His Excellency the Minister Part 67

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

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

Madame Gerson laughed on observing Sulpice in the orchestra-stalls.

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

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

"Of course, he did not come!" she said. "I remember what Madame Marsy advised me, one day,--she has pa.s.sed through that in her time: one should think of the invitations to dinner before dismissing a ministry!

Oh! it is tiresome; think of it!--One invites the Secretary of the President of the Council to dinner. He is named on the card. He comes.

It is all over; he is no longer Secretary of the President, the President of the Council is no longer President, there is no longer a President, perhaps not even a Council; one should be certain of one's t.i.tles and rank before accepting an invitation to dinner!"

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

Vaudrey, looking fatigued and abstracted, sat in his stall during the entr'acte. He looked unconsciously about the theatre and still felt surprised at not receiving salutations and bows, as formerly. He felt that he was becoming a waif. Bah! he consoled himself with the thought that the human race is thus constructed: everything is in success, he gets most who offers most. Why then trouble about it?

His eyes followed the movement of his gla.s.s and one after another he saw Madame Marsy, Jouvenet, Madame Gerson, so many living and exceedingly taunting recollections, when suddenly Sulpice trembled, shaken by a keener and almost angry feeling as his glance was directed to a box against the dark-red of which two faces were boldly outlined: those of Rosas and Marianne.

He was excited and unpleasantly piqued.

There before him he saw, between two large pillars, bearing gigantic, gilded masts that seemed to mock at him, the woman whom he had adored and the sight of whom still tore his heart. Pale and dressed in a white gown, she was leaning toward Rosas in a most adorable att.i.tude, with her fair hair half-falling on her white shoulders--those shoulders that he still saw trembling under his kisses, those shoulders on which he might have pressed his burning lips and his teeth.

That livid beauty, strangely adorable, with her hair and ears dazzling with jewels, stood clearly out against the background of the box in which, like an enormous Cyclopean eye, appeared the round, ground gla.s.s let into the door, forming a nimbus of light around Marianne's brow.

Paler than her, with a sickly but smiling countenance, Rosas showed his bloodless, pale, Spanish face beside that of Marianne, as tragic looking as a portrait by Coello. His tired-looking, pensive, thin face was resting on his hand, which through the opera-gla.s.s looked a transparent hand of wax, on which an enormous emerald ring flashed under the gaslight. Monsieur de Rosas did not move.

She, on the contrary, at times inclined toward him, bringing her mouth close to the Castilian's ear, standing out against his reddish beard as if detached therefrom, and she whispered to Rosas words that Vaudrey surmised, and which caused a spark of feverish delight to lighten up Jose's sad eyes. As she leaned back tilting her chair, her satin corsage below the bust was hidden from Sulpice by the edge of the box and he saw only her face, neck and white shoulders, and she seemed to him to be quite naked, the lines of her serpentine body sharply marked by the red line of the velvet border. And with his greedy glance he continued to trace the curves of that exquisite torso, the back that he had pressed, all the being moulded by voluptuousness, that had been his.

This was the vanishing of his last dream! This love gone, this deception driven into his heart like a knife, his last faith mocked at, insulted, and branded with its true name, _folly_, he felt as if a yawning chasm had been opened in him. Life was over! He was old now and he had wasted, yes, wasted his happiness in playing at youth. He had believed himself loved! Loved! Imbecile that he was!

He felt himself urged by a strong temptation to go to that box and open its door and cry out to that man who had not yet given his name to that woman:

"You do not know her! She is debauchery and falsehood itself!"

It seemed to Vaudrey that at times a bearded face, surmounting a white cravat, appeared behind Rosas and Marianne: the haughty face of Uncle Simon.

While the throng of Egyptians filed on the stage, Sulpice endeavored to turn away his thoughts and remove his glances from that group that attracted him. He still, however, looked at it, in spite of himself, and voluntarily wounded his own heart.

Marianne did not seem to have even noticed him.

The curtain fell and he wandered into the wings, less to be there than to escape that irritating sight. In breathing that atmosphere of a theatre, he experienced a strange sensation that pained and consoled him at the same time. The scene-shifters were rolling back the illuminating apparatus pierced with light, and dragged to the rear the huge white sphinxes and the immense canvas on which the palm-trees were outlined upon a blue sky. Sulpice felt the cruelly ironical sensation of finding himself, disheartened and defeated, once more on the very boards where he had entered the first time, smiling, swelling with joy, saluting and saluted and hearing on every side the same murmur, sweet as a May zephyr:

"Monsieur le Ministre."

