His Excellency the Minister Part 6

"May I not set you down at your house, madame?"

"Your Excellency is very kind, but we have our own carriage!"

"Au revoir," said Vaudrey to Lissac, "come and breakfast with me to-morrow."

"With pleasure!"

"To the ministry!" said Vaudrey to the coachman as he stepped into his carriage.

He sank back upon the cus.h.i.+ons with a feeling of delight as if glad to be alone. All the scenes of that evening floated again before his eyes.

He felt once more in his nostrils the subtle, penetrating perfume of the greenroom, he saw again the blue eyes of the little danseuse. The admiring looks, the respectful salutes, the smiles of the women, the soft, caressing tones of Sabine, and Madame Gerson's pearly teeth, he saw or heard all these again, and above all, this word clear as a clarion, triumphant as a trumpet's blast: _Success!_ All this came back again to him.

"You have succeeded!"

He heard Guy's voice again speaking this to him in joyous tones.

Succeeded! It was certainly true.

Minister! Was it possible! He had at his beck and call a whole host of functionaries and servitors! He it was who had the power to make the whole machine of government move--he, the lawyer from Gren.o.ble--who ten years ago would have thought it a great honor to have been appointed to a place in the department of Isere!

All those people whom he could see in the shadow of the lighted boulevards buying the newspapers at the kiosks, would read therein his name and least gesture and action.

_"Monsieur le Ministre has taken up his residence on the Place Beauvau.

Monsieur Vaudrey this morning received the heads of the Bureaus and the personnel of the Department of the Ministry of the Interior. Monsieur Vaudrey, with the a.s.sistance of Monsieur Henri Jacquier of Oise, undersecretary of State, is actively engaged in examining the reports of prefects and under-prefects. Monsieur will doubtless make some needed reforms in the administration of the prefectures."_ Everywhere, in all the newspapers, Monsieur Vaudrey! The Minister of the Interior! He, his name, his words, his projects, his deeds!

Success! Yes, it was his, it had come!

Never in his wildest visions had he dreamed of the success that he had attained. Never had he expected to catch sight of such bright rays as those which now shone down upon him from that star, which with the superst.i.tion of an ambitious man, he had singled out. Success! Success!

And now all the world should see what he would do. Already in his own little town, in his speeches, during the war, at the elections of 1871, and especially at Versailles, during the years of struggle and political intrigue, in the tribune, or as a commissioner or sub-commissioner, he had given proofs of his qualifications as a statesman, but the touchstone of man is power. Emerging from his semi-obscurity into the suns.h.i.+ne of success, he would at last show the world what he was and what he could do. Power! To command! To create! To impress his ideas upon a whole nation! To have succeeded! succeeded! succeeded! Sulpice's dreams were realized at last.

And whilst the ministerial carriage was driving at a gallop towards the Place Beauvau, Sabine, m.u.f.fled up in her furs, her fine skin caressed by the blue-fox border of her pelisse, said to herself, quite indifferent to the man himself, but delighted to have a minister's name to enroll upon her list of guests:

"He is a simpleton--Vaudrey--but a very charming simpleton, nevertheless."

The iron gates of the Place Beauvau were thrown back for his Excellency's carriage to enter. The gravel creaked under the wheels, as the coupe turning off to the left, stopped under the awning over the door.

Sulpice alighted. The great door opened to admit him. Two white-cravatted servants occupied a bench while awaiting the minister's return.

Sulpice ran lightly up the great marble staircase leading to his private apartments. Handing his hat and coat to a servant in the antechamber, he gayly entered the little salon, where he found his wife sitting by a table reading _La Revue_ by the light of a shaded lamp. At the sight of her pretty, fresh young face extended to greet him, with her blue eyes and smiling air, at the sound of her clear, sweet, but rather timid voice asking a little anxiously: "Well?" Sulpice took the fair face in both his hands and his burning lips imprinted a long kiss on the white forehead, over which a few curls of golden hair strayed.

"Well, my dear Adrienne, I have been greatly interested. All the kindness with which I was received, the evident delight with which the new cabinet has been welcomed by the people, even the grimaces of Pichereau whom I met,--if you only knew where--all gave me pleasure, delighted me, and yet made me fear. Minister! Do you know what I have been thinking of since I was made a minister?"

"Of what have you been thinking?" asked the young wife, who, with her hands folded, gazed trustingly and sweetly into Sulpice's feverish eyes.

