His Excellency the Minister Part 61

She fastened her bouquet of drooping roses to her corsage and without daring to look at Lissac again, she re-entered, leaning on Ramel's arm.

Left alone in the salon, Guy remained a moment to shake his head.

"Poor, dear creature!" he said. "If I had been young enough not to understand the position in which her madness placed me, or base enough to profit by it, what a pretty little preface to a great folly she was about to commit this evening! Well! this attack of morality will perhaps count in my favor some day."

He stooped down and picked up a rose that had fallen from Adrienne's bouquet to the carpet.

He smiled as he took up the flower and looked at it.

"One learns at any age!" he thought, as he put the flower in his coat.

"That, at least, is a love souvenir that they will not send the police to rob me of."

VII

On rising the following morning, after a feverish night, Sulpice realized a feeling of absolute moral destruction. It seemed to him that he had lost a dear being. In that huge, silent hotel one would have thought that a corpse was lying. He did not dare to present himself to Adrienne. He could not tell what to say to her. He went downstairs slowly, crossing the salons that were still decorated with the now fading flowers, to reach his cabinet. The carpet was littered with the broken leaves of dracaenas and petals that had fallen from the azaleas, and presented the gloomy, forsaken aspect peculiar to the morrow of a fete. The furniture, stripped of its coverings, offered the faded tint of old maids at their rising. With heavy head, he sat at his desk and looked at the piled-up doc.u.ments with a vague expression. Always the eternal pile of despatches, optimistic reports, and ba.n.a.l summaries of the daily press. Nothing new, nothing interesting, all was going well.

This tired world had no history.

The minister still remained there, absorbed as after an unhealthy insomnia, when Warcolier entered, ever serious, with his splendid, redundant phrases and his usual att.i.tude of a pedantic rhetor. He came to inform the minister that a matter of importance, perhaps of a troublesome nature, loomed on the horizon. Granet was preparing an interpellation. Oh! upon a matter without any real importance. An affair of a procession that had taken place at Tarbes, accompanied by some little disturbance. It was only a pretext, but it was sufficient, perhaps, to rally a majority around the _minister of to-morrow_. Old Henri de Prangins, with his eye on a portfolio, and always thirsting for power, was keeping Granet company: the man who would never be a minister with the man who was sure to be.

"Well, what has this to do with me?" asked Vaudrey indifferently.

Granet! Prangins! He was thinking of a very different matter. Adrienne knew all and Marianne deceived him. She was to marry Rosas.

The very serious Warcolier manifested much surprise at the little energy displayed by Monsieur le Ministre. He expected to see him bound, in order to rebound, as he said, believing himself witty. Was Vaudrey himself giving up the game? Was Granet then sure of the game? He surmised it and had already taken the necessary measures in that direction. But surely if Granet were the rising sun, Vaudrey was himself abandoning his character of the setting sun. He was not setting, he was falling. A sovereign contempt for this man entered Warcolier's lofty soul, Warcolier the friend of success.

"Then you do not understand, Monsieur le President?"

Vaudrey drew himself up with a sudden movement that was frequent with him. He struck the table on which his open portfolio rested, and said:

"I understand that Granet wants that portfolio! Well, be it so! I set little store by it, but he does not have it yet!"

"That is something like it! It is worthy of a brave man to show a resolute front to his enemies! It is in battle that talent is retempered, as formerly in the Styx were tempered--"

"I know," said Sulpice.

Warcolier's intelligent smile was not understood by the minister.

Sulpice, who was in despair over his shattered domestic joys, had no wish to enter on a struggle except to bring about a reaction on himself.

To hold his own against Granet, was to divert his own present sadness.

"All right," he said to Warcolier. "Let Granet interpellate us when he pleases--In eight days, to-morrow, yes, to-day even, I am ready!"

"Interpellate _us_!" thought Warcolier. "You should say, interpellate _you_."

He had already got out of the sc.r.a.pe himself.

