His Excellency the Minister

For the third time since Adrienne had learned everything, he tried to stammer the word pardon. He felt it was useless. This sensitive being had withdrawn within herself and wrapped herself, as with a cloak, in all her outraged chastity. He could only humiliate himself without softening her. All Adrienne's deceived trustfulness and insulted love strengthened her in her determination never to forgive.

She would go.

Vaudrey in despair returned to his study, where the books that had been sent from the ministry were piled upon the carpet in all the confusion attending an entry into occupation. The servant at once brought him his lamp and handed him a package of cards in envelopes,—cards of condolence as for a death—and a large card, saying: "That gentleman is here!"

"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!"

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 title 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!"

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.

"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 anticipating it.

"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!"

His name! To put his name there! The name of Vaudrey that he had dreamed of reading at the foot of so many noble, 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!

"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!"

"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.

He remained there, terrified at the prospect of the quasi-association 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.

Vaudrey turned round abruptly, instinctively pushing aside Molina's prospectus, as if he already felt some shame in holding it in his hands.

He flushed as he recognized Adrienne.

The young woman's reserved attitude showed absolute firmness. She came to say adieu, she was about to leave.

He had not even the energy to keep her. He was afraid of an unbending reply that would have been an outrage.

"What! Molina?" he stammered.

"Yes, oh! he understands business. On leaving, he called on me. He thought that I had still sufficient influence over you to urge you, as he says, to make your fortune. He told me that you were in want of money, and after having been sharp enough to try the husband, he offered me, as you might give a commission to a courtesan, I do not know what emerald ornament, if I would advise you to accept his proposals!—That gentleman does not know the people with whom he is dealing!"

"Wretch!" said Vaudrey. "He did that?"

"And I thanked him," Adrienne replied calmly. "I did not know that you had debts and that, in order to pay them, you had come so near accepting the patronage of such a man. He told me so and he rendered me and you a service."

"Me?"

Vaudrey snatched up the prospectus of the Algerian gas and angrily tore it in pieces.

"We shall probably not see each other again," said Adrienne, in a firm voice that contrasted strangely with her gentle grace; "but I shall never forget that I bear your name and that being mine, I will ever honor it."

She handed Sulpice a document.

Dejected, his heart burning, and his sobs rising, Sulpice uttered a loud cry as he rushed toward her:

"Adrienne!"

She withdrew her hand slowly while he was trying to seize it.

"You have nothing to thank me for," she said. "I am a partner, saving, as I best can, the honor of the house. That association is better than Molina's."

"Adieu," she added bitterly.

"Are you going—? Going away?" asked Sulpice, trying to give to his entreaty something like an echo of the love of the former days.

"Whose fault is it?" replied the young woman, in a voice as chilly as steel.

She was no longer the Adrienne of old, the little timid provincial with blushing cheek and trembling gesture. Sorrow, the most terrible of disillusions, had hardened and, as it were, petrified her. Vaudrey felt that to ask forgiveness would be in vain. Time only could soften that poor woman, obstinately unbending in her grief. He needed but to observe her attitude and cutting tones to fully realize that.

"Adrienne!" Sulpice repeated, "it is impossible, you will not leave!"

"Oh!" she said. "I gave myself and I have taken myself back. Your entreaties will not now alter my determination. I am eager to leave Paris. It seems to me that I have regained myself and that I escape from falsity, lies, and infamy, and from a swarm of insects that crawl over my body!—I bid you farewell, and farewell it is!"

"Well, let it be so!" exclaimed Vaudrey. "Go! But if it is a stranger who leaves me, I will accept nothing from her. Here is the authority. Will you take it back?"

"For the last time, adieu!"

She went out, and he allowed her to disappear, overwhelmed by this living mourning of a faith. She fled and he allowed her to descend the stairway, followed by her femme de chambre. She entered the carriage that was waiting for her below, in Rue Chaussée-d'Antin, but he had not the courage, hopeless as he was, to follow the carriage whose rumbling he heard above the noise of the street as it rolled away more quickly and more heavily than the others, and it seemed to him that its wheels had crushed his bosom.