"I?--I have been telling myself that it is not enough to be a minister.

One must be a great minister! You understand, Adrienne, a great minister!"

As he spoke he took Adrienne's hands in his, and the young wife glanced up admiringly at this young man burning with hope, who stood there before her, declaring: "I will be great!"

She had never dreamed of his reaching such heights as these on that day when she felt the fingers of her fiance trembling in her hand, the day that Sulpice had whispered the words in her ear which made her heart leap with joy: "I love you, Adrienne, I shall always love you--Always!"

III

Sulpice Vaudrey had married Adrienne for love. She brought to him from the convent at Gren.o.ble where she had been educated, the charming innocence of a young girl and the innate devotion of a woman. She was an orphan with a considerable fortune, but although Sulpice had only moderate resources, he had scarcely thought of her wealth, not even inquiring of her guardian, Doctor Reboux, on the occasion of his formal demand for her hand, about the dowry of Mademoiselle Gerard.

He had met her at more than one soiree at Gren.o.ble, where she appeared timid, dazzled and retiring, and quietly interrogating everything by her sweet glance. Some few words exchanged carelessly, music which they had listened to side by side, the ordinary everyday intercourse in society, had made Sulpice acquainted with his wife; but the sight of the pretty blonde--so sweet and gentle--the childlike timidity of this young girl, something rather pensive in the confiding smile of this blooming creature of eighteen summers, had won him completely. He was free, and alone, for he had lost, but a short time before, the only creature he loved in the world, his mother, of whom he was the son in the double sense of flesh and spirit, by the nourishment of her breast and by the patient teaching that she had implanted in his mind.

He remembered only his father's dreamy and refined face in the portrait of a young, sad-looking man in a lawyer's black gown, before which he had stood when quite small, and spelled out as he might have lisped a prayer, the four letters: _papa_. Alone in this little town of Gren.o.ble, for which he had left his native village of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, he had, just before meeting Adrienne, fallen a victim to a profound melancholy and realized the necessity of deciding upon his career.

He was then thirty-four. Except the years spent in the study of law at Paris amid the turmoil of the left bank of the Seine, he had always lived in the province--his own province of Dauphine. He had grown up in the old house at Saint-Laurent, where every nook and corner kept for him its own sweet memory of his childhood and youth. The great white drawing-room with its wainscotings of the time of Louis XVI., which opened out upon a flight of steps leading down into a terraced garden; the portraits of obscure ancestors: lawyers in powdered wigs and wearing the robes of the members of the Third estate, fat and rosy with double chins resting upon their broad cravats, amiable old ladies with oddly arranged hair and flowered gowns, coquettish still as they smiled in their oval, wooden frames, and then the old books in their old-fas.h.i.+oned bindings slumbering in a great bookcase with gla.s.s doors, or piled up on shelves below the fowling-pieces, the game-bags and the powder-horns.

With this dwelling of which he thought so often now, his whole past was linked, about it still clung something of its past poetry, and it was sacred through the memories it preserved, and as the scene of the unforgotten joys of childhood. He could see again, the great stone-flagged kitchen, where they sat up at nights telling stories, the chamber above it, the bed with its heavy serge curtains, where he lay--sometimes shaking with terror--all alone, adjoining the room once occupied by his father, and the moonlight s.h.i.+ning through the tall old trees in the courtyard outside, that entering by the half-open blinds cast shadows like trembling lace on the wall opposite to him. It seemed to Sulpice then that he could hear the sounds of the weird demon's chase as told by old Catherine, the cook, in bated tones during their vigils.

It was there that he went every year to pa.s.s his holidays with his mother, who had had the courage to send him away,--just as during winter she had plunged him into cold water--to the Lyceum at Gren.o.ble, whence he would return to Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, "so thin, poor child!" as his mother said.

And how fat she would send him back again to school,--to make the masters ashamed of their stinginess.

How pleasant were the reminiscences of those sunny days amongst the mountains, the excursions to Grande Chartreuse, where the murmuring brook trickled among the rocks, the halts at Guiers-Mort or under the trees in the stillness of a drowsy day in summer; how delightful to stretch one's self out at the foot of the cliffs or on a gra.s.sy slope with a book, pausing now and then to indulge in day-dreams or glance up at the fleecy clouds floating in the blue sky above his head and watch them gathering, then vanis.h.i.+ng and melting away like smoke wreaths! Ah!

how sweet were those long, idle days full of dreams, when the noise of the waterfall das.h.i.+ng over the rocks lulled the senses like some merry song, or a nurse's tender, crooning lullaby.

