Part 7 (1/2)
The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a popular man at Gren.o.ble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how generous he was, and by the middle-cla.s.s who regarded him as a prudent man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of the National a.s.sembly. He had just pa.s.sed his thirty-fourth year.
His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by this brilliant launch on his career.
With what deep emotion, even to-day, Vaudrey recalled that Sunday in February, a foul, wet day, when he returned home in a closed carriage with a friend, from an electioneering tour. The day before he had made a speech in a wineshop to an audience of peasants, who listened, open-mouthed, but withal suspicious, examining their candidate as they would have handled a beast offered at the market, and who, step by step, applauded his remarks, stretching out their rasp-like hands as he left them, and crying out: ”You are our man!”
That very morning he returned to Gren.o.ble in the rain, pa.s.sing through villages where the posters bearing his name and those of his friends, half-demolished by the rain, flapped dismally in the wind. Before the mayor's office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare.
But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France, and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in the struggle.
Moreover, at night, with what feverish transport he watched the returns of the election as they reached the Palais de Justice, black with the crowd, and filled with uproar! With what a fearfully fast-beating heart he saw the rapidly swelling number of ballots cast for him! Dispatches came, and pedestrians hurried in from the country, waving their bulletins above their heads, and Sulpice heard on every lip the same cry: ”Vaudrey leads!”
Some cried bravo, while others clapped their hands. A crowd quickly gathered about Vaudrey. It already seemed to him that he was lifted up by a great wave and carried to a new world.
A friend seized him by the arm and drew him into a corner of the hall, away from the others, and hurriedly said: ”You know I am not one to ask much of you, to ask anything of you, in fact. I merely reckon on a receivers.h.i.+p. That is easily done, eh? A mere nothing?”
Sulpice, whose feelings were overcome by this great popular consecration, felt a kind of anger stir his heart against this solicitor, who, in the triumph of a great popular cause, saw only a means of self-advancement, of securing an appointment. The deputy--for he was a deputy now, each commune adding its total to the Vaudrey vote--was moved by a feeling of disgust.
The crowd followed him home that evening, shouting in triumph.
Amid the joy of victory, Sulpice felt the burden of the anxiety caused by duties to be done: a treaty of peace to be signed, and what a peace!
Must he, alas! append his signature to a doc.u.ment devoted to the dismemberment of his country? Far into the night he stood in reverie in his chamber, his brow resting against the cold window-pane.
He retired to rest very late, and arose with the gray dawn of February, but without having slept.
He looked across the street to a convent garden, with its square and lozenge-shaped beds regularly arranged, its bare trees and box-wood borders, that he had often gazed upon. Some nuns in their black robes pa.s.sed slowly across this cold and calm horizon that for many years had also been the range of his vision.
Henceforth this familiar spot, this sad garden, whose cloistral a.s.sociations charmed him, would be lost to his view. It was Paris now that awaited him, feverish Paris, burning with anger and odorous of saltpetre. Its very pavements must burn. Sulpice was in haste, however, to see it once more, to pa.s.s with head aloft beneath the garrets where he had once dreamed as a student, f.a.gging and striving to get knowledge.
How often he would regret that convent garden, those familiar flower-beds, the deep silence that enveloped him as he sat working by the open window, the pa.s.sage of a bird near him, as if to fan him with its wing, and the vague murmur of the canticles of the sisters ascending to his window like the echo of a prayer!
In the recess during one of the years following his election to the a.s.sembly, he married Mademoiselle Gerard. Doctor Reboux, her guardian, charmed to give his ward to a man with a future like Vaudrey's, had not hesitated long about consenting to the marriage. Adrienne delighted Sulpice, and the young girl herself was quite happy to be chosen by this good-natured, distinguished young man whom everybody at Gren.o.ble, not excepting his political adversaries, admired and spoke well of. With large, brilliant, black eyes lighting up a thin, fair face, a full beard, a high forehead with a deep furrow between the eyebrows, giving to his usually wandering, keen and restless glance a somewhat contemplative expression, Sulpice was a decidedly attractive man. He was not a handsome or a charming fellow, but a good-natured, agreeable, refined man, a fine conversationalist, persuasive, enthusiastic and alert; learned without being pedantic, a man who could inspire in a young girl a perfect pa.s.sion. Adrienne joyfully married him, as he had sought her from love.