"Ah! what a wretch I have been!" he said as he struck his knee with his closed fist. "How unhappy I am! Adrienne!"

He rose abruptly, as if moved by a spring, and bounded toward a window which he threw wide open to admit the cold wind of this November evening, and tried to distinguish among the many carriages that rolled through the brownish mud, with their lighted lamps shining like so many eyes, to discover, to imagine the carriage that was bearing Adrienne away. He believed that he recognized it in a vehicle that was threading its way, loaded with trunks, almost out of sight yonder.

"Adrienne! Adrienne!"

No reply! The carriage had disappeared in the distance, in the fog.

For a moment, Sulpice remained there crushed but drawn by the noise of the street, as if by some whirlpool in the deep sea. Had he been thrown out and been dashed upon the pavements, he would have been happy. Only a void seemed about him, and before him that black hollow in which moved confusedly only strangers who in no way formed part of his life.

This isolation terrified him. At last, he went downstairs in haste, threw himself into a carriage and had himself driven to the railway, intending to see Adrienne again.

"Quickly! quickly! at your best speed!"

The driver whipped up his horses and the carriage-windows clattered with the noise of old iron.

Vaudrey arrived too late. The train had left twenty minutes before. He had reflected too long at his window.

"Besides," he said to himself sadly, "she would not have forgiven me! She will never forget!"

"A virtuous woman! Does he know how to love as well as the others?" she murmured, as she thought of Vaudrey whom she would never see again, and whom she no longer loved.

"See! I am a widow now, and a widow who will never love anyone, and who will never marry again."

They were rendering Aida that evening, and a débutante had been announced as a star.

Sulpice Vaudrey, since Adrienne's departure,—already two weeks!—had wandered about Paris like a damned soul when he did not attend the Chamber, where he experienced the discomforts and the weakness of a fallen man. Weary, disgusted and melancholy, Vaudrey took his seat in the theatre to kill an evening.

There was what was called in the language of a Paris editor, a swell house. In front of the stage there was literally a shower of diamonds and the boxes were gaily adorned. The fauteuils were occupied by Parisian glories and foreign celebrities. Not a stall in the amphitheatre without its celebrity. Chance had placed in this All-Paris gathering, Madame Sabine Marsy and Madame Gerson, the two friends who detested each other. The pretty little Madame Gerson occupied and filled with her prattle, the box of the Prefect of Police—No. 30, in which Monsieur Jouvenet showed his churchwarden's profile. She was talking aloud about her salon, her receptions, her acquaintances. She was eclipsing Madame Marsy with her triumphs. At the back of the box, Monsieur Gerson was sleeping, overcome by fatigue. Madame Gerson laughed on observing Sulpice in the orchestra-stalls.

"See! there is Monsieur Vaudrey! He still looks a little beaten!" she said.

"Of course, he did not come!" she said. "I remember what Madame Marsy advised me, one day,—she has passed through that in her time: one should think of the invitations to dinner before dismissing a ministry! Oh! it is tiresome; think of it!—One invites the Secretary of the President of the Council to dinner. He is named on the card. He comes. It is all over; he is no longer Secretary of the President, the President of the Council is no longer President, there is no longer a President, perhaps not even a Council; one should be certain of one's titles and rank before accepting an invitation to dinner!"

She laughed heartily and loud, and Madame Marsy, who was half dethroned, fanned herself nervously in her box, or levelled her glass at some one in the audience, affecting a little disdainful manner toward her fair neighbor. A friendship turned to acid.

His eyes followed the movement of his glass and one after another he saw Madame Marsy, Jouvenet, Madame Gerson, so many living and exceedingly taunting recollections, when suddenly Sulpice trembled, shaken by a keener and almost angry feeling as his glance was directed to a box against the dark-red of which two faces were boldly outlined: those of Rosas and Marianne.

