His Excellency the Minister Part 57

"Kiss her then! One pardons when one loves!"

With a supplicating cry, Vaudrey threw himself on his knees before Adrienne, while Lissac hastily opened the door and left, feeling indeed that he could not say a word and that Vaudrey only could obtain Vaudrey's pardon.

"I, in my anger," he said, "he, in his jealousy, have allowed ourselves to get into a pa.s.sion. It is stupid. One should speak lower."

He went away, much dissatisfied with himself and but little less with Vaudrey. Again he considered this man foolish, adored as he was by such a wife, whom he deceived. He was not sure that at the bottom of his own heart he did not feel a sentiment of love toward Adrienne. Ah! if he had been loved by such a creature, he would have been capable of great things!--He would have arranged and utilized his life instead of spoiling it. In place of vulgar love, he would have kept this unique love intact from the altar to the tomb!

Pale and tottering, and a child once more under her sorrow, as he had just seen her, she was so adorably lovely that he had received an entirely new impression, one of almost jealousy against Sulpice, and therefore, brusquely overcoming this strange, unseemly emotion, he had himself thrust Vaudrey toward his wife and had departed hastily, as if he felt that he must hurry away and never see them again. But as he left, on the contrary, he saw her again with her sad, wretched, suffering look and the young wife's sorrowful voice went with him, repeating in a tone of broken-hearted grief:

"That is known then!"

"Ah! that miserable fellow, Vaudrey!" thought Guy.

In going out, he had to wait a moment in the antechamber, to admit of the pa.s.sage of some vases of flowers, green shrubs and variegated foliage plants that were being brought in to decorate the salons. A fete! And this evening! In the arrival of those flowers for decoration, at the moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed that crus.h.i.+ng news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their hothouse bloom.

Would Adrienne have the courage or strength to undertake the reception of the evening, within a few hours? Guy was annoyed at having come.

"I could well have waited and kept my anger to myself. The unhappy woman would have known nothing."

"Bah!" he added. "She is kind, she adores Sulpice, it is only a pa.s.sing storm. She will forgive!"

He promised himself, moreover, to return in the evening, to excuse himself to Adrienne, to comfort her if he could.

"There is some merit, after all, in that," he thought again. "On my word! I believe I love her and yet I am angry with that animal Vaudrey for not loving her enough."

She will forgive!--Lissac knew courtesans but he did not know this woman, energetic as she was under her frail appearance, a child, a little provincial lost in the life of Paris, lost and, as it were, absorbed in the hubbub of political circles, smitten with her husband, who comprehended in her eyes every seduction and superiority, having given herself entirely and wis.h.i.+ng to wholly possess the elect being who possessed her, in whom she trusted and to whom she gave herself, body and soul, with all her confidence, her innocence and her modesty. He did not know what such a sensitive, nervously frail nature could feel on the first terrible impulses, full of enthusiasm under her exterior coldness, of resolution concealed under her timid manners, capable of madness, distracted in spite of her reason and calm; this candor of thought, of education, and a.s.sociations that made her, with all her irresistible attractiveness, the virtuous woman with all her charm.

Adrienne had at first read the journal that had been sent to her without understanding anything about it. Alkibiades, Basilea, the mistress of the Archon, what signified that to her? What did it mean? Then suddenly her thought rested on the name of Sulpice, travestied in the Greek of parody, Sulpicios. Was it of her husband that they intended to speak?

She immediately felt a bitter anguish at heart, but it was a matter only of allowing one's self to be impressed by a journalistic pleasantry, as contemptible as an anonymous letter! She would think no more about it.

She must concentrate her thoughts on the evening's reception. There was to be an official repast, followed by a soiree. She had nothing to concern herself about in regard to the menu; Chevet undertook that. For the ministerial dinners there was a fixed price as in restaurants. Hosts and guests live _au cabaret_, they dine at so much a head. Adrienne endeavored to occupy herself with the musical soiree, with the programmes that they brought her, with the names of comedians and female singers, printed on vellum, and with those bouquets with which the vases of her little salon were decorated. Ah! well, yes, in spite of the feverish activity, she could think only of that article in the journal, that miserable article, every line of which flamed before her eyes just as when one has looked too long at a fire. She had been seized with the temptation there and then to openly ask Sulpice what these veiled illusions meant.

