His Excellency the Minister Part 35

Yes, this immense gilded dwelling with its Gobelins tapestries stifled her with its terrifying gloom, where nothing, not a single article, recalled her charming provincial home, her Gren.o.ble house with its garden filled with lilacs where she was often wont to read while Sulpice worked upstairs, bent over his table crowded with papers, before his open window. Ah! those cherished rooms, in the humble corner of the provincial home, their happy crouching in the peaceful nest; aye, even the happy first days in Paris, in the Chaussee-d'Antin apartments, in which Adrienne at least felt herself in her own home, free in her actions and thoughts, and where she could talk aloud without feeling that an eye was constantly watching her, and ears were always strained, in fact, a perpetual espionage upon all her actions and a criticism of all her words.

She had reached a point when she asked herself if, even for Sulpice, happiness was not far removed from this life of slavery, of feverish politics, which for some time past had been visibly paling his cheeks and rendering him nervous and altogether different from of old.

"If you did not love me so much," she said with a sweet smile, "I could believe that you loved me no longer."

"What folly! you have only one rival, Adrienne."

"Ah! I know that very well, but that robs me of everything. It is politics. Come! be great, and I shall be happy or resigned, as you wish.

I adore you so much! I would give you my life, so I would gladly give you my days of weariness!"

Although she was rich, she strove to introduce into her official surroundings the bourgeois and provincial orderly methods that she had been so virtuously taught. She found that her desserts vanished with frightful rapidity, that dishes scarcely touched and bottles whose contents had only been tasted, were removed to the kitchen. She commented thereon, but the somewhat contemptuous smile of her domestics was her only reply and it made her feel ashamed.

Vaudrey's predecessor, Monsieur Pichereau, was exacting, _close-fisted_. His table was meagre but there was nothing astonis.h.i.+ng in that, Monsieur Pichereau had a delicate stomach. Well and good, but the predecessors of Monsieur Pichereau, they had given fetes, they had!

It is true that one was a count and the other a marquis. One can always tell a gentleman anywhere.

One evening, they heard one of the domestics of the ministry say to another:

"As if it were not our money that the ministers spend! It is the electors' money. They give us wages: we give them salaries. There it is!"

The domestic was discharged immediately, but these remarks, however, recurred to Adrienne's memory and filled her with dislike for the flunkeyism that surrounded her, waiting on her with cold civility, but without any attachment, like hotel waiters or girls at an inn that one will leave the next day, giving them a gratuity.

Vaudrey saw much less of these daily little wounds. He lived in an atmosphere of constant flattery, favor-begging cloaked under complimentary phrases. Had he leisure, he would have been able to calculate with mathematical exact.i.tude how many angles the human form would describe in the process of bowing and sc.r.a.ping. In his department, everybody asked for something or got someone else to ask. _Promotion_, that insatiable hunger, was the greedy dream of all that little world of intriguing, underhand, begging employes, who opened up around the new minister so many approaches, like military lines around a redoubt.

Sulpice felt himself besieged and the target for a crowd of greedy ambitions. The sub-heads of departments cast bitterly envious glances at the offices of chiefs, like hungry beggars hypnotized by the display at Chevet's. Commendatory letters rained on him. This shower of begging-missives nauseated the minister to such an extent that he endeavored to arrest the stream, ordering Warcolier, the Under Secretary of State, to be called and requesting him to reply to the deputies, to the senators, to everybody, in fact: that he had no influence to use, that the era of favoritism was over; that he, Vaudrey, understood that only merit would receive official gifts. "Merit only. You understand, Monsieur Warcolier?"

Warcolier rolled his huge eyes in astonishment; then, with the self-satisfied smile of an expressionless beau, after pa.s.sing his fat hand through his long whiskers, yellow and streaked with gray, that decorated his rosy cheeks, he remarked doctorally, that Monsieur le Ministre was entering on a path that, in all conscience, he could qualify as being only dangerous. Eh! _bon Dieu!_ one must do something for one's friends!--Vaudrey's accession to the Department of the Interior had given birth to many new hopes; on all grounds they must be satisfied. Vaudrey would never be forgiven for such deception.