He was excited and unpleasantly piqued.

There before him he saw, between two large pillars, bearing gigantic, gilded masts that seemed to mock at him, the woman whom he had adored and the sight of whom still tore his heart. Pale and dressed in a white gown, she was leaning toward Rosas in a most adorable attitude, with her fair hair half-falling on her white shoulders—those shoulders that he still saw trembling under his kisses, those shoulders on which he might have pressed his burning lips and his teeth.

She, on the contrary, at times inclined toward him, bringing her mouth close to the Castilian's ear, standing out against his reddish beard as if detached therefrom, and she whispered to Rosas words that Vaudrey surmised, and which caused a spark of feverish delight to lighten up José's sad eyes. As she leaned back tilting her chair, her satin corsage below the bust was hidden from Sulpice by the edge of the box and he saw only her face, neck and white shoulders, and she seemed to him to be quite naked, the lines of her serpentine body sharply marked by the red line of the velvet border. And with his greedy glance he continued to trace the curves of that exquisite torso, the back that he had pressed, all the being moulded by voluptuousness, that had been his.

This was the vanishing of his last dream! This love gone, this deception driven into his heart like a knife, his last faith mocked at, insulted, and branded with its true name, folly, he felt as if a yawning chasm had been opened in him. Life was over! He was old now and he had wasted, yes, wasted his happiness in playing at youth. He had believed himself loved! Loved! Imbecile that he was!

"You do not know her! She is debauchery and falsehood itself!"

It seemed to Vaudrey that at times a bearded face, surmounting a white cravat, appeared behind Rosas and Marianne: the haughty face of Uncle Simon.

While the throng of Egyptians filed on the stage, Sulpice endeavored to turn away his thoughts and remove his glances from that group that attracted him. He still, however, looked at it, in spite of himself, and voluntarily wounded his own heart.

Marianne did not seem to have even noticed him.

The curtain fell and he wandered into the wings, less to be there than to escape that irritating sight. In breathing that atmosphere of a theatre, he experienced a strange sensation that pained and consoled him at the same time. The scene-shifters were rolling back the illuminating apparatus pierced with light, and dragged to the rear the huge white sphinxes and the immense canvas on which the palm-trees were outlined upon a blue sky. Sulpice felt the cruelly ironical sensation of finding himself, disheartened and defeated, once more on the very boards where he had entered the first time, smiling, swelling with joy, saluting and saluted and hearing on every side the same murmur, sweet as a May zephyr:

"Monsieur le Ministre."

Suddenly, in the centre of a group, with his hat on, escorted by bending men, whose lips expressed flattery, Sulpice recognized Lucien Granet, who in the dazzling triumph of his new kingdom, crossed and recrossed the stage, distributing here and there patronizing bows.

The coarse Molina accompanied the new minister, laughing in a loud tone like the sound of a well-filled cash-box suddenly shaken.

Vaudrey felt just as if he had received a blow full in the chest.

He turned to the danseuse to apologize, when he perceived a young girl, all in pink, whose blue eyes looked frightened and her cheeks reddened when she recognized Vaudrey. It was Marie Launay, whom he had seen in the greenroom the previous year, who had not yet scored a success, while he was retired.

"Oh! I did not recognize you," she said. "I beg your pardon, Monsieur le Ministre!"

He wished to make some reply; but this title used by the young girl, ignorant of the political change, grated on his heart like the scratching of a nail and he saw on the other side of the stage, reaching the house by the communicating door, Lucien Granet, surrounded by his staff, and followed by the eternal cortége of powerful ones, among whom Warcolier was talking loudly, and Molina the Tumbler was recognizable by his enormous paunch and loud laugh.

"Perhaps Madame Marsy has asked that this Granet be presented to her," thought Vaudrey as he mockingly recalled how Guy de Lissac ran after him there in order to conduct him to the fashionable woman's box.

How long it was since then!

