His Excellency the Minister Part 7

The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a popular man at Gren.o.ble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how generous he was, and by the middle-cla.s.s who regarded him as a prudent man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of the National a.s.sembly. He had just pa.s.sed his thirty-fourth year.

His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by this brilliant launch on his career.

With what deep emotion, even to-day, Vaudrey recalled that Sunday in February, a foul, wet day, when he returned home in a closed carriage with a friend, from an electioneering tour. The day before he had made a speech in a wineshop to an audience of peasants, who listened, open-mouthed, but withal suspicious, examining their candidate as they would have handled a beast offered at the market, and who, step by step, applauded his remarks, stretching out their rasp-like hands as he left them, and crying out: "You are our man!"

That very morning he returned to Gren.o.ble in the rain, pa.s.sing through villages where the posters bearing his name and those of his friends, half-demolished by the rain, flapped dismally in the wind. Before the mayor's office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare.

But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France, and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in the struggle.

Moreover, at night, with what feverish transport he watched the returns of the election as they reached the Palais de Justice, black with the crowd, and filled with uproar! With what a fearfully fast-beating heart he saw the rapidly swelling number of ballots cast for him! Dispatches came, and pedestrians hurried in from the country, waving their bulletins above their heads, and Sulpice heard on every lip the same cry: "Vaudrey leads!"

Some cried bravo, while others clapped their hands. A crowd quickly gathered about Vaudrey. It already seemed to him that he was lifted up by a great wave and carried to a new world.

A friend seized him by the arm and drew him into a corner of the hall, away from the others, and hurriedly said: "You know I am not one to ask much of you, to ask anything of you, in fact. I merely reckon on a receivers.h.i.+p. That is easily done, eh? A mere nothing?"

Sulpice, whose feelings were overcome by this great popular consecration, felt a kind of anger stir his heart against this solicitor, who, in the triumph of a great popular cause, saw only a means of self-advancement, of securing an appointment. The deputy--for he was a deputy now, each commune adding its total to the Vaudrey vote--was moved by a feeling of disgust.

The crowd followed him home that evening, shouting in triumph.

Amid the joy of victory, Sulpice felt the burden of the anxiety caused by duties to be done: a treaty of peace to be signed, and what a peace!

Must he, alas! append his signature to a doc.u.ment devoted to the dismemberment of his country? Far into the night he stood in reverie in his chamber, his brow resting against the cold window-pane.

He retired to rest very late, and arose with the gray dawn of February, but without having slept.

He looked across the street to a convent garden, with its square and lozenge-shaped beds regularly arranged, its bare trees and box-wood borders, that he had often gazed upon. Some nuns in their black robes pa.s.sed slowly across this cold and calm horizon that for many years had also been the range of his vision.

Henceforth this familiar spot, this sad garden, whose cloistral a.s.sociations charmed him, would be lost to his view. It was Paris now that awaited him, feverish Paris, burning with anger and odorous of saltpetre. Its very pavements must burn. Sulpice was in haste, however, to see it once more, to pa.s.s with head aloft beneath the garrets where he had once dreamed as a student, f.a.gging and striving to get knowledge.

How often he would regret that convent garden, those familiar flower-beds, the deep silence that enveloped him as he sat working by the open window, the pa.s.sage of a bird near him, as if to fan him with its wing, and the vague murmur of the canticles of the sisters ascending to his window like the echo of a prayer!

In the recess during one of the years following his election to the a.s.sembly, he married Mademoiselle Gerard. Doctor Reboux, her guardian, charmed to give his ward to a man with a future like Vaudrey's, had not hesitated long about consenting to the marriage. Adrienne delighted Sulpice, and the young girl herself was quite happy to be chosen by this good-natured, distinguished young man whom everybody at Gren.o.ble, not excepting his political adversaries, admired and spoke well of. With large, brilliant, black eyes lighting up a thin, fair face, a full beard, a high forehead with a deep furrow between the eyebrows, giving to his usually wandering, keen and restless glance a somewhat contemplative expression, Sulpice was a decidedly attractive man. He was not a handsome or a charming fellow, but a good-natured, agreeable, refined man, a fine conversationalist, persuasive, enthusiastic and alert; learned without being pedantic, a man who could inspire in a young girl a perfect pa.s.sion. Adrienne joyfully married him, as he had sought her from love.

And now all the poetry and romance of his youth blossomed again in his heart, in the thick of the political struggle in which he was engaged; he forgot, amid the idyllic scenes of domestic life, the storms of Versailles, the political troubles, forebodings as to the future, all anxieties of the present, the routine life of the a.s.sembly into which he plunged with all his mind, and the excitement of his labors, his debates and his duties.

