Part 35 (1/2)

Yes, this immense gilded dwelling with its Gobelins tapestries stifled her with its terrifying gloom, where nothing, not a single article, recalled her charming provincial home, her Gren.o.ble house with its garden filled with lilacs where she was often wont to read while Sulpice worked upstairs, bent over his table crowded with papers, before his open window. Ah! those cherished rooms, in the humble corner of the provincial home, their happy crouching in the peaceful nest; aye, even the happy first days in Paris, in the Chaussee-d'Antin apartments, in which Adrienne at least felt herself in her own home, free in her actions and thoughts, and where she could talk aloud without feeling that an eye was constantly watching her, and ears were always strained, in fact, a perpetual espionage upon all her actions and a criticism of all her words.

She had reached a point when she asked herself if, even for Sulpice, happiness was not far removed from this life of slavery, of feverish politics, which for some time past had been visibly paling his cheeks and rendering him nervous and altogether different from of old.

”If you did not love me so much,” she said with a sweet smile, ”I could believe that you loved me no longer.”

”What folly! you have only one rival, Adrienne.”

”Ah! I know that very well, but that robs me of everything. It is politics. Come! be great, and I shall be happy or resigned, as you wish.

I adore you so much! I would give you my life, so I would gladly give you my days of weariness!”

Although she was rich, she strove to introduce into her official surroundings the bourgeois and provincial orderly methods that she had been so virtuously taught. She found that her desserts vanished with frightful rapidity, that dishes scarcely touched and bottles whose contents had only been tasted, were removed to the kitchen. She commented thereon, but the somewhat contemptuous smile of her domestics was her only reply and it made her feel ashamed.

Vaudrey's predecessor, Monsieur Pichereau, was exacting, _close-fisted_. His table was meagre but there was nothing astonis.h.i.+ng in that, Monsieur Pichereau had a delicate stomach. Well and good, but the predecessors of Monsieur Pichereau, they had given fetes, they had!

It is true that one was a count and the other a marquis. One can always tell a gentleman anywhere.

One evening, they heard one of the domestics of the ministry say to another:

”As if it were not our money that the ministers spend! It is the electors' money. They give us wages: we give them salaries. There it is!”

The domestic was discharged immediately, but these remarks, however, recurred to Adrienne's memory and filled her with dislike for the flunkeyism that surrounded her, waiting on her with cold civility, but without any attachment, like hotel waiters or girls at an inn that one will leave the next day, giving them a gratuity.

Vaudrey saw much less of these daily little wounds. He lived in an atmosphere of constant flattery, favor-begging cloaked under complimentary phrases. Had he leisure, he would have been able to calculate with mathematical exact.i.tude how many angles the human form would describe in the process of bowing and sc.r.a.ping. In his department, everybody asked for something or got someone else to ask. _Promotion_, that insatiable hunger, was the greedy dream of all that little world of intriguing, underhand, begging employes, who opened up around the new minister so many approaches, like military lines around a redoubt.

Sulpice felt himself besieged and the target for a crowd of greedy ambitions. The sub-heads of departments cast bitterly envious glances at the offices of chiefs, like hungry beggars hypnotized by the display at Chevet's. Commendatory letters rained on him. This shower of begging-missives nauseated the minister to such an extent that he endeavored to arrest the stream, ordering Warcolier, the Under Secretary of State, to be called and requesting him to reply to the deputies, to the senators, to everybody, in fact: that he had no influence to use, that the era of favoritism was over; that he, Vaudrey, understood that only merit would receive official gifts. ”Merit only. You understand, Monsieur Warcolier?”

Warcolier rolled his huge eyes in astonishment; then, with the self-satisfied smile of an expressionless beau, after pa.s.sing his fat hand through his long whiskers, yellow and streaked with gray, that decorated his rosy cheeks, he remarked doctorally, that Monsieur le Ministre was entering on a path that, in all conscience, he could qualify as being only dangerous. Eh! _bon Dieu!_ one must do something for one's friends!--Vaudrey's accession to the Department of the Interior had given birth to many new hopes; on all grounds they must be satisfied. Vaudrey would never be forgiven for such deception.

”What deception?” asked Sulpice. ”I promised reforms and I am going to carry them out, but people laugh at my reforms and ask what?--Places.”

”Bless me!” replied Warcolier, ”entirely logical.”

”Be it so! but there are places and places. I cannot, however, retire a whole staff of employes to give place to a new one. That's precisely what they want. There is not a deputy who has not one candidate to recommend to me.”

”That's very natural, Monsieur le Ministre, seeing that there is not a deputy who may not himself be a candidate.”

”Still, he should be independent of his electors, but in truth, it is not the rights of those who have elected them that my colleagues defend, it is their own interests.”

”Every man for himself, Monsieur le Ministre. Yesterday, even yesterday, one of my electors whose wife has just given birth to a child, wrote me, asking for a good nurse. That is like one of our colleagues, Perraud--of the Vosges.--One of his electors commissioned him to take back an umbrella with him upon his early return. The electors regard their deputies in the light of commission merchants.”

”And as tobacco bureaus! Well, I wish to have more morality than that in State affairs. I like giving, but I know how to refuse,” said Vaudrey.

”That will be easy enough so long as you are popular and solid in Parliament; but on the day that it is clearly proved that such and such a future minister can make himself more useful than you to the personal interests of everybody--and there are such ministers in sight--”

”Granet, yes, I know! He promises more b.u.t.ter than bread, to cry quits later in giving more dry crusts than fresh b.u.t.ter. But I don't care to deceive any one.”

”As you please, Monsieur le Ministre, as you please,” answered Warcolier, in a mocking and gentle tone.

Sulpice did not like this man. He was a phrase-maker. He had a vague feeling that this Warcolier who in public affected strictly severe principles was privately undermining him and that he yielded to favors in order to win support. It was enough for the minister to discourage coa.r.s.e, greedy ambitions, provided that the Under Secretary of State encouraged unsavory, eager hopes by shrewd smiles and silence that a.s.sented to all that was desired. This little underhand work going on in his office was unknown to Vaudrey; he did not know that out of every refusal he gave, Warcolier secured friends; but he maintained a watchful distrust for this republican who had become so stanch a supporter of the Republic only since that form of government had triumphed. Besides, what had he to fear? The President of the Council, Monsieur Collard, of Nantes, had the unbounded confidence of the head of the State and of the Chamber; and he was Collard's intimate friend. The majority of the cabinet was compact. The perfect calm of the horizon was undisturbed by a cloud. Vaudrey could rule without fear, without excitement and give all his spare time to that woman whose piercing glance, wandering smile, palpitating nostrils, dishevelled, fair hair, kisses, fondness, cries, and tones pursued him everywhere.