"I hope, indeed," she thought, with her contempt of all lying, "that he will not charge me with suspecting him. No, certainly, I do not suspect him."

She went to the little cabinet where Sulpice sometimes read or worked after breakfast, and there, as if she had thrown herself upon an open knife, she suddenly heard those sinister words which pierced her very flesh like pointed blades.

They were speaking of another woman. Lissac said in a loud tone: Your mistress! and Vaudrey allowed it to be said!--

A mistress! what mistress? Marianne Kayser! Oh, that woman of whom Sulpice had so often spoken in an indifferent manner, that pretty creature, so often seen, seductive, wonderfully beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful, it was she! Your mistress! Sulpice had a mistress! He lied, he deceived. He? She was betrayed! Was it possible? If it were possible?

But it was true! Eh! _parbleu_, yes, it was true--And this, then, was why they had sent her this horrible article! She knew now.

She had been tempted to enter the room suddenly, to throw herself between these men and interrupt their conversation. She had not the strength. And then, what Lissac said had the effect of consoling her!--Guy's reproaches to Sulpice were such as she would have liked to cast at him, if she could have found speech now. But not a word could she frame. She was stunned, dumb and like a crushed being. She knew only one thing, that she suffered horribly, as she had never before suffered.

At first she allowed Vaudrey, who knelt at her feet, as Lissac had told him on going away, to take her hand that hung listlessly down. Then she gently withdrew it as if she felt herself seized by an instinctive sense of outraged modesty.

Vaudrey tried to speak. At first only confused words, silly excuses, clumsy falsehoods, cruelly absurd phrases--_caprices_, _nothing serious_, _whim_, _madness_--so many avowals, so many insults, came to his lips. But then, before the silence of Adrienne, he could say nothing more, he was speechless, overwhelmed, and sought a hand that was refused.

"Will you never forgive me?" he asked at last, not knowing too well what he said.

"Never!" she said coldly.

She rose and with as much sudden energy as but a moment before she had felt of weakness, she crossed the room.

"Are you going away?" stammered Sulpice.

"Yes, I must be alone--Ah! quite alone," she said, with a sort of gesture of disgust as she saw her husband approach her.

He stopped and said, as if by chance:

"You know that--this evening--"

"Yes, yes," she replied, "do not be anxious about anything! I am still the minister's wife, if I am Madame Vaudrey no longer."

He tried in vain to reply.

Adrienne had already disappeared.

"There is the end of my happiness!" Sulpice stammered as he suddenly confronted an unknown situation dark as an abyss. "Ah! how wretched I am! Very wretched! whose fault is it?"

He plunged gladly into the work of examining the bundles of reports from the prefects, feverishly inspecting them to deafen and blind his conscience, and seized at every moment with a desire to make an appeal to Adrienne or to go and insult Marianne. Oh! especially to tell Marianne that she had betrayed him, that she was a wretch, that she was the mistress of Rosas, the mistress of Jouvenet, a strumpet like any other strumpet, yes, a strumpet!

Amid all the disturbance of that day of harsh misfortune, perhaps he thought more of the Marianne that he had lost than of the Adrienne that he had outraged; while the wife questioned with herself if it were really she coming and going, automatically trying on her ball costume, abandoning her head to the hair-dresser, feeling that in two hours she would be condemned to smile on the minister's guests, the senators and the deputies and play the part of a spectre, marching in the land of dreams, in a nightmare that choked her, fastened on her throat and heart and prompted her to cry and weep, all her poor nerves intensely strained and sick, subdued by the energy of a tortured person, imposing on herself the task of not appearing to suffer and--a still more atrocious thing--of not even suffering in reality and waiting, yes, waiting to sob.

