Part 43 (1/2)
”Why?”
”I have led Madame Gerson to hope--You know whom I mean, Madame Marsy's friend,--I have almost promised her that you would accept an invitation to dine at her house.”
For a moment Vaudrey was put out.
Another evening taken! Hours of delight stolen from Marianne!
”I have done wrong?” asked Adrienne, as she rested her pretty but somewhat sad face on her husband's bosom. ”I did it because it is so great a pleasure to me to spend an entire evening with you, even at another's house. Remember you have so many official dinners, banquets and invitations that you attend alone. When the minister's wife is invited with him, it is a fete-day for the poor, little forsaken thing.
I do not have much of you, it is true, but I see you, I hear you talking and I am happy. Do not chide me for having said that we would go to Madame Gerson's. The more so, because she is a charming woman. Ah! when she speaks of you! 'So great a minister!' Don't you know what she calls you?--'A Colbert!'”
Vaudrey could not restrain a smile.
”Come, after that, one cannot refuse her invitation. It is the _Monseigneur_ of the beggar,” said he, kissing Adrienne's brow. ”And when do we dine at Madame Gerson's?”
”On Monday next; I shall have at least one delightful evening to see you,” said the young wife sweetly.
The minister entered his cabinet. Almost immediately after, a messenger handed him a card: _Molina, Banker_.
”How strange it is!” thought Sulpice. ”I had him in mind.”
In the course of his troublesome reflections concerning the Gochard paper, Vaudrey persistently thought of that fat, powerful man who laughed and harangued in a loud voice in the greenroom of the ballet, as he patted with his fat fingers the delicate chin of Marie Launay.
Why! if he were willing, this Molina--Molina the Tumbler!--for him it is a mere bagatelle, a hundred thousand francs!
Salomon Molina entered the minister's cabinet just as he made his way into the foyer of the Opera, with swelling chest, tilted chin and stomach thrust forward.
”Monsieur le Ministre,” he said in a clear voice, as he spread himself out in the armchair that Vaudrey pointed out to him, ”I notify you that you have my maiden visit!--I am still in a state of innocency! On my honor, this is the first time I have set my foot within a minister's office!”
He manifested his independence--born of his colossal influence--by his satisfied and successful air. The former Ma.r.s.eillaise clothes-dealer, in his youth pouncing upon the sailors of the port and Maltese and Levantine seamen, to palm off on them a second-hand coat or trousers, as the wardrobe dealers of the Temple hook the pa.s.ser-by, Salomon Molina, who had paraded his rags and his hopes on the Canebiere, dreaming at the back of his dark shop of the triumphs, the pleasures, the revels and the indigestions that money affords, had, moreover, always preserved the bitterness of those wretched days and his red, Jewish lip expressed the gall of his painful experiences.
His first word as he entered Vaudrey's cabinet, a.s.serting the virginity of his efforts at solicitation, betrayed his bitterness.
Now, triumphant, powerful, delighted, feasted and fat, his ma.s.sive form, his gross flesh and his money were in evidence all over Paris. His huge paunch, shaking with laughter, filled the stage-boxes at the theatres.
He expanded his broad shoulders as he reclined in the caleche that deposited him on race-days at the entrance of the weighing-enclosure. He held by the neck, as it were, everything of the Parisian quarry that yelps and bounds about money, issues of stock, and the food of public fortune: bankers, stock-brokers, and jobbers, financial, political and exchange editors, wretches running after a hundred sous, statesmen in a fair way to fortune; and he distributed to this little crowd, just as he would throw food into a kennel, the discounts and clippings of his ventures, taking malicious pleasure, the insolent delight of a fortunate upstart, in feigning at the moment when loans were issued, sickness that had no existence, in order to have the right of keeping his chamber, of hearing persons of exalted names ringing at his door and dancing attendance upon him,--powerful, influential and ill.u.s.trious persons,--him, the second-hand dealer and chafferer from Ma.r.s.eilles.
It was then that he tasted the joy of supreme power, that delight which t.i.tillated even his marrow, and after having rested all day, the prey of a convenient neuralgia, he experienced the unlimited pleasure of force overcoming mind, the blow of a fist crus.h.i.+ng a weakling, as with a white cravat he appeared in some salon, in the greenroom of the ballet, or in the dressing-room of a _premiere_, saying with the mocking smile of triumph and the a.s.surance attending a gorged appet.i.te:
”I was sick to-day, I suffered from neuralgia! The Minister of Finance called on me!--Baron Nathan came to get information from me!”
Among all the pleasures experienced by this man, he valued feminine virtue occasionally purchased with gold as little in comparison with the virgin souls, honor and virtue that he often succeeded in humiliating, in bending before him like a reed, and snuffing out with his irony, whenever necessity placed at his mercy any of those puritanical beings who had pa.s.sed sometimes with haughty brow before the millions of this man of money. It was then that the clothes-dealer took his revenge in all its hideousness. There was no pity to be expected from this fat, smiling and easy-going man. His fat fingers strangled more certainly than the lean hands of a usurer. Molina never pardoned.
Ah! if this fellow went to see the minister, most a.s.suredly he wanted a favor from him.
But what?
It was extraordinary, but before Vaudrey, Molina who could hold his own among rascals, found himself ill at ease. There was in the frank look of this _ninny_, as Molina the _Tumbler_ had one evening called him while talking politics, such direct honesty that the banker, accustomed as he was to dealings with sharks and intriguers, did not quite know how to open the question, nevertheless a very important matter was in hand.
”A rich plum,” thought Molina.