Sulpice thought again and again of the summer morning when he led his wife to the altar, and compared it to a day's halt in the course of a journey under the blaze of the sun; he recalled the old house full of noisy stir, the crowd of relatives and friends in festive attire, the stamping of the horses' feet before the great open gate, the neighbors standing at the windows, and the little street-boys scuffling upon the pavement, all the joyous bustle of that happy day. It seemed to Sulpice that the sunlight came streaming in with Adrienne's entrance into the vast salon, from the walls of which her pictured ancestresses in their huge leg-of-mutton sleeves seemed to smile at her.

Beneath the orange wreath sent from Paris, her face expressed the happy, surprised, and sweetly anxious look of a young communicant wrapped in her veil.

Sulpice had never seen her look more beautiful. How prettily she came towards him, blus.h.i.+ng vividly, and holding out her two little white gloved hands! He, somewhat bored by the company that surrounded them, cast an involuntary glance at a mirror hanging opposite and decided that he looked awkward and formal with his hair too carefully arranged. How they had laughed since then and always with new pleasure at these recollections, so sweet even now.

His happiness on that joyous day would have been complete had his mother been present, when in the presence of the old priest who had instructed Adrienne in her catechism, Sulpice stood forward and took by its velvet s.h.i.+eld the taper that seemed so light to him, and awkwardly held the wafer that the priest extended to him. It was a great event in Gren.o.ble when the leader of the Liberal Party, who headed the list at the last election, was seen being married like a believing bourgeois. The organ pealed forth its tender vibrations, some Christmas anthem, mysterious and tremulous, like an alleluia sounding through the aisles of centuries; the light streamed through the windows in floods and rested upon Adrienne, who was kneeling with her childlike head leaning on her gloved hands, kissing her fair locks with sunlight and illumining the gleaming satin of her dress with its long train spreading out over the carpet.

Sulpice took away from this ceremony in the presence of a crowded congregation an impression at once perfumed and dazzling: the perfumes of flowers, the play of light, the greetings of the organ, and within and about him, all the intoxication of love, singing a song of happiness.

All that was now far away! nearly six years had elapsed since that day, six years of bitter struggle, during which Vaudrey fought the harder, defended his ideas of liberty with fervid eloquence, disputed step by step, and through intense work came to the front, living at Paris just as he did in the province, having his books brought from there to his apartment in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, close to the railroad that he took every morning when he regretfully left Adrienne, Adrienne to whom he returned every evening that political meetings and protracted sittings did not rob him of those happy evenings, which were in truth the only evenings that he really lived.

Adrienne seldom went out, not caring to display herself and shunning the bustle, living at Paris, as at Gren.o.ble, in peaceful seclusion, caring only for the existence of her husband, his work, and his speeches that he prepared with so much courageous labor. She sat up with him until very late, glancing over the books, the summaries of the laws and the old parliamentary reports.

At times she was terrified at the ardor with which Sulpice devoted himself to these occupations. She greatly desired to take her part and was grieved at being unable to a.s.sist him by writing from his dictation, or by examining these old books. She felt terribly anxious when Vaudrey had to make a speech from the tribune. She dared not go to hear him, but knowing that he was to speak, she had not the courage to remain at home. Anxiously she ascended to the public gallery. She shuddered and was almost ready to faint, when she heard the voice of the president break what seemed to her an icy silence, with the words: _Monsieur Vaudrey has the ear of the a.s.sembly_.

The sound of Sulpice's voice seemed changed to her. Fearfully she asked herself if fright was strangling him. She dared not look at him. It seemed to her that the people were laughing, making a disturbance and coughing, but not listening to him. Why had she come? She would never do so again. An icy chill took possession of her. Then suddenly she heard a storm of applause that seemed like an outburst of sympathy. Hands were clapped, voices applauded. She half raised herself, and leaning upon the rail of the gallery, saw Sulpice between the crowded heads, towering above the immense audience, radiant and calm, standing with his arms folded or his hands resting on the tribune, below the chair occupied by a motionless, white-cravatted man, and throwing back his fair head, hurling, as from a full heart, his words, his wishes and his faith. All this she saw with supreme happiness and felt proud of the man whose name she bore.