It was the same scene, the same dress-coats upon the same luminous boards, the same electric rays that fell around him in the hour of his accession, creating the same vulgar aureole. Some firemen crossed the stage slowly and with a wearied expression made their examinations; some water-carriers were sprinkling the parquet, while others were brushing away the dust. And as if these common duties interested Sulpice, he looked on with a vacant expression, as if his thoughts had taken wing.

Suddenly, in the centre of a group, with his hat on, escorted by bending men, whose lips expressed flattery, Sulpice recognized Lucien Granet, who in the dazzling triumph of his new kingdom, crossed and recrossed the stage, distributing here and there patronizing bows.

The coa.r.s.e Molina accompanied the new minister, laughing in a loud tone like the sound of a well-filled cash-box suddenly shaken.

Vaudrey felt just as if he had received a blow full in the chest.

He recalled his own meeting as a successful man with Pichereau the beaten one, on these very boards and almost in the same place, and in order to avoid having to endure the friendly ironical hand-shake that Pichereau was approaching him to give--the hand-shake formerly given to Pichereau--he quickly hid himself behind a wing, receiving as he did so, a blow, accompanied with a: _Pardon, monsieur_, from a workman who was pushing along a piece of scenery, and a: _What a clumsy fellow!_ from a little danseuse, the tip of whose pink slipper he had unwittingly grazed with his heel.

He turned to the danseuse to apologize, when he perceived a young girl, all in pink, whose blue eyes looked frightened and her cheeks reddened when she recognized Vaudrey. It was Marie Launay, whom he had seen in the greenroom the previous year, who had not yet scored a _success_, while he was _retired_.

"Oh! I did not recognize you," she said. "I beg your pardon, Monsieur le Ministre!"

He wished to make some reply; but this t.i.tle used by the young girl, ignorant of the political change, grated on his heart like the scratching of a nail and he saw on the other side of the stage, reaching the house by the communicating door, Lucien Granet, surrounded by his staff, and followed by the eternal cortege of powerful ones, among whom Warcolier was talking loudly, and Molina the Tumbler was recognizable by his enormous paunch and loud laugh.

"Perhaps Madame Marsy has asked that this Granet be presented to her,"

thought Vaudrey as he mockingly recalled how Guy de Lissac ran after him there in order to conduct him to the fashionable woman's box.

How long it was since then!

Sabine Marsy was dethroned. And he!--

He felt a friendly tap on the shoulder as he was moving away, and turning around he saw Warcolier who, having seen him in the distance, doubtless came to him to enjoy the simple pleasure of treating him patronizingly, he who had so long called him _Monsieur le Ministre_.

"Well, my dear Vaudrey, what is the news?" said Warcolier, bearing his head high and smiling with a silly, but an aggressively benign expression, with the superior tone of satisfied fools.

"Nothing!" said Sulpice. "I think Verdi's music is superb!"

"Oh! a little Wagnerian," Warcolier replied, repeating what he had heard. "But what of politics?"

"Ah! politics concerns you now!"

"Well! why," Warcolier replied, "that goes on well. There is a little relaxation! a ministry more--more--"

"More h.o.m.ogeneous!" said Vaudrey, in a slightly mocking tone.

"Exactly. And, after all, the duty of every good citizen is to defend the government under which we live."

Ah! a.s.suredly, Vaudrey considered that his former Secretary of State, now become the va.s.sal of Granet, displayed a rather ridiculous a.s.surance. He smiled as if he would have laughed in his face and turned his back upon him.

Warcolier was not annoyed, for he felt certain that he had angered the former minister, and he was delighted. It was a kick from an a.s.s. The witticism of a fool.

Vaudrey regained his place, much dissatisfied at having come and furious at this pretentious imbecile, when, on leaving the wings, he ran against Lissac who was entering a sort of hall where Louis sat writing the names of the entrances on the sheet.

Guy flushed slightly on seeing him.

"In order to see you, one has to meet you here," said Sulpice. "Why have you not called on me? Is it because I am no longer a minister?"

"That would be a reason for seeing me more frequently," said Lissac.

"But it is not that. What do you want me to tell you? You know my sentiments. I don't care to become a bore, as it is called, or a ceaseless prater of morality, which is the same thing. Besides, morality to me is something like the Montyon prize to a harlot! Then, too, I am keeping in my corner and I shall stick to it hereafter closer than ever.

I have put the brake on. I am getting old, and I shall bury myself in some suburb and look after my rheumatism."

In Lissac's tone there was an unexpected melancholy.

"Then you will not call on me again?"