And now all the poetry and romance of his youth blossomed again in his heart, in the thick of the political struggle in which he was engaged; he forgot, amid the idyllic scenes of domestic life, the storms of Versailles, the political troubles, forebodings as to the future, all anxieties of the present, the routine life of the a.s.sembly into which he plunged with all his mind, and the excitement of his labors, his debates and his duties.
Sulpice thought again and again of the summer morning when he led his wife to the altar, and compared it to a day's halt in the course of a journey under the blaze of the sun; he recalled the old house full of noisy stir, the crowd of relatives and friends in festive attire, the stamping of the horses' feet before the great open gate, the neighbors standing at the windows, and the little street-boys scuffling upon the pavement, all the joyous bustle of that happy day. It seemed to Sulpice that the sunlight came streaming in with Adrienne's entrance into the vast salon, from the walls of which her pictured ancestresses in their huge leg-of-mutton sleeves seemed to smile at her.
Beneath the orange wreath sent from Paris, her face expressed the happy, surprised, and sweetly anxious look of a young communicant wrapped in her veil.
Sulpice had never seen her look more beautiful. How prettily she came towards him, blus.h.i.+ng vividly, and holding out her two little white gloved hands! He, somewhat bored by the company that surrounded them, cast an involuntary glance at a mirror hanging opposite and decided that he looked awkward and formal with his hair too carefully arranged. How they had laughed since then and always with new pleasure at these recollections, so sweet even now.
His happiness on that joyous day would have been complete had his mother been present, when in the presence of the old priest who had instructed Adrienne in her catechism, Sulpice stood forward and took by its velvet s.h.i.+eld the taper that seemed so light to him, and awkwardly held the wafer that the priest extended to him. It was a great event in Gren.o.ble when the leader of the Liberal Party, who headed the list at the last election, was seen being married like a believing bourgeois. The organ pealed forth its tender vibrations, some Christmas anthem, mysterious and tremulous, like an alleluia sounding through the aisles of centuries; the light streamed through the windows in floods and rested upon Adrienne, who was kneeling with her childlike head leaning on her gloved hands, kissing her fair locks with sunlight and illumining the gleaming satin of her dress with its long train spreading out over the carpet.
Sulpice took away from this ceremony in the presence of a crowded congregation an impression at once perfumed and dazzling: the perfumes of flowers, the play of light, the greetings of the organ, and within and about him, all the intoxication of love, singing a song of happiness.
All that was now far away! nearly six years had elapsed since that day, six years of bitter struggle, during which Vaudrey fought the harder, defended his ideas of liberty with fervid eloquence, disputed step by step, and through intense work came to the front, living at Paris just as he did in the province, having his books brought from there to his apartment in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, close to the railroad that he took every morning when he regretfully left Adrienne, Adrienne to whom he returned every evening that political meetings and protracted sittings did not rob him of those happy evenings, which were in truth the only evenings that he really lived.
Adrienne seldom went out, not caring to display herself and shunning the bustle, living at Paris, as at Gren.o.ble, in peaceful seclusion, caring only for the existence of her husband, his work, and his speeches that he prepared with so much courageous labor. She sat up with him until very late, glancing over the books, the summaries of the laws and the old parliamentary reports.
At times she was terrified at the ardor with which Sulpice devoted himself to these occupations. She greatly desired to take her part and was grieved at being unable to a.s.sist him by writing from his dictation, or by examining these old books. She felt terribly anxious when Vaudrey had to make a speech from the tribune. She dared not go to hear him, but knowing that he was to speak, she had not the courage to remain at home. Anxiously she ascended to the public gallery. She shuddered and was almost ready to faint, when she heard the voice of the president break what seemed to her an icy silence, with the words: _Monsieur Vaudrey has the ear of the a.s.sembly_.