His Excellency the Minister Part 9

He had thrown on a chair his damask napkin of Muscovite pattern, and instinctively glanced at himself in the mirror, just as a coquette might do before a rendezvous, smoothing out his flannel vest and spreading out his cravat that only half-fastened the blue foulard collar of his dressing-gown.

At the moment that he was examining the folds made on his red leather slippers by his ample flannel trousers, a woman half-raised the satin portiere, and, standing within a frame formed by the folds of yellow satin, looked at the young man, displaying her brilliant teeth as she smilingly said:

"Good-morning, Guy!"

Lissac went straight toward her with outstretched hands.

She allowed the large satin portiere to fall behind her, and after having permitted her little suede gloved hands to be raised for a moment, she boldly abandoned them to Guy, laughing the while, as they looked at each other face to face. He betrayed some little astonishment, gazing at her as a person examines one whom one has not seen for a long time, and the young woman raised her head unabashed, displaying her features in full light, as if submitting to an inspection with confidence.

"You did not expect me, eh?"

"I confess--"

"Doubtless it is a considerable time since you thought of me."

Guy was inclined to bow and, as his only reply, to kiss the tips of her fingers; but he reflected that, since they last met, the parting of his brown locks had been devilishly widened, and he remained standing, answering with the conceit of a handsome man:

"You are mistaken, I often think of you."

She had, with, a sweeping glance around the room, examined the furniture of the apartment, the framed pictures, the designs and the gilding, and, on sitting down near the fire with her little feet crossed, she expressed her opinion:

"Very stylishly ensconced! You always had good taste, I know, my dear Guy."

"I have less now than formerly, my dear Marianne," he said, giving to this airy remark the turn of a compliment.

Marianne shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

"Do you find me very much altered?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes, rejuvenated."

"I don't believe a word of it."

"Upon my honor. You look like a communicant."

"Good heavens! what kind?" said Marianne, laughing in a clear, ringing, but slightly convulsive tone.

He was still looking at her curiously, seated thus near the fireplace.

The bright and sparkling fire cast its reflections on the gold frames in waving and rosy tints that brightened the somewhat pale complexion of this young woman and imparted a warm tone to her small and brilliant gray eyes. She half turned her fair face toward him, her retrousse nose was tiny, spirituelle and mobile, her large sensuous mouth was provoking and seductive, and suggested by its upturned corners, encouragement or a challenge.

She had allowed her cloak, whose fur tr.i.m.m.i.n.g was well-worn, to slip from her shoulders, exposing her form to the waist; she trembled slightly in her tight-fitting dress, and golden tints played on her bare neck, which was almost hidden under the waves of her copper-colored hair.

She had just taken off her suede gloves with a jerky movement and was abstractedly twisting them between her fingers.

In spite of the somewhat depressing effect of her worn garments, she displayed a natural elegance, a perfect form and graceful movements, and Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition of people, divined that this woman felt some embarra.s.sment. She whom he had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now burned out like an exploded rocket.

Marianne Kayser!

Of all the women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, pa.s.sionate and half-mad.

She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too rebellious to accept the humiliations of destiny.

She was an orphan, and had been brought up by her uncle, Simon Kayser, a serious painter, indifferent to all that did not concern his art,--its morality, its dignity, its superiority--who had, under cover of his own ignorance, allowed the ardent dreams of his niece and her wayward fits to develop freely like poisonous plants; near this man, in the vicious atmosphere of an old bachelor's disorderly household, Marianne had lived the bitter life of a young woman out of her element, poor, but with every instinct unswervingly leaning towards the enjoyments of luxury.

She had grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and, as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the child lighted his stove and filled his pipe.

The studio was littered with books. As chance offered, she read them all eagerly and examined with curiosity the pictures drawn by an Eisen or a Moreau, depicting pa.s.sionate kisses exchanged under arbors, where behind curtains, short silk skirts appeared in a rumpled state. She had rapidly reached womanhood without Kayser's perceiving that she could comprehend and judge for herself.

This falsely inspired man, entirely devoted to mystical compositions, vaguely painted--philosophical and critical, as he said--this thinker, whose brush painted obscure subjects as it might have produced signs, did not dream that the girl growing up beside him was also in love with chimeras, and drawn toward the abyss, not however to learn the mysteries hidden by the clouds, but the mystery of life, the secret of the visions that haunted her, of the disquieting temptations that filled her with such feverish excitement.

If Uncle Kayser could for one moment have descended from the nebulous regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor in the depth of Marianne's glance, and something feverish and restless in her movements. But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, aesthetic dignity, and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission for it, an end, an idea--_art the educator, art the moralizer_,--and allowed this feverish, wearied, impulsive creature, moulded by vice, who bore his name, to wander around his studio like a stray dog.

Isolated, forgotten, the young girl sometimes pa.s.sed whole days bending over a book, her lips dry, her face pale, but with a burning light in her gray eyes, while her fingers were thrust through her hair, or she rested upon a window-sill, following afar off, some imaginary picture in the depths of the clouds.