Vaudrey debated with himself as to whether he would try to see Adrienne.

No? What should he say to her? It would be better to let a little time shed its balm upon the wound. Then, too, if he wished to bar the way to Granet, he had not too much time before him. The shrewd person should act promptly.

"I shall see him on the Budget Committee!" thought Vaudrey.

He found it necessary now to force an interest in the struggle which a few months before would have found him eagerly panting to enter on. The honeymoon of his love of power had pa.s.sed. He had too keenly felt, one after another, the discouragements of the office that he sought in order to _do good_, to reform, to act, in the pursuit of which he found himself, from the first moment, clas.h.i.+ng with routine, old-fas.h.i.+oned ideas, petty ambitions, the general welfare, all the brood of selfish interests. It had been his to dream a sort of Chimera bearing the country toward Progress on outstretched wings: he found himself entangled in the musty mechanism of a worn-out and rancid-smelling engine, that dragged the State as a broken-winded horse might have done.

Then, little by little, weariness and disgust had penetrated the heart of this visionary who desired to live, to a.s.sert himself in putting an end to so many abuses, and whom his colleagues, his chiefs of division, his chief of service, the chief of the State himself cautiously advised: "Make no innovations! Let things go! That has gone on so for so long!

What is the use of changing? It will still do very well!"

Ah! it was to throw off the shackles and to try the impossible! Vaudrey found himself hemmed in between his dearest hopes and the most disheartening realities. He was asked for offices, not reforms. The men charged with the fate of the country were not straggling after progress, they were looking after their own interests, their landed and shopkeeping interests. He felt nauseated by all this. He held those deputies in contempt who besieged his cabinet and filled his antechamber in order to beg, claim and demand. All of them sought something, and they were almost strangled by the solicitations of their own const.i.tuents. They appeared to Sulpice to be rather the commissionaires of universal suffrage than the servants. This abas.e.m.e.nt before the manipulators of the votes made Vaudrey indignant. He felt that France was becoming by degrees a vast market for favors, a nation in which everyone asked office from those who to keep their own promised everything, and the thought filled him with terror. The ministers, wedded to their positions, became the mere servants of the deputies, while the latter obeyed the orders of their const.i.tuents. All was kept within a vast network of office-seeking and trafficking. And with it all, a hatred of genuine talent, bitter selfishness and the crus.h.i.+ng narrowness of ideas!

Vaudrey recalled a story that had been told him, how during the Empire, the Emperor, terrified, feeling himself isolated, asked and searched for a man, and how a certain little bell in the Tuileries was especially provided to warn the chamberlains of the entry into the chateau of a new face, of the visit of a stranger, in order that the camarilla, warned by the particular ring, would have time to place themselves on their guard, and to send the newcomer to the right about if he might become an aid to the master and a danger to the servants. Well! Sulpice did not hear that invisible and secret bell, but he guessed its presence, he divined its presence around him, warning the interested, always ready to chase away the stranger; he felt that its secret thread was everywhere thrown around the powerful, the mighty of four days or a quarter of a century and that, so long as influence existed in the world, there would be courtiers and that these courtiers, eager for a crumb, would prevent the stranger, that is to say, truth, from reaching the light, fearing that this stranger might play the part of the lion and chase the flies away from the honeycomb.

Thus, how much nausea and contempt he felt for that transient power which in spite of himself was rendered useless! A power that placed him at the mercy of the bawling of a colleague or an enemy, and even at the mercy of that all-powerful master so readily dissatisfied: everybody. He had seen, at too close quarters, the vile intrigues, the depressing chafferings, the grinding of that political kitchen in which so many people,--this Warcolier with his voluble rhetoric, this Granet with his conceited smile of superiority,--were hungering to hold the handle of the saucepan. He recalled a remark that Denis Ramel had often repeated to him: "What is the use of putting one's self out in order to bask in the suns.h.i.+ne? The best are in the shade."