In the evening, everything blazed on the facade of the ministry. The rows of gas-jets suggested that a public fete was being held in the Hotel Beauvau. The naming capital letters R.F. were boldly outlined against the dark sky, the three colors of the flags looked bright in the ruddy light of the gas. Carriages rolled over the sanded courtyard, giving up at the carpeted entrance to the hotel the invited guests dressed in correct style, the women wrapped in ample cloaks with gold fringe or trimmed with fur, and all poured into the antechamber, brus.h.i.+ng against the _Gardes de Paris_ in white breeches, with grounded arms, forming a row and standing out like Caryatides against the s.h.i.+ning, large leaved green flowers on which their white helmets shone by the light of the l.u.s.tres. In the dressing-room, the clothing was piled up, tied together in haste; the antechamber was quickly crossed, the women in pa.s.sing casting rapid glances at the immense mirrors; a servant asked the names of the guests and repeated them to an usher, whose loud voice penetrated these salons that for many years had heard so many different names, of all parties, under all regimes, and proclaimed them in the usual commonplace manner, while murdering the most celebrated of them. Upon the threshold of the salon, filled with fas.h.i.+onable people and flooded with intense light, stood the minister, who had been receiving, greeting, bowing, ever since the opening of the soiree, to those who arrived, some of whom he did not know; crowding behind him, correctly dressed, stood his secretaries, the members of his cabinet appropriating their shares of the greetings extended to the Excellency, and at his side stood Madame Vaudrey, pale and smiling as the creatures of the other world; she also bowed and from time to time extended her gloved hand mechanically; pale she looked in her decollete gown of white satin, clasped at the shoulders with two pearl clasps, a bouquet of natural roses in her corsage, and standing there like a melancholy spectre on the very threshold of the festive salons.

When she perceived Guy enter, she greeted him with a sad smile, and Vaudrey eagerly offered his hand to him as if he relied greatly on him to arrange matters.

Adrienne's repressed grief had pained Lissac. While to the other guests she appeared to be only somewhat fatigued, to him the open wound and sorrow were visible. He plunged into the crowd. Beneath the streaming light the diamonds on the women's shoulders gleamed like the l.u.s.tres'

crystals. Within a frame of gobelins and Beauvais tapestry taken from the repository, was an improvised scene that looked like a green and pink nest of camellias, dracaenas and palms. The bright toilettes of the women already seated before this scenic effect presented a wealth of pale blue, white or pink silk, mother-of-pearl shoulders, diamonds, and bows of pink or feather headdresses. Guy recognized Madame Marsy in the front row, robed in a very low-cut, sea-green satin robe with a bouquet of flowers at the tip of the shoulder, who while fanning herself looked with haughty impertinence at the pretty Madame Gerson, her former friend. Madame Evan was numerously surrounded, she was the most charming of all the stylish set and the woman whom all the others tried to copy.

Behind this species of female flower-bed the black coated ranks crowded, their sombre hue relieved here and there by the uniform of some French officer or foreign military attache. There was a profusion of orders, crosses and strange old faces, with red ribbons at the neck, deputies evidently in dress, youthful attaches of the ministry or emba.s.sy, correct in bearing and officious, their crush-hats under their arms and holding the satin programme of the _musicale soiree_ in their hands, some numbers of which were about to be rendered. Under the ceilings that were dappled with painted clouds, surrounded by brilliant lights and a wealth of flowers, this crowd presented at once an aspect of luxury and oddity, with its living ant.i.theses of old parliamentarians and tyros of the a.s.sembly.

Intermingled with strains of music, were whisperings and the confused noise of conversations.

Guy watched with curiosity, as a man who has seen much and compares, all this gathering of guests. From time to time he greeted some one of his acquaintance, but this was a rare occurrence. He was delighted to see Ramel whom he had often met at Adrienne's _Wednesdays_, and whom he liked. He appeared to him to be fatigued and sick.

"I am not very well, in fact," said Ramel. "I have only come because I had something serious to say to Vaudrey."

"What then?" asked Lissac.

"Oh! nothing! some advice to give him as to the course to be followed.

There is decidedly much underhand work going on about the President."

"Who is it?"

"Most of them are here!"

"His guests?"

"You know very well that when one invites all one's friends, one finds that three-quarters of one's enemies will be present."