His Excellency the Minister Part 65

"Molina!" said Vaudrey, becoming very pale. "Show him in!"

The fat Salomon entered puffing and smiling, and spread himself out on an armchair as he said to the former minister:

"Well, how goes it?--Not too badly crushed, eh?--Bah! what is it after all to quit office?--Only a means for returning to it, sometimes!"

"All the same," he said with his cackling laugh that sounded like the jingling of a money-bag, "there are too many changes of ministers! They change them like s.h.i.+rts! It puts me out. I get used to one Excellency and he is put aside! So it is settled, henceforth I will not say Excellency save to the usher or an office-boy!"

He accompanied his clumsy jests with a loud laugh, then, changing his tone:

"Come, that is not all. I came to speak of business to you."

He looked Vaudrey full in the face with his piercing glance, took from his pocketbook a printed sheet and said in a precise tone:

"Here is an opportunity where your t.i.tle of former minister will serve you better than that of minister. So much is being said of Algeria, its mines and its fibre. Well, read that!"

Vaudrey took the paper. It was the prospectus, very skilfully drawn, of a company established to introduce gas into Algeria, almost as far as the Sahara. They promised the subscribers wonders and miracles: acres upon acres of land as a bonus. There was a fortune to be made. Meantime, they would issue six thousand shares of five hundred francs. It was three millions they were asking from the public. A mere trifle.

"They might ask ten," said Molina, smiling. "They would give it!"

"And you wish me to subscribe to your Algerian gas?" asked Vaudrey.

The fat Molina burst out into loud laughter this time.

"I? I simply wish to give you the opportunity to make a fortune!"

"How?"

"That is one scheme. I will bring you four, five, ten of them! I have another, the Luxemburg coal. A deposit equal to that of Charleroi. You have only to allow me to print in the list of directors: Monsieur Sulpice Vaudrey, former President of the Council."

Vaudrey looked the fat man squarely in the face.

"Besides you will be in good company!" said the banker as he read over the names of deputies, senators, statesmen, coupled with those of financiers.

Sulpice knew most of them.

He despised nearly all of them. It was such that Molina styled _good company!_

"And those mines, are you certain they will produce what you promise?"

"Ah!" said Salomon, "that is the engineers' matter! Here is the report of a mining engineer who is perhaps straining after effect and doing a little puffing up! But one must go with the times! He who ventures nothing, has nothing. In war, one risks one's skin; in business, one risks one's money. That is war."

Vaudrey debated with himself whether he should tear the prospectus in pieces and throw them in the face of the fat man.

"My dear Vaudrey," said the _Tumbler_, "you have a vein that is entirely your own. A former minister remains always a former minister.

Well, such a t.i.tle as that is turned to account. It is quoted, like any other commodity. You are not rich, that fact proves your honesty, although in America, and we are Americanizing ourselves devilishly much, that would only be the measure of your stupidity. You can become rich, I have the means of making myself agreeable to you and you have the opportunity of becoming useful to us."

"In a word, you buy my name?"

"I hire it from you! Very dearly," said Molina, still laughing.

"Certainly," said Vaudrey, "you did not understand me on the first occasion that you called on me to speak about money, and when I questioned with myself whether I should ask you not to call again."

Molina interrupted him abruptly by rising. He felt that an insult was about to be uttered. He parried it by antic.i.p.ating it.

"Stupidity!" he said. "Here is the prospectus. There are the names of the directors. You will consider. It has never injured any one to take advantage of his position. The puritans, in an age of trickery, are idiots; I say so. What I propose to you surprises you. To place your name beside that of Monsieur Pichereau or Monsieur Numa de Baranville!

It is as simple as saying good-day. Perhaps you think then that you will be the only one? They all do it, all those who are extravagant and shrewd. It is a matter of coquetting in these days over a hundred-sou piece! Come, I will wager that Monsieur Montyon would not mince matters--especially if he had transferable paper in circulation!"

"You know that?" said Vaudrey, turning pale.

"Ah! I know many others in like condition! Come, no false modesty! It is a matter of business only! I tell you again, I have many other cases.

All this is in order to have the pleasure of offering you certificates for attendance fees. I will open a credit for you of two hundred thousand francs, if you wish. We will arrange matters afterwards."