In those days Sulpice made no plans for his future, where he would go, what he would do, or what would become of him; but he felt within himself unbounded hope, a hope as limitless and bright as the azure sky above him, the inspiration of devotion, love and poetry. He asked himself whether he should be a missionary or a representative of the people. It seemed to him that his heart was large enough to contain a world, and as he grew up he began to ask himself the terrible question: "Will a woman ever love me?"

To be loved! What a dream! One day he put this question to one of his comrades at college, Guy de Lissac, the son of a country gentleman in the neighborhood, who answered:

"b.o.o.by! every one is loved some day or other, and there are some who are loved even too much!"

Sulpice had received a patriarchal and half-puritanical training, but softened materially by his mother's almost excessive care, it had left, as it were, a kind of poetic perfume that clung about him and never left him.

Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing again his mother's voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy bal.u.s.ters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to trample with bare feet the great cl.u.s.ters of grapes piled up in the wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated! Even as a representative or minister, musing over his past that seemed but yesterday, Sulpice wandered again in thought to this quiet country spot, so loved by him, so sweet, so still, reposing in the silence of provincial calm--far away, removed from all the noise and bustle of Paris.

The farmers of Dauphine generally think of making their sons tillers of the soil, sending them to school and to college, perhaps to begin later the study of law or medicine, but welcoming them joyfully back again to their native fields, to their farms, where the youths soon forget all they may have learned of the Code or the Codex and lead the healthy, hardy life of the country. Good, well-built fellows, their chests enlarged by their daily exercise, their thighs strengthened by mountain-climbing, gay young men, liking to hunt and drink on the banks of the Isere and caring more for good harvests than for the songs of the wind amongst the branches of the poplars upon the river-banks.

Sulpice had an old uncle on his father's side who proposed to his sister-in-law to give up his broad acres--a fortune in themselves--to Sulpice, if his nephew would consent to marry his daughter. Sulpice refused. He would not marry for money.

"Fiddle-faddle!" cried his uncle. "Sickly sentimentality! If he cultivates that _grain_, my brother's son will not make much headway."

"There is where you are mistaken, brother-in-law. What my poor Raymond had not time to become, his child will be: a lawyer at once eloquent and honest."

"Well, well," replied the uncle, "but he shall not have my girl."

Sulpice, after finis.h.i.+ng his studies at Paris, returned to his mother at Gren.o.ble, took her away from the old house at Saint-Laurent and installed her in the town with himself, where he began the practice of law and attracted everybody's attention from the first. He made pleading a sacred office and not a trade. Everyone was astonished that he had not remained in Paris.

Why? He loved his native province, the banks of the Isere, the healthy, poetic atmosphere hanging over the desert of the Chartreuse and the snows of the Grand-Som. A talented man could make his way anywhere,--moreover, it was his pleasure to consider it a duty not to leave this secluded corner of the earth where he would cause freedom of speech to be known. Sulpice, whose heart was open to every ardent and generous manifestation of human thought, had imbibed from his mother, as well as from his father's writings and books, and from the _Encyclopaedia_ that Raymond Vaudrey had interlined with notes and reflections, not merely traditional information, but also, so to speak, the baptism of liberty. He had lived in the feverish days of the past eighty years, through his reading of the _Gazette Nationale_ of those stormy days. The speeches that he found in those pages--speeches that still burned like uncooled lava--of Mirabeau, Barnave, and Condorcet, a son of Gren.o.ble, seemed to impart a glow to his fingers and fire to his glance. Then, too, the magnificent dreams of freedom proclaimed from the tribune inflamed his mind and made his heart beat fast. He saw as in a vision applauding crowds, tricolors gleaming in the clear and golden sunlight, processions moving, files marching past, and heard eternal truths proclaimed and acclaimed.

His mother smiled at all this enthusiasm. She did not however try to repress it. It would vanish at the touch of years, just as the leaves of the trees fly before the winds of October. And besides, the dear woman herself was in sympathy with his hopes, his dreams and visions, remembering that her lost Raymond had loved what his son in his turn so much adored.