His Excellency the Minister Part 70

"Do you wish me to tell you? It seems to me that you are walking to the mayor's office on eggs!"

"Be easy," Marianne replied, laughing heartily, "there will be none broken."

The marriage was celebrated. At last! as Kayser said. It was a formality rather than a ceremony. Marianne, ravishingly beautiful, was exultant at realizing her dream. Her pale complexion took on tints of the bloom of the azalea pierced by the rays of the sun. Never had Rosas seen her so lovely. How stupidly he had acted formerly in yielding to appearances and flying from her, instead of telling her that he loved her. He had lost whole years of love that he would never recover, even in the blissful fever of this union. Those joys, formerly disdained, were, alas! never to be restored.

Ah! how he would love her now, adore her and keep her with him as his living delight! They would travel; in three days they would set out for Italy. The baggage already filled the house in the Avenue Montaigne, their nuptial mansion. Marianne would take away all the souvenirs that she had preserved in the grisette's little room at Rue Cuvier, where Rosas had so often seen her and where he had said to her: "I love you!"

"People took their penates," she said, "but I take my fetishes!"

Rosas was wild with joy. The possession of this woman, sought after as mistress, but more intensely ardent than a mistress, with her outbursts of tears and kisses, threw him into ecstasies and possessed him with distracting joy. Something within him whispered, as in the days of early manhood, at the ecstatic hour of sunrise. Already he wished to be on the way to Italy with Marianne, far from the mire and mists of Paris.

"These rain-soaked sidewalks on which the gaslight is reflected seem gloomy to me," he said. "Let us seek the blue skies, Marianne, the orange groves of Nice, the stars of Naples."

She smiled.

"The _blue_ again!" she thought. "They all desire it, then?"

She desired to remain a few days longer in Paris, delighted to proclaim her new name in its streets, its Bois and its theatres, where she had been known in her sadness, displaying her desperate melancholy. It seemed to her that, in her present triumph, she crushed both men and things. What was Naples to her? She had not miserably dragged her disillusions and her angers along the Chiaja. Florence might take her for a d.u.c.h.ess, as well as any other, but Paris, every corner of which was familiar to her, and where every scene had been, as it were, a frame for her follies, her hopes, her failures, her heartbreaks, her deceptions, all her sorrows of an ambitious woman, which had made her the daring woman that she was,--those boulevards, those paths about the Lake, those proscenium boxes at the theatre, she would see them in her triumph, as she had seen them in her untrammelled follies or in the moments of her ruin and abandonment.

"Two days more! One day more," she said. "After the first representation at the Varietes, we will leave, are you willing?"

"Ah! you Parisienne! Hungry Parisienne!" Jose replied.

She looked at him with her gray eyes sparkling, and smiling.

"The Varietes?--Don't you know the old rondel?--The one you hummed when you were sick, you know?--It seems to me that I can hear it yet:

Do you see yonder That white house, Where every Sunday Under the sweet lilacs--"

Uncle Kayser, ever prudent, advised a speedy departure. He feared he scarcely knew what. He feared everything, "like Abner, and feared only that." Every morning he dreaded seeing some indiscreet articles in the papers respecting the Duke and the d.u.c.h.esse de Rosas.

"These journalists disregard, without scruple, the wall of private life!

It is a moral wall, however!"

At last, they would leave in two days, so it was determined. Rosas had wished to see Guy again for the last time. At Rue d'Aumale they informed him that Monsieur de Lissac was travelling. The shutters of the apartment were not, however, closed. The duke had for a moment been tempted to insist on entering; then he withdrew and returned home without a.n.a.lyzing too closely the feeling of annoyance that came over him. The weather was splendid and dry. He returned on foot to Avenue Montaigne, where he expected to find Marianne superintending her trunks.

On entering the house, the doors of which were open, as at the hour of packing and removing, giving the whole house the appearance of neglect and flight, he was astonished to hear a man's voice, which was neither that of Simon Kayser nor that of the valet, and evidently answering in a violent tone the equally evident angry voice of Marianne.

He did not know this voice, and the noise of a bell-rope hastily pulled, in a fit of manifest anger, made him quicken his steps, as if he instinctively felt that the d.u.c.h.ess was in danger.

In the shadow of a dull December evening, the house, with its disordered appearance that resembled a sacking, a.s.sumed a sinister aspect. Jose suddenly felt a sentiment of anguish.

He quickly reached the salon, where Marianne was in a robe de chambre of black satin, and was standing near the chimney with an expression of anger in her eyes, holding the bell-rope, whose iron chain had struck against the wall.

Before her stood a young man with a heavy moustache, his hat tilted over his ear, whom Monsieur de Rosas did not know.

His manner was insolent and he looked thick-set in his black, close-b.u.t.toned frock-coat. His style was vulgar, and, with his hands in his pockets, he appeared both low and threatening.

Marianne rang for a servant. She was flushed with rage. She became livid on seeing Jose.

"What is the matter, then?" asked Rosas coldly, as he stepped between the d.u.c.h.ess and the man.

The man looked at him, took off his hat, and in a loud voice that was itself odoriferous, said:

"You are Monsieur le Duc de Rosas, doubtless?"

"Yes," said Jose, "and may I know--?"

"Nothing! it is nothing!" cried Marianne, running hastily to Jose and taking his hands as if she desired to drag him away.

"How, nothing?" the man then said, as he took a seat, holding his hat in his hand and placing his fist on his left hip, in the att.i.tude of a fencing-master posing for an elegant effect. "To treat a gentleman as you have just treated me; you call that nothing?"

He turned to Rosas and said, as he saluted him with the airs of a _sub.

off._ on the stage:

"Adolphe Gochard! You do not know me, Monsieur le duc?"

"No," said Jose.

"What do you want?--"

"Ah! pardon me," said Gochard, as he interrupted Marianne. "You rang, you wished to have the presence of the servants. You threatened to have me pitched out of the door by the shoulders. Since you have called, they shall hear me."

The servants, hurrying to the spot, now appeared in the indistinct shadow of the doorway.

"Be off!" cried Marianne.

"Why?" asked the duke severely, and astonished.

"Because madame prefers that I should only tell you what I have to say to you," said Gochard. "Ah! you claimed that I wanted to extort blackmail. I, an old brigadier, extort blackmail? Well, so let it be!

Let us sing our little song!"

"Monsieur," said the duke, who had become pallid and whose clenched teeth showed beneath his red beard, "I do not know what Madame la d.u.c.h.esse de Rosas has said to you, or what you have dared to say to her, but you will leave this place instanter!"

"Is that so?" said the man, as he shrugged his shoulders, which were like those of a suburban bully.

"Just so!"

"That would surprise me!" said Gochard. "But, _saperlipopette_, you are not very polite in your set!"

"Not very polite with boors! You are in my house!"

"Oh! you can't teach me where I am!" said the Dujarrier's lover, with a wink of his eye. "But, madame has been perching at my cost for a long time at Rue p.r.o.ny and it is upon my signature, yes, my own signature, if you please, that she has obtained the means of renting the Hotel Vanda.

She has not so much to be impudent about!"

"Your signature?--The Hotel Vanda?"

The duke looked at Marianne, who, as white as a corpse, instead of becoming indignant, entreated and tried to lead her husband away from this man, as if they were in the presence of grave danger.