"What deception?" asked Sulpice. "I promised reforms and I am going to carry them out, but people laugh at my reforms and ask what?--Places."

"Bless me!" replied Warcolier, "entirely logical."

"Be it so! but there are places and places. I cannot, however, retire a whole staff of employes to give place to a new one. That's precisely what they want. There is not a deputy who has not one candidate to recommend to me."

"That's very natural, Monsieur le Ministre, seeing that there is not a deputy who may not himself be a candidate."

"Still, he should be independent of his electors, but in truth, it is not the rights of those who have elected them that my colleagues defend, it is their own interests."

"Every man for himself, Monsieur le Ministre. Yesterday, even yesterday, one of my electors whose wife has just given birth to a child, wrote me, asking for a good nurse. That is like one of our colleagues, Perraud--of the Vosges.--One of his electors commissioned him to take back an umbrella with him upon his early return. The electors regard their deputies in the light of commission merchants."

"And as tobacco bureaus! Well, I wish to have more morality than that in State affairs. I like giving, but I know how to refuse," said Vaudrey.

"That will be easy enough so long as you are popular and solid in Parliament; but on the day that it is clearly proved that such and such a future minister can make himself more useful than you to the personal interests of everybody--and there are such ministers in sight--"

"Granet, yes, I know! He promises more b.u.t.ter than bread, to cry quits later in giving more dry crusts than fresh b.u.t.ter. But I don't care to deceive any one."

"As you please, Monsieur le Ministre, as you please," answered Warcolier, in a mocking and gentle tone.

Sulpice did not like this man. He was a phrase-maker. He had a vague feeling that this Warcolier who in public affected strictly severe principles was privately undermining him and that he yielded to favors in order to win support. It was enough for the minister to discourage coa.r.s.e, greedy ambitions, provided that the Under Secretary of State encouraged unsavory, eager hopes by shrewd smiles and silence that a.s.sented to all that was desired. This little underhand work going on in his office was unknown to Vaudrey; he did not know that out of every refusal he gave, Warcolier secured friends; but he maintained a watchful distrust for this republican who had become so stanch a supporter of the Republic only since that form of government had triumphed. Besides, what had he to fear? The President of the Council, Monsieur Collard, of Nantes, had the unbounded confidence of the head of the State and of the Chamber; and he was Collard's intimate friend. The majority of the cabinet was compact. The perfect calm of the horizon was undisturbed by a cloud. Vaudrey could rule without fear, without excitement and give all his spare time to that woman whose piercing glance, wandering smile, palpitating nostrils, dishevelled, fair hair, kisses, fondness, cries, and tones pursued him everywhere.

Marianne, how he loved her! From day to day, how his love of her increased like a madman's! It seemed to him that he suddenly found himself in the presence of the only woman who could possibly understand him, and in the only world in which he could live; his petty bourgeois, sensual inexperience flourished in the little hotel of the courtesan.

He had doubtless loved; often enough he had thought himself once more in love; the poor grisettes, to whom he had written in verse, as he might have sung songs to them, were gone from his thoughts, though they had occupied his heart for a short time. He had profoundly loved her who bore his name, perhaps he loved her still as warmly, as sincerely--the unfortunate man!--as of old. He sometimes recalled with tearful eye, how his whole frame trembled with love in the presence of that young girl who had given herself entirely to him, in all her trust and sincerity, in all her candor, and all her chastely-timid innocent modesty. But Adrienne's love was insipid compared with the intoxicating and appetizing voluptuousness of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her att.i.tudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared everything, mocked, caressed, beginning with a pout and ending with some drollery, and challenged pa.s.sion by exasperating it with refusals and mockery that changed into distracting lasciviousness.

When she extended to Vaudrey her little hand, covered with rings, and indolent and soft, he felt as if he had received an electric shock and that his marrow had been touched. This man of forty felt all the enthusiasm and distraction of a youth. It seemed to him that this was the only woman that he possibly could love, and in truth she was the only one that he could have loved as he did, with his forgetfulness of self, his outbursts of madness, the distracted sentiment of a love for which he would have braved and risked everything.