He was seized with lawful indignation against his own ambitions, against the lack of energy that prevented him from sweeping away all obstacles,--men, and routine,--and he recalled with afflicting bitterness his entry on public life, in the blaze of divine light, and his dreams, his poor n.o.ble dreams! "A great minister! I will be a great minister!"

"Ah! yes, indeed! one is a minister, that is all! And that is enough! It is often too much! We shall see indeed what he will do, that Granet who ought to do so much!"

Vaudrey laughed nervously.

"What he will do? Nothing! Nothing! Still nothing! That is very easy! To do anything, one should be a great man and not a politician captivated with the idea of reaching the summit of power. Ah! _parbleu!_ to be a great man! 'That is the question.'"

He grew very excited over the proud rebellion of his old faith and shattered hopes against the negative success he had obtained. Besides, there was no reason for giving up the struggle. There was a council to be held at the elysee. He went there, but at this moment of disgust, disgust of everything and himself, this palace like all the rest, seemed to him to be gloomy and mean. An usher in black coat and white cravat, wearing a chain around his neck, wandered up and down the antechamber, according to custom, his shoes covered with the dust from the carpet trodden upon by so many people, either applicants or functionaries. The gaslight burning in broad day as in the offices in London was reflected on the cold walls that shone like marble. Doors ornamented with gilt nails and round, ivory k.n.o.bs and without locks, were noiselessly swinging to and fro. Wearied office-seekers with tired countenances were spread out upon the garnet-colored velvet chairs, which were like those of a middle-cla.s.s, furnished house.

From time to time, the tiresome silence was broken by the sound of near or distant electric bells. Vaudrey, who arrived before his colleagues, studiously contemplated the surroundings ironically. An estafette, a gendarme, arrived with a telegram; the usher signed a receipt for it.

That was all the life that animated this silent palace. A man with a military air, tall, handsome and in tightly-b.u.t.toned frock-coat, pa.s.sed and saluted the President of the Council; then, Jouvenet, the Prefect of Police, looking like a notary's senior clerk, his abundant black hair plastered on his head, a large, black portfolio under his arm, approached the minister and bowed. Vaudrey, having Lissac in mind, returned his salutation coldly.

"I will speak to you presently, Monsieur le Prefet."

"Good! Monsieur le Ministre!"

In spite of the foot-soldier and the Parisian guard on duty at the door of the palace, all that now seemed to Vaudrey to lack official solemnity, and resembled rather a temporary and melancholy occupation.

"Bah! And if I should never set my foot in this place again," he thought, as he remembered Granet's interpellation, "what would it matter to me?"

He was informed first at the Council and then at the Chamber, that Granet would not introduce his question until the next day. Vaudrey had the desired time to prepare himself. In the Budget Committee, where he met Granet, the _minister of to-morrow_ asked him an inopportune question concerning the expenses of the administration. Vaudrey was angered and felt inclined to treat it as a personal question. It now only remained for his adversaries to begin to suspect him! To appear so was even now too much. Sulpice took Granet up promptly, the latter a.s.sured him that "his colleague and friend, the President of the Council," had entirely misconstrued the meaning of his words.

"Well and good!" said Vaudrey.

He was not sorry that the interpellation was not to take place at once.

Before to-morrow, he would have placed his batteries. And then he would think of quieting Adrienne, of regaining her, perhaps. On returning to the ministry, he caused some inquiries to be made as to whether Madame were not sick. Madame had gone out. She had gone out as if she were making a pilgrimage to a cemetery, to the apartment in Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin, whereon might have been written: _Here lies_. It was like the tomb of her happiness.

She would not see Sulpice again. In the evening, however, she consented to speak to him.

Her poor, gentle face was extremely pale, and as if distorted by some violent pain.

"You will find some excuse," she said, "for announcing that I am ill. I am leaving for Gren.o.ble. I have written to my uncle, the Doctor expects me, and all that now remains to me is a place in his house."