At that moment, she would fain have cried out to every one that she was his, that she adored him, that he was her pride, even as she was his joy! She would like to have folded him to her, to cling to his neck and to repeat before all that crowd: _I love you!_

But she reserved all her tender effusions for the intimacy of their home, in order to calm the enthusiasm, oftentimes desperate, of this nervous man whom everything threw into a feverish excitement, this grand man, as they called him at Gren.o.ble, who was for her only a great child whom she adored and kept in check by her girlish devotion combined with her motherly, delicate attentions.

Vaudrey, however, more ambitious to do good than to obtain power, and spending his life in the conflicts of the Chamber, saw the years slipping away without realizing that he was making any progress, not a single step forward in the direction of his goal. Since the war, the years had pa.s.sed for him as well as for those of his generation, with confusing rapidity, and suddenly, all at once, after having been in some sense slumbering, flattering himself that a man of thirty has a future before him, he was rudely awakened to the astonis.h.i.+ng truth that he was forty.

Forty! Sulpice had experienced a certain melancholy in advancing the figure by ten, and whatever position he had acquired within his party, within the circle of his friends, his dream was to reach still higher, he was tired of playing second-rate parts, and eager to stand before the footlights in full blaze, in the first role.

In the snug interior that Adrienne furnished, he enjoyed all material happiness. She soothed him, brought his dreams back to the region of the real, terrified at times by his discouragements, his anger, and still more by his illusions concerning men and things.

Sulpice often reproached her for having clipped the wings of his ambition.

"I!" she would say, "it is rather the fans of your windmills that I break, you Don Quixote!"

He would then smile at her, and look earnestly into the depths of the timid creature's lovely blue eyes, causing her to blush as if ashamed of having seemed to be witty.

Her chief aim was to be the devoted, loving friend of this man whom she thought so superior to herself, and although she was totally ignorant of political intrigues, she was by virtue of the mere instinct of love, his best and most perspicacious adviser and felt delighted only when Vaudrey, by chance, listened to her counsel.

"I love you so dearly!" she confessed with the unlimited candor of a poor creature who has but a single affection, a single pretext for loving.

He saw in the life he led, only the penumbra: his neglected youth, his hopes fled, his fears, the disgust which at times filled him as he thought of the never-ending recommencements and trickeries of political life. So dearly cherished, so beloved, it seemed to him, nevertheless, that his life lacked something. He would have liked a child, a son to bring up, a domestic tie, since political conditions prevented him from accomplis.h.i.+ng a civic duty. Ah! yes, a son, a being to mould, a brow to kiss, a soul to fas.h.i.+on after the image of his own, a child who would not know all the sorrows of life that his own generation had laid on him! Perhaps it was only a child that he needed. Something, however, he evidently lacked.

Still he smiled, always in love with that young woman of twenty-four years, delicate, slender, and full of the fears and artlessness of a child. Accustomed to the quiet solitude of the house of her guardian, she, when at Paris, in her husband's study, arranging his books, his papers, his legislative plans and reports, sought to surround her dear Sulpice with the comforting felicity of bourgeois happiness that was enjoyed calmly, like a cordial sipped at the fireside.

Then suddenly one day, the news of a startling political change broke in on this household.

Sulpice reached home one evening at one and the same time nervous, anxious, and happy.

His name was on almost every lip, in connection with a ministerial combination. His last speech on domestic policy had more than ever brought him into prominence and he was considered to have boldly contributed to the development of a fearful crisis.

A minister! he might, before the morning, be a minister! His policy was triumphant.

The advocate Collard--of Nantes,--who was pointed out as the future head of the Cabinet, was one of his intimate friends. It was suggested--positively--that Sulpice should be intrusted with one of the most _important portfolios_, that of the Interior or of Foreign Affairs, the _lesser portfolios_ being considered those of Public Instruction and of Agriculture and Commerce, the former of which concerns itself with the spiritual welfare of the people, and the latter with their food supply.

Sulpice told all this to Adrienne while eating his dinner mechanically and without appet.i.te.

There was to be a meeting of his coterie at eight o'clock. It was already seven. He hurried.

Adrienne saw that he was very pale. She experienced a strange sensation, evidently a joyful one although mingled with anxiety. Politics drew him away from his wife so frequently, and for so long a time, that she was already compelled to live in such solitude that the secluded creature wondered if in future she would not be condemned to still greater isolation. But all anxiety disappeared under the influence of Sulpice's manifest joy. He was feverishly impatient. It seemed to him that never had he known so decisive a moment in his life.

The sound of the bell, suddenly ringing out its clear note in the silence, caused him to start.

The dining-room door was opened by a servant, who handed a letter to Vaudrey, bearing on one corner of the envelope the word: _Urgent_.

Sulpice recognized the writing.

It was from Collard of Nantes.