When he confessed it frankly, she had a way of answering with a questioning manner full of doubt, which conveyed the delicacy of the woman's self-love and the intentionally refined doubt of the coquette, a questioning _yes_:

"Yes?"

Simply that.

And in this _yes_, there was a world of tenderness, excitement and burning promises for Sulpice.

Then he drew her to him:

"Yes, yes, yes, yes!" he repeated in burning tones, as he thrust his head between her shoulders that emerged from her embroidered chemise, and her neck perfumed and satiny, that he covered with eager kisses.

Yes! And he would have uttered this _yes_ before every one like a bravado. _Yes!_ It was his delight to give himself wholly to Marianne and to tell her again and again that nothing in the whole world could take the place of this mistress who made him forget everything: politics, the home, the ambition that had been his life, and his affection for Adrienne that had been his joy.

Thanks to the Dujarrier, Marianne had paid the rent of the house, the servants and the pressing debts. Claire Dujarrier advanced the hundred thousand francs demanded by Mademoiselle Kayser, and which she had apparently--in reality she took them from her own funds--borrowed from Adolphe Gochard, her lover, who had not a sou, and in whose favor Vaudrey signed in regular legal form, a bill of exchange at three months' date _value received in cash_. The Dujarrier merely retained twenty thousand francs as her commission and handed only eighty thousand to Marianne.

"But Vaudrey's acceptance to Gochard is for one hundred thousand!"

"You are silly, my girl! What if I lose the balance? If your minister should not pay?"

"What do you mean?"

"Stranger things have happened, my little one."

Vaudrey having paid, given his name, signed this bill of exchange, felt the extreme joy arising from the base self-love of the man who pays a lovely creature and who, nevertheless, believes himself loved.

In the early days, Sulpice went to Rue p.r.o.ny only during the day or at night after dinner, or on leaving a reception or the theatre. Marianne awaited him. He came stealthily, distracted with joy. There, in the closed chamber he remained with Marianne, who was full of pride at the complete subjugation of the will of this man in her embrace. She amused herself occasionally by calling him _Your Excellency_, in reading to him from some book which spun out the ceremonial necessary in applying for an interview with a minister:

"If ever I ask you for an audience, do you know how I must address myself to the secretary? Listen to this book, it is funny: 'Ordinary toilet. The etiquette for the toilet is not very strict, but it is, however, in good taste to appear dressed as for a ceremonious call. For women, the toilet should be simple and the gloves new.'"

She laughed as she rested almost naked in Sulpice's arms, and repeated, looking into his eyes:

"A simple toilet!"

"And again, listen!" she said, as she resumed the book. "'In speaking to a minister as in writing to him, one should address him as _Monseigneur_ or _Your Excellency_. On reaching the door as you leave the salon, you should again bow respectfully.' That is amusing, ah! how amusing it is!--Then they respect you as much as that? Your Excellency!

Monseigneur! Shall I be obliged to courtesy to you?--Your lips, give me your lips, Monseigneur! I adore you!--You are my own minister; my finance minister, my lover, my all! I do not respect you, but I love you, I love you!"

He trembled to the very roots of his hair when she spoke to him thus. He felt transports of joy in clasping her in his arms and genuine despair when he left her. Leave her! leave her there under that lamp alone, in that low bed where he had just forgotten that there existed anything else in the world besides that apartment, warm with perfumes. He would have liked to pa.s.s the whole night beside her, separating only when satiated and overwhelmed with caresses. But how could he leave Adrienne alone over there in the ministerial mansion? However trustful this young wife might be, and innocent, credulous and incapable of suspicion, if he had pa.s.sed a night absent from her, she would have been terrified and warned.

He easily invented prolonged receptions and night sessions that detained him until an advanced hour.

"One would say that the evening sessions grow more frequent than formerly," Adrienne remarked gently at breakfast.