.

The next day she went straight to the former danseuse's.

Claire Dujarrier lived in that long Rue La Fontaine at Auteuil which partook of the characteristics of a suburban main street and a provincial faubourg, with its summer villas, its little cottages enclosed within gloomy little gardens, railed-off flower-beds, boarding-schools for young people, and elbowing each other as in some village pa.s.sage, the butcher's store, the pharmacy, the wine-dealer's shop, the baker's establishment,--a kind of little summer resort with a forlorn look in February, the kiosks and cottages half decayed, the gardens full of faded, dreary-looking leaves. Marianne looked about, seeking the little Claire house. She had visited it formerly. A policeman wandered along sadly,--as if to remind one of the town,--and on one side, a gardener pa.s.sed scuffling his wooden shoes, as if to recall the village.

However, here it was that the formerly celebrated girl, who awoke storms of applause when she danced beside Cerrito at the Opera, now lived buried in silence,--a cab going to the Villa Montmorency seemed an event in her eyes,--forgotten, her windows shut, and as a diversion looking through the shutters at the high chimneys of some factory in the neighboring Rue Gras that belched forth their ruddy or bluish fumes, or yellow like sulphuric acid, or again red like the reflection of fire.

Marianne rang several times when she arrived at the garden railing of the little house. The bells sounded as if they were coated with rust. An ancient maid-servant, astonished and morose, came to open the door.

She conducted the young woman into the salon where Claire Dujarrier sat alone, eating cakes, with her terrier on her lap.

The dog almost leaped at Marianne's throat while Claire, rising, threw herself on her neck.

"Ah! dear little one!--How pleased I am! What chance brings you?"

Marianne looked at the Dujarrier. She might still be called almost lovely, although she was a little painted and her eyes were swollen, and her cheeks withered; but she knew so perfectly well all the secrets for rejuvenating, the eyebrow preparation, the l.a.b.i.al wash, that she was a walking pharmaceutical painting done on finely sculptured features. The statue, although burdened with fat, was still superb.

She listened to Marianne, smiled, frowned and, love-broker and advisory courtesan that she was, ended by saying to the "little one" that she had a devilish good chance and that she had arrived like March in Lent.

"It is true, it has purposely happened. Vanda, you know her well?"

"No!" answered Marianne.

"What! Vanda, whom that big viper Guy called the Walking Rain?"

"I do not remember--"

"Well! Vanda has gone to Russia, she left a month ago. She will be there all the winter and summer, and part of next winter. Her _general_ requires her. He is appointed to keep an eye on the Nihilists. So she wishes to rent her house in Rue p.r.o.ny. That is very natural. A charming house. Very _chic_. In admirable taste. You have the chance. And not dear."

"Too dear for me, who have nothing!"

"Little silly! You have yourself," said Claire Dujarrier. "Then you have me, I have always liked you. I will lend you the ready cash to set yourself up, you can give me bills of exchange, little doc.u.ments that your minister--pest! you are going on well, you are, ministers!--that His Excellency will endorse. Vanda will not expect anything after the first quarter. Provided that her house is well-rented to someone who does not spoil it, she will be satisfied. If she should claim all, why, at a pinch I can make up the amount. But, my dear,"--and the old woman lowered her voice,--"on no account say anything to Adolphe."

"Adolphe?"

"Yes, my _husband_. You do not know him?"

She took from the table a photograph enclosed in a photograph-case of sky-blue plush, in which Marianne recognized a swaggering fellow with flat face, large hands, fierce, bushy moustache, who leaned on a cane, swelling out his huge chest in outline against a mean, gray-tinted garden ornamented with Medicis vases.

"A handsome fellow, isn't he? Quite young!--and he loves me--I adore him, too!"

The tumid eyes of Claire Dujarrier resembled lighted coals. She pressed kiss after kiss of her painted lips on the photograph and reverently laid it on the table.

Marianne almost pitied this half-senile love, the courtesan's terrifying, last love.

She was, however, too content either to trouble herself, or even to reflect upon it. She was wild with joy. It seemed to her that a sudden rift had opened before her and a gloriously sunny future pictured itself to her mind. What an inspiration it was to think of Claire Dujarrier!

She would sign everything she wished, acknowledge the sums lent, with any interest that might be demanded. Much she cared about that, indeed!--She was sure now to free herself and to _succeed_.

"You are jolly right," said the ancient danseuse. "The nest is entirely at the birds' disposal. Your minister--I don't ask his name, but I shall learn it by the bills of exchange--would treat you as a grisette if he found you at your uncle's. Whereas at Vanda's--ah! at Vanda's! you will have news to tell me. So, see this is all that is necessary. I will write to Vanda that her house is rented, and well rented. Kiss me and skip! I hear Adolphe coming. He does not care to see new faces. And then, yours is too pretty!" she added, with a peculiar significance.

She got the old servant to show Marianne out promptly, as if she felt fearful lest her _husband_ should see the pretty creature. Claire Dujarrier was certainly jealous.

"It is not I that would rob her of her porter!" Marianne thought, as she walked away from Rue La Fontaine.

