His Excellency the Minister Part 24

"If you wish," he replied. Then, in an almost embarra.s.sed tone, he added:

"Perhaps it will be better for me to go alone--I have to think--to work--There is no sitting at the Chamber to-day; and the day is entirely at my own disposal."

"Just as you please," Adrienne replied, looking at Sulpice with a tender and submissive glance. "It would, however, have been so delightful and beneficial to have gone to the Bois together on such a bright day! But you and your affairs before everything, you are right; take an airing, be off, come, breathe--I shall be glad to see you return smiling cheerfully as in the sweet days."

Sulpice looked at his young wife with a fondness that almost inspired him with remorse. In her look there was so complete an expression of her love. Then her affection was so deep, and her calm like the face of a motionless lake was so manifest, and she loved him so deeply, so intelligently. And how trustful, too!

He was impelled now to beg her don her cloak and to have a fur robe put into the coupe and set out now, when the sun was gradually showing itself, like two lovers bound for a country party. At the same time he felt a desperate longing to be alone, to abandon himself to his new idea and to the image that beset him. He felt that he was leaving Adrienne for Marianne.

He did not hold to the suggestion, in fact, he repeated that it would be better if he were alone. As there would be no session of the Chamber for a whole week, he would go out with Adrienne the next day. The coachman could drive them a long distance, even to Saint-Cloud or Ville-d'Avray.

They would breakfast together all alone, unknown, in the woods.

"Truly?" said Adrienne.

"Truly! I feel the necessity of avoiding so many demonstrations in my honor."

Sulpice laughed.

"I am stifled by them," he said, as he kissed Adrienne, whose face was pink with delight at the thought of that unrestrained escapade.

"How you blus.h.!.+" said Sulpice, ingenuously. "What is the matter with you?"

"With me? Nothing."

She looked at him anxiously.

"You think my complexion too ruddy! I have not the Parisian tint. Only remain a minister for some time, and that will vanish. There is no dispraise in that."

She again offered her brow to him.

He left her, happy to feel himself free.

At last! For an entire day he was released from the ordinary routine of his life; from the wrangling of the a.s.sembly, the hubbub of the corridors, the gossip of the lobbies, interruptions, interrupted conversations, from all that excitement that he delighted in, but which at times left him crushed and feverish at the close of the day. He became once more master of his thoughts, of his meditation. He belonged to himself. It was almost impossible to recover his self-mastery in the stormy arena into which he was thrust, happy to be there, and where his distended nostrils inhaled, as it were, the fumes of sulphur.

At times, amid the whirlwind of politics, he suffered from a yearning for rest, a sick longing for home quiet, a desire to be free, to go between the acts, as it were, to vegetate in some corner of the earth and to resume in very truth an altogether different life from the exasperating, irritating life that he led in Paris, always, so to speak, under the lash; or, still better, to change the form of his activity, to travel, to feed his eyes on new images, the fresh verdure, or the varied scenes of unknown cities.

But the years had rolled by amid the excitement and nervous strain of political life. He lived with Adrienne in an artificial and overheated atmosphere. Happy because he was loved, that his ambitions were realized, that he charmed an a.s.sembly of men by the same power that had obtained him the adoration of this woman, yes, he was happy, very happy: to bless life, to excite envy, to arouse jealousy, to appear simply ridiculous if he complained of destiny; and nevertheless, at the bottom of his soul, discontented without knowing why, consumed by intangible, feverish instincts, ill-defined desires for Parisian curiosities, having dreamed in his youth of results very inferior to those he had realized, yet finding when he a.n.a.lyzed the realities that he enjoyed, that the promises of his dreams were more intoxicating than the best realizations.

Vaudrey was an ambitious man, but he was ambitious to perform valiant feats. Life had formerly seemed to him to be made up of glory, triumphal entries into cities, accompanied by the fluttering of flags and the flourish of trumpets. He pictured conquests, victories, exaltations!

Theatrical magnificence! But now, more ironical, he was contented with quasi-triumphs, if his restless, anxious nature could be satisfied with what he obtained.

Adrienne loved him. He loved her profoundly.

Why had the meeting with Marianne troubled him so profoundly, then?

Manifestly, Mademoiselle Kayser realized the picture of his vanished dreams, and the desires of a particular love that the pa.s.sion for Adrienne, although absolute, could not satisfy. This man had a nature of peculiar ardor--or rather, curious desires, a greedy desire to know, an itching need to approach and peep into abysses.

Sometimes it seemed to Vaudrey that he had not lived at all, and this was the fear and desire of his life: to live that Parisian life which flattered all his instincts and awoke and reanimated all his dreams. But yesterday it had appeared to him when he met this young woman who raised her eyes to him, half-veiled by her long eyelashes, that a stage-curtain had been raised, disclosing dazzling fairy scenery, and since then that scenery had been always before him. It banished, during his drive, all peace, and while the coupe threaded its way along the Faubourg Saint-Honore toward the Arc-de-Triomphe, the minister who, but two hours before, had been plunged in state affairs, settled himself down in a corner of the carriage, his legs swaddled in a robe and his feet resting on a foot-warmer, looking at, but without observing the cold figures that walked rapidly past him, the houses lighted up by the sun's rays, and the dry pavements, and he thought of those strange eyes and those black b.u.t.terflies, which seemed to him to flutter over that fair hair like swallows over a field of ripe wheat.