The studio overlooked a silent, gloomy street in which no sound was heard save the slow footfalls of weary and exhausted pedestrians. It was stifling behind this window and Marianne's gloomy horizon was this frame of stones against which her wandering thoughts bruised themselves as a bird might break its wings.

Ah! to fly away, to escape from the solemn egotism and the theories of Simon Kayser, and to live the pa.s.sionate life of those who are free, loved, rich and happy! Such was the dream upon which Marianne nourished herself.

She had perpetually before her eyes, as well as before her life, the gray wall of that high house opposite the painter's studio, pierced with its many eyes, and whether on summer's stifling evenings, the shutters closed--the whole street being deserted, the neighbors having gone into the country--or in winter, with its gray sky, the roofs covered with the snow that was stained all too soon, when the brilliant lights behind the curtains looked like red spots on the varnished paper, Marianne ever felt in her inmost being the bitter void of Parisian melancholy, the overwhelming sadness of black loneliness, of hollow dreams, gnawing like incurable sorrows.

She grew up thus, her mind and body poisoned by this dwelling which she never left except to drag her feet wearily through the galleries of the Louvre, leaning on the arm of her uncle, who invariably repeated before the same pictures, in the loud and bombastic tone of a _comediante_, the same opinions, and grew enthusiastic and excited according as the pictures of the masters agreed with his _style_, his _system_, his _creed_. One should hear him run the gamut of all his great phrases: My _sys-tem!_ Marianne knew when the expression was coming. All these Flemish painters! Painters of snuff-boxes, without any ideal, without grasp! "And the t.i.tian, look at this t.i.tian! Where is _thought_ expressed in this t.i.tian? And _mo-ral-i-ty?_ t.i.tian! A vendor of pink fles.h.!.+ Art should have a majesty, a dignity, a purity, an ideality very different."

Ah! these words in _ty_, solemn, bombastic, pedantic, with a false ring, they entered Marianne's ears like burning injections.

These visits to the museum impressed her with a gloom such as a ramble in a cemetery would create, she returned to the house with depressing headaches and muttering wrathful imprecations against destiny. She even preferred that studio with its worn-out divans and its worm-eaten tapestries that were slowly shredding away.

There, at least, she was all alone, face to face with herself, consumed by a cowardly fear--the fear of the future--this young girl who had read everything, learned everything, understood everything, knew everything, sullied by all the jokes of the Kayser studio, which, in spite of the exalted, sacrosanct, aesthetic discussions which took place therein, sometimes shockingly resembled a smoking-room--this physical virgin without any virginity of mind, could there take refuge in herself, and there in the solitude to which she was condemned, she questioned herself as to the end to which her present life would lead her.

Of dowry she had none. Her father had left her nothing. Kayser was poor and in debt. She had no occupation. To run about giving private lessons on the piano, seemed to Marianne to degrade her almost to the level of domestic service. Those who wished to pose for the Montyon prize might do so! She never would!

Ah! what sufferings! what would be the end of such a life? Marriage? But who desired her? One of those talentless painters, who ventilated at Kayser's house, not merely their contemptuous theories, but also their down-at-the-heel shoes? To fall from one Bohemian condition to another, from exigency to want, to be the wife of one of these greasy-haired dreamers? Her whole nature shuddered in revolt at this idea. Through the open window, the tepid breath of nature wafted toward her the odor of the rising sap in gentle, warm whiffs that filled her with a feverish astonishment. Stretched on the patched divan, her eyes closed and her lovely form kissed by the tepid breeze, she dreamed, dreamed, dreamed--

The awakening was folly, a rash act, an elopement.

In the house on Rue de Navarin there happened to be one fellow more daring than the rest, he was an artist who, in the jostling daily life, kindled his love at the strange flame that burned in the l.u.s.tful virgin's eyes. A glance revealed all.

The meeting with a rake determined the life of this girl. She fell, not through ignorance or curiosity, but moved by anger and, as it were, out of bravado. Since she was without social position, motherless and isolated, having no family, without a prop and unloved, well, she threw off the yoke absolutely. She broke through her shackles at one bound.

She rebelled!--

She eloped with this man.

He was a handsome fellow, who thirsted for pleasure, and took his prize boldly about, plunging Marianne into the ranks of vulgar mistresses, and had not the mad woman's superior intelligence, will, and even her disgust, ruled at once over this first lover and the equivocal surroundings into which he had thrust her, she would have become a mere courtesan.

Kayser had experienced only astonishment at the flight of his niece. How was it that he had never suspected the cause that disturbed her thoughts? "These diabolical women, n.o.body knows them, not even those who made them. A father even would not have detected anything. The more excuse therefore for an uncle!" So he resumed his musing on elevated art, quieting his displeasure--for his comrades jeered him--by the fumes of his pipe.

Moreover, all things considered, the painter added, Marianne had followed the natural law. Full liberty for everybody, was still one of Simon Kayser's pet theories. Marianne was of age and could dispose of her lot without the necessity of submitting to a strict endors.e.m.e.nt of her conduct. When she had "sounded all the depths of the abyss,"--and Kayser p.r.o.nounced these words while puffing his tobacco--she would return. Uncle Kayser would always keep a place for her at what he called _his fireside_.

"The fireside of your pipe," Marianne once remarked to him.