His Excellency the Minister Part 15

Vaudrey looked at Marianne. He observed distinctly a flash of joy illuminate her pale face and he felt a sudden and singular discontent, amounting almost to physical anguish. And why, great heavens?

Marianne smiled a salutation; he half-bowed and watched her as she went away, with a sort of angry regret, as if he had something further to say to this woman who was almost a stranger to him, and who, guided by Sabine, now disappeared amid the crowd of black coats and bright toilets. And then, almost immediately and suddenly, he was surrounded and besieged by his colleagues of the Chamber, men either indifferent or seeking favors, who only awaited the conclusion of the conversation with Mademoiselle Kayser, which they would certainly have precipitated, except for the fear of acting indiscreetly, in order to precipitate themselves on him. Amid all those unknown persons who approached him, Vaudrey sought a friend as he felt himself lost and taken by a.s.sault by this rabble.

The sight of the face of a friend, older than himself, a spare man with a white beard very carefully trimmed, caused him a feeling of pleasure, and he joyfully exclaimed:

"Eh! _pardieu!_ why, here is Ramel!"

He immediately extended both hands in warm greeting to this man of sixty years, wearing a white cravat twisted round his neck, like a neckerchief in the old-fas.h.i.+oned style, and whose black waistcoat with its standing collar of ancient pattern was conspicuous amid the open waistcoats of the fas.h.i.+onably-dressed young men who had been very eagerly surrounding the minister for the last few moments.

"Good day, Ramel!--How delighted I am to see you!"--

"And I also," said Ramel in a friendly and affectionate tone, while his face, that seemed severe, but was only good-natured and masculine, suddenly beamed. "It is not a little on your account that I came here."

"Really?"

"Really. I was anxious to shake hands with you. It is so long since I saw you. How much has happened since then!"

"Ah! Ramel, who the devil would have said that I should be minister when I took you my first article for the _Nation Francaise_!" said Vaudrey.

"Bah! who is not a minister?" said Ramel. "You are. Remember what Napoleon said to Bourrienne as he entered the Tuileries: 'Here we are, Bourrienne! now we must stay here!'"

"That is exactly what Granet said to me when he told me of the new combination."

"Granet expressed in that more of an after-thought than your old Ramel."

"My best friend," said Sulpice with emotion, grasping this man's hands in his.

"It is so much more meritorious on your part to tell me that," said Ramel, "seeing that now you do not lack friends.h.i.+ps."

"You are still a pessimist, Ramel?"

"I--A wild optimist, seeing that I believe everything and everybody! But I must necessarily believe in the stupidity of my fellows, and upon this point I am hardly mistaken."

"But what brings you to Madame Marsy's, you who are a perfect savage?"

"Tamed!--Because, I repeat to you, I knew that you were coming and that Monsieur de Rosas was to speak on the subject of savages, and these please me. If I had been rich or if I only had enough to live on, I should have pa.s.sed my life in travelling. And in the end, I shall have lived between Montmartre and Batignolles: a tortoise dreaming that he is a swallow--"

"Ramel, my dear fellow," said the minister, "would you wish me to give you a mission where you could go and study whatever seemed good to you?"

"With my rheumatism? Thanks, your Excellency!" said Ramel, smiling. "No, I am too old, and never having asked any one for anything, I am not going to begin at my age."

"You do not ask, it is offered you."

"Well, I have no desire for that. I am at the hour of the _far niente_ that precedes the final slumber. It is a pleasant condition. One has seen so many things and persons that one has no further desires."

"The fact is," said the minister, "that if all the people you have obligated in your life had solicited an invitation from Madame Marsy, these salons would not be large enough to contain them."

"Bah! they have all forgotten as I have, myself," said Ramel, with a shake of his head and smiling pleasantly.

Vaudrey felt intense pleasure in meeting, in the midst of this crowd of indifferent or admiring persons, the man who had formerly seen him arrive in Paris, and with whom he had corresponded from the heart of his province, as with a kinsman. There was, in fact, between them, a relations.h.i.+p of mind and soul that united this veteran of the press with this young statesman.

The ideal sought was the same, but the temperaments were different.

Ramel, although he had known them, had for a long time avoided those excitements of struggle and power that inflamed Vaudrey's blood.

"It was a glorious day when my pulse became regulated," he said.

"Experience brought me the needed tonic."