It pleased him to think of that woman. It was an entirely changed preoccupation, a relaxation. A curious, strangely agreeable sensation: his imagination thus playing truant, and wandering toward that vision, renewed his youth. He experienced therein the perplexities that troubled him at twenty. Love in the heart means fewer white hairs on the brow.

And then, indeed, he would never, perhaps, see Mademoiselle Kayser again! He would, however, do everything to see her again at the coming soiree at the ministry, an invitation--Suddenly his thoughts abruptly turned to Ramel, whom he also wished to invite and meet again. He loved him so dearly. It was he who formerly, in the journalistic days, and at the time of the battles fought in the _Nation Francaise_, had called Denis "a conscience in a dress-coat."

Therefore, since he had an afternoon to spare, he would call on Ramel.

He was determined to show him that he would never preserve the dignity of a minister with him.

"Rue Boursault, Batignolles," he said to the coachman, lowering one of the windows; "after that, only to the Bois!"

The coachman drove the coupe toward the right, reaching the outer boulevards by way of Monceau Park.

Vaudrey was delighted. He was going to talk open-heartedly to an old friend. Ah, Ramel! he was bent on remaining in the background, on being nothing and loving his friends only when they were in defeat, as Jeliotte had said. Well, Vaudrey would take him as his adviser. This devil of a Ramel, this savage fellow should govern the state in spite of himself.

The minister did not know Ramel's present lodging which he had occupied only a short time. He expected to find dignified poverty and a cold apartment. As soon as Denis opened the door to him, he found himself in a workman's dwelling that had been transformed by artistic taste into the small museum of a virtuoso. After having pa.s.sed through a narrow corridor, and climbed a small, winding staircase, Vaudrey rang at the third floor of a little house in Rue Boursault and entered a well-kept apartment full of sunlight.

Hanging on the walls were engravings and crayons in old-fas.h.i.+oned frames. A very plain mahogany bookcase contained some select volumes, which, though few, were frequently perused and were swollen with markers covered with notes. The apartment was small and humble: a narrow bedroom with an iron bedstead, a dressing room, a tiny dining-room furnished with cane-seated chairs, and the well-lighted study with his portraits and his frames of the old days. But with this simplicity, as neat as a newly-shaved old man, all was orderly, and arranged and cared for with scrupulous attention.

This modest establishment, the few books, the deep peace, the oblivion found in this Batignolles lodging, in this home of clerks, poor, petty tradesmen and workmen, sufficed for Ramel. He rarely went out and then only to take a walk from which he soon returned exhausted. He had formerly worked so a.s.siduously and had given, in and out of season, all his energy, his nerves and his body, improvising and scattering to the winds his appeals, his protests, his heart, his life, through the columns of the press. What an acc.u.mulation of pages, now destroyed or buried beneath the dust of neglected collections! How much ink spilled!

And how much life-blood had been mingled with that ink!

Ramel willingly pa.s.sed long hours every day at his study window, looking out on the green trees or at the high walls of a School of Design opposite, or at the end of a tricolored flag that waved from the frontal of a Primary Normal School that he took delight in watching; then at the right, in the distance, throbbing like an incessant fever, he saw the bustling life of the Saint-Lazare Station, where with every shrill whistle of the engines, he saw white columns of smoke mount skyward and vanish like breaths.

"Smoke against smoke," thought Ramel, with his pipe between his teeth.

"And it would be just as well for one to struggle--a lost unity--against folly, as for a single person to desire to create as much smoke as all these locomotives together!"

Ramel appeared to be delighted to see Vaudrey, whose name the housekeeper murdered by announcing him as _Monsieur Vaugrey_. He placed a chair for him, and asked him smilingly, what he wanted "with an antediluvian journalist."

"A mastodon of the press," he said.

What had Vaudrey come for?

His visit had no other object than to enjoy again a former faithful affection, the advice he used to obtain, and also to try to drag the headstrong Ramel into the ministry. Would not the directors.h.i.+p of the press tempt him?

"With it, the directing of the press!" said Denis. "It is much better to have an opposition press than one that you have under your thumb.

Friendly sheets advise only foolishly."

"Why, Vaudrey, do you know," suddenly exclaimed the veteran journalist, "that you are the first among my friends who have come into power--I say the first--who has ever thought of me?"

"You cannot do me a greater pleasure than tell me so, my dear Ramel. I know nothing more contemptible than ingrates. In my opinion, to remember what one owes to people, is to be scrupulously exact; it is simply knowing orthography."

"Well! mercy! there are a devilish lot of people who don't know if the word grat.i.tude is spelled with an _e_ or an _a_. No, people are not so well skilled as that in orthography. There are not a few good little creatures to be sent back to school. All the more reason to be thankful for having learned by heart--by heart, that is the way to put it, my dear Vaudrey--your participles."

Sulpice was well acquainted with Ramel's singular wit, a little sly, but tinged with humor, like pure water into which a drop of gin has been poured, more perfumed than bitter. He knew no man more indulgent and keen-sighted than him.

"For what should I bear a grudge against people?" said the veteran. "For their stupidity? I pity them, I haven't time to dislike them; one can't do everything."

Besides, the minister felt altogether happy to be with this man no longer in vogue, but who might be likened to coins that have ceased to be current and have acquired a higher value as commemorative medals. He could unbosom himself to him: treachery was impossible. He longed to have such a stay beside him, and still urged him, but Ramel was inflexible.

"But as I have already said--if I have need of you?"

"Of me? I am too old."