"I will leave you these declarations of faith!" added Molina, showing the prospectus of the gas undertaking. "Fear nothing! It is not more untruthful than the others! It is unnecessary to show me out. _A la revista!_"

He disappeared abruptly, Vaudrey hearing the floor of the hall creak under this man's hippopotamus feet, and the unhappy Sulpice who had spun so many, such glorious and grand dreams, dreams of liberty, freedom and virtue, civic regeneration, reconstructed national morals and character, the sacredness of the hearth and the education of the conscience; this Vaudrey, bruised by life, overthrown by his vices, was there under the soft light of his lamp, looking with staring eye, as a being who wishes to die contemplates the edge of an abyss, looking at that printed paper soliciting subscriptions, beating the big drum of the _promoter_ in order to entrap the vast and ever-credulous horde.

His name! To put his name there! The name of Vaudrey that he had dreamed of reading at the foot of so many n.o.ble, eternal and reforming laws, to inscribe it upon that paper beneath so many cunning names, jugglers, habitual drainers of the public cash-box. To fall to that! To do that!

To lend himself?

To sell himself!

And why not sell himself? Who would discharge this bill of exchange? The Gochard paper! The debt of the past! The price of the nights spent with Marianne! The hundred thousand francs for that girl's kisses!

Sulpice felt in the weakness increased by a growing fever, that his self-possession was leaving him. All his ideas clashed confusedly. Amid the chaos, only one clear idea remained; a hundred and sixty thousand francs had to be found. Where were they to be found? Yes, where? Through Molina, who offered him two hundred thousand! This open credit seemed to him like an opened-up placer in which he had only to dig with his nails.

The cunning and thick voice of the Hebrew banker echoed in Sulpice's ears: "They all do it!" It was not so difficult to give his name, or to _hire_ it, as Salomon said. Who the devil would notice it at a time when indifference pa.s.ses over scandals as the sea covers the putrid substances on the sh.o.r.e and washes them with its very sc.u.m?

"They all do it!"

No, despite the irony of the handler of money, there are some consciences that refuse to yield: and then, what then?--Vaudrey had desired virtue of a different kind and other morals! Ah! how he had suffered the poison to penetrate him; even to his bones! How Marianne had deformed and moulded him at her fancy, and he still thought of her only with unsatisfied longings for her kisses and ardor! Ah! women!

Woman! Yes, indeed, yes, woman was the great source of moral weakness and inactivity. She used politics in her own way, in destroying politicians. If he had only left office with head erect and not dragging the chain-shot of debt! But that bill of exchange! Who would pay that?

"Eh! Molina, _parbleu!_ Molina! Molina!"

He was right, too, that triumphant Jew with his insolent good humor. It is an absurd thing, after all, to be prudish and to thrust away the dish that is offered you. To be rich is, in fact, quite as good as to be powerful! Money remains! That is the only real thing in the world! It would be a fine sight to see a man refuse the opportunity to make a fortune, and to refuse it--why? For a silly, conscientious scruple. And after all, business was the very life of modern society. This Molina, circulating his money, was as useful as many others who circulate ideas.

"His Algerian gas is a work of civilization just like any other!"

Urged by the necessity of escaping from that debt that strangled him like a running noose, Sulpice gradually arrived at argumentative sophistries, which were but capitulations to his own probity, cowardly arrangements with his own conscience. His name? Well, he would turn it into money since it was worth a gold ingot! The journalist who sells his thought, the artist who sells his marble, the writer who sells his experiences and his recollections, equally sell their names and for money, the flesh of their flesh. Like a living answer and a remorse, he saw the lean face and white moustache of Ramel, who was seated at the window, breathing the warm rays of the sun, in the little room on Rue Boursault, but he answered, speaking aloud:

"Well, what?--Ramel is a saint, a hero!--But I am no saint. I am a man and I will live!"

Somewhat angered, he took the prospectus that Molina had left him and rereading it again and again, he relapsed into a sitting posture and with haggard eyes scanned the loud-swelling lines of that commercial announcement, seeking therein some pretext for accepting. For he would accept, that was done. Nothing more was to be said, his conscience yielded. He was inclined to laugh.

"Still another victim caught and floored by Molina the _Tumbler!_"

He remained there, terrified at the prospect of the quasi-a.s.sociation he had determined on and by his complicity with a jobber of questionable business.

With his eye fixed upon this solicitation for capital, wherein were the words which would formerly have repelled him: _joint stock company_, _capital stock_, _public subscription_, _subscription certificate_, and at the head of which he was about to inscribe his name as one of the directors, at the foot of a capitulation, as it were, Sulpice had not seen, standing in the doorway of his half-lighted study, a woman in travelling costume, who stopped for a moment to look at the unfortunate, dejected man within the shade of the lamp which made him look more bald than he was, then advanced gently toward him, coughing slightly--for she did not dare to call him by his name or touch him with her gloved hand--to warn him that she was there.