Denis Ramel was a wise man. He took life as he found it, without enthusiasm as without bitterness. He was not wealthy. More than sixty years old, he found himself, after a life of hard, rough and continuous struggle, as badly off as when he started out on his career, full of burning hopes. He had pa.s.sed his life honorably as a journalist--a journalist of the good old times, of the school of thought, not of news-tellers,--he had loyally and conscientiously exercised a profession in which he took pleasure; he had read much, written much, consumed much midnight oil, touched upon everything; put his fingers into every kind of pie without soiling them, and after having valiantly turned the heavy millstone of daily labor incessantly renewed for forty years, he had reached the end of his journey, the brink of the grave, almost penniless, after having skirted Fortune and seen Opportunity float toward him her perfumed and intoxicating locks more than a hundred times. Bent, weary, almost forgotten, and unknown and misunderstood by the new generation, that styled this enthusiasm, more eager, moreover, than that of juvenile faith, "old"--he saw the newcomers rise as he might have beheld the descent of La Courtille.

"It amuses me."

Ramel had, in the course of his career as a publicist, as a dealer in fame, a.s.sisted without taking part therein, in the formation of syndicates, allotments of shares and financial intrigues; and putting his shoulder to the wheel of enterprises that appeared to him to be solid, while seeking to strike out those which appeared to be doubtful, he had created millionaires without asking a cent from them, just as he had made ministers without accepting even a thread of ribbon at their hands.

This infatuating craft of a maker of men pleased him. All those pioneers in the great human comedy, he had seen on their entrance, hesitating and crying to him for a.s.sistance. This statesman, swelling out with his importance in the tribune, had received the benefit of his correction of his earlier harangues. He had encouraged, during his compet.i.tion for the Prix de Rome, this member of the Inst.i.tute who to-day represented national art at the Villa Medicis; he had seen this composer, now a millionaire, beg for a private rehearsal as he might ask alms, and slip into one's hands concert tickets for the Herz hall. He was the first to point out the verses of the poet who now wore _l'habit vert_. He had first heralded the fame of the actor now in vogue, of the tenor who to-day had his villas at Nice, yes, Ramel was the first to say: "He is one of the chosen few!"

Old, weary and knowing, very gentle and refined in his banter, and refusing to be blinded or irritated by the trickeries of destiny, Denis Ramel, when asked why, at his age and with his talents, he was neither a deputy, nor a millionaire, nor a member of the Inst.i.tute, but only a Warwick living like a poor devil, smiled and said, with the tone of a man who has probed to the bottom the affairs of life:

"Bah! what is the use? All that is not so very desirable. Ministers, academicians, millionaires, prefects, men of power, I know all about them. I have made them all my life. The majority of those who strut about at this very time, well! well! it is I who made them!"

And, like a philosopher allowing the rabble to pa.s.s him, who might have been their chief, but preferred to be their judge, he locked himself in his apartments with his books, his pictures, his engravings, his little collection slowly gathered year by year, article by article, smoking his pipe tranquilly, and at times reviewing the pages of his life, just as he might have fingered the leaves of a portfolio of engravings, thinking when he chanced to meet some notable person of the day who shunned him or merely saluted him curtly and stiffly:

"You were not so proud when you came to ask me to certify your pay-slip for the cas.h.i.+er of the journal."

Ramel had always greatly esteemed Sulpice Vaudrey. This man seemed to him to be more refined and less forgetful than others. Vaudrey had never "posed." As a minister, he recalled with deep emotion the period of his struggles. Ramel, the former manager of the _Nation Francaise_, was one of the objects of his affection and admiration. He would have been delighted to s.n.a.t.c.h this man from his seclusion and place him in the first rank, to make this s.e.xagenarian who had created and moulded so many others, noteworthy by a sudden stroke.

Amid the tumultuous throng, and feeling overjoyed to find once more one whom he could trust, to whom he could abandon himself entirely, he repeated to him in all sincerity:

"Come, Ramel! Would you consent to be my secretary general?"

"No! your Excellency," Ramel answered, as a kindly smile played beneath his white moustaches.

"To oblige me?--To help me?"

"No--Why, I am an egotist, my dear Vaudrey. Truly, that would make me too jealous. Take Navarrot," he added, as he pointed to a fas.h.i.+onable man, elegantly cravatted, carrying his head high, who had just greeted Vaudrey, using the same phrase eight times: "My dear minister--your Excellency--my minister--"

"Navarrot?"

"He appears to be very much attached to you!"

"You are very wicked, Ramel. He holds to the office and not to the man.

He is not the friend of the minister, but of ministers. He is one of the ordinary touters of the ministry. He applauds everything that their Excellencies choose to say."

"Oh! I know those touters," said the old journalist. "When a minister is in power, they cheer him to the echo; when he is down, they belabor him."

Vaudrey looked at him and laughingly said: "Begone, journalist!"

"But at any rate,"--and here he extended his hand to Ramel,--"you will see me this evening?"

"Certainly."