Evening was now darkening the gray streets. A faint bluish mist was rising over the river and spreading like breath over the quays. Marianne saw Paris in the distance, and her visit seemed like a dream to her; she closed her eyes, and a voice within her whispered confusedly the names of Rosas, Vaudrey, Vanda, Rue p.r.o.ny; she pictured herself stretched at length on a reclining chair in the luxurious house of a courtesan, and she saw at her feet that man--a minister--who supplicatingly besought her favor, while in the distance a man who resembled Rosas was travelling, moving away, disappearing--

"Nonsense!" the superst.i.tious creature said to herself, "it was one or the other! The duke or the minister! I have not made the choice."

Then looking at the confused image of herself thrown on the window of the cab, she threw a kiss at her own pale reflection, happy with the unbounded joy of a child, and cried aloud while laughing heartily:

"Bonjour, Vanda! I greet you, Mademoiselle Vanda."

PART SECOND

I

The Monceau plain is the quarter of changed fortunes and dice-throwing.

An entire town given over to luxury, born in a single night, suddenly sprung into existence. The unpremeditated offspring of the aggregation of millions. Instead of the cobbler's stall, the red-bedaubed shop of the dealer in wines, the nakedness of an outer boulevard, here in this spot of earth all styles flourish: the contrast of fancy, the chateau throwing the English cottage in the shade; the Louis XIII. dwelling hobn.o.bbing with the Flemish house; the salamander of Francis I. hugging the bourgeois tenement; the Gothic gateway opening for the entry of the carriages of the courtesan. A town within a town. Something novel, white, extravagant, overdone: the colossal in proximity to the attractive, the vastness of a grand American hotel casting its shadow over an Italian loggia. It partook at once of the Parisian and the Yankee. The Chateau de Chambord sheltering a chocolate maker, and the studio of an artist now become the salon of a rich curbstone broker.

The little Hotel de Vanda,--_one of our charming fugitives_, as those of the chroniclers who still remember Vanda, say of her in their articles sometimes--is an elegant establishment, severe in external appearance, but of entirely modern interior arrangements, with a wealth of choice knickknacks, and is regarded as one of the most attractive houses in Rue p.r.o.ny. Since the flight of the pretty courtesan, it bears the sad notice: _Residence to let_. Its fast closed shutters give it the gloomy appearance of a deserted boudoir. Complete silence succeeds feverish bustle! Vanda was a boisterous, madcap spendthrift. Through the old windows with their old-fashioned panes there often used to escape s.n.a.t.c.hes of song, airs of waltzes, fragments of quadrilles. Vanda's horses pawed the ground spiritedly as they started at the fashionable hour for the Bois, through the great gateway leading to the stables. And now, for months, a corner of Rue p.r.o.ny had been silent and drowsy, and weighted with the melancholy that surrounds forsaken objects.

It was here that Marianne, in carrying out her determination, entered with a high head, resolved to cast off her sombre misery or to sink, her plans defeated. The Dujarrier had greatly a.s.sisted her in taking up her abode, building her hopes on Mademoiselle Kayser's beauty as on some temporary profitable investment. As the old woman looked at her, she shook her head. Marianne had to be quick. She was pale, already weary, and her beauty, heightened by this weariness, was "in full blast," as the former bungling artiste said in her capacity of a connoisseur.

"After all," Dujarrier said to herself, "it is the favorable moment for success. One does not become a _general_ except through seniority."

Marianne also experienced the same feelings as the Dujarrier. She realized that she had reached the turning-point of her life, it was like a game of baccarat that she was playing with fate. She might come out of it rich and preserved from the possibility of dying in a hospital or a hovel after having dragged her tattered skirts through the streets, or overwhelmed with debts, ruined forever, strangled by liabilities. This commercial term made her smile ironically when she thought of it.

Against her she had her past, her adventurous life, almost the life of a courtesan, carried away by the current of her amorous whims; it now needed only the burden of liabilities for her to become not only completely discla.s.sed, but ruined by Parisian life. She had given the Dujarrier receipts for all that that quasi-silent-partner had advanced her, the old lady excusing herself for the precaution she took by saying precisely:

"In that way one can hold people. Grateful acknowledgments are good; written acknowledgments are better!"

The Dujarrier considered herself witty.

Marianne had signed, moreover, all that the other had asked. She still needed, indeed, to make further outlay. And what mattered it if she plunged deeper while she was _taking a dive_, as she expressed it in her language, which was a mixture of street slang and the elegant phraseology of the salon.

"Bah! I know how to swim."

She suddenly straightened herself under this anxiety, rea.s.sured, moreover, and spurred on as she was by the Dujarrier herself, who said as she shrugged her shoulders:

"When a woman like you has a man like Vaudrey,--a minister,--she has her nest lined."

Sulpice was not the man long to resist so refined a Parisienne as Marianne. In him, the repressed ardors, the poetic ideas of a man of twenty, had become the appet.i.tes of a man of forty. This provincial, hungry for Parisianism,--very young in feelings and soul,--felt, as soon as he found himself in Marianne's company, mad with desire for a new life. The dazzling honors attending his entry into the ministry found their culmination in the burning glance of Marianne, as their eyes met.