Sabine Marsy was dethroned. And he!—

"Well, my dear Vaudrey, what is the news?" said Warcolier, bearing his head high and smiling with a silly, but an aggressively benign expression, with the superior tone of satisfied fools.

"Nothing!" said Sulpice. "I think Verdi's music is superb!"

"Oh! a little Wagnerian," Warcolier replied, repeating what he had heard. "But what of politics?"

"Ah! politics concerns you now!"

"Well! why," Warcolier replied, "that goes on well. There is a little relaxation! a ministry more—more—"

"More homogeneous!" said Vaudrey, in a slightly mocking tone.

"Exactly. And, after all, the duty of every good citizen is to defend the government under which we live."

Ah! assuredly, Vaudrey considered that his former Secretary of State, now become the vassal of Granet, displayed a rather ridiculous assurance. He smiled as if he would have laughed in his face and turned his back upon him.

Warcolier was not annoyed, for he felt certain that he had angered the former minister, and he was delighted. It was a kick from an ass. The witticism of a fool.

Guy flushed slightly on seeing him.

"In order to see you, one has to meet you here," said Sulpice. "Why have you not called on me? Is it because I am no longer a minister?"

"That would be a reason for seeing me more frequently," said Lissac. "But it is not that. What do you want me to tell you? You know my sentiments. I don't care to become a bore, as it is called, or a ceaseless prater of morality, which is the same thing. Besides, morality to me is something like the Montyon prize to a harlot! Then, too, I am keeping in my corner and I shall stick to it hereafter closer than ever. I have put the brake on. I am getting old, and I shall bury myself in some suburb and look after my rheumatism."

In Lissac's tone there was an unexpected melancholy.

"Then you will not call on me again?"

"What is the use of worrying you?—Reflect for yourself, my good man! You don't need me to emphasize your blunders. By the way, you know, our mad mistress?—She is in the theatre."

"I have seen her!" said Vaudrey, turning very pale.

"But, tell me," continued Lissac, whose cutting tone suddenly became serious, "have you read the paper?"

"No! What is there in it?"

They were then in the corridor of the Opéra, and heard the prelude to the curtain-raising. Guy took the Soir from his pocket and handed it to Vaudrey:

"Here, see!—That poor Ramel!—You were very fond of him, were you not?"

"Ramel!"

Vaudrey had no need to read. He knew everything as soon as Guy showed him the paper and mentioned Denis's name in a mournful tone.

Dead!—He died peacefully in his armchair near the window, as if falling asleep.—"The death is announced," so read the paragraph, "of one of the oldest members of the Parisian press, Monsieur Denis Ramel, who was formerly a celebrated man and for a long time directed the Nation Française, once an important journal, now no longer in existence."—Not a word beyond the brief details of his death. No word of praise or regret, merely the commonplace statement of a fact. Vaudrey thought it was a trifling notice for a man who had held so large a place in the public eye.

"What do you think of it?" he said to Lissac. "People are ungrateful."

"Why, what would you have? Why didn't he write operettas?"

In order to forget Marianne, he turned his thoughts to Ramel.

Denis had been suffering for a long time. He smiled as he felt the hour of his departure draw near. He wished to disappear without stir, and in a civil way as he said, without attracting attention, à l'Anglaise. Poor man! his wish was accomplished.

Vaudrey threw himself into a carriage and was driven to Batignolles. On the way he thought of the eternal antitheses of Parisian life: the news of the death of a friend communicated to him at the Opéra while a waltz-tune was being played!

And thinking to himself:

"From the Opéra to the Opéra! That, moreover, is the history of my ministry—and that of the Granet administration, probably!"

Denis Ramel! the sure guide of his youth and his counsellor through life! He recalled his entry on public life, his arrival in Paris, the first articles brought into the old editorial rooms of the Nation Française! If for a moment he had been one of the heads of the State, it was due to the man stretched out before him now!

He gently stooped over the corpse and pressed a farewell kiss on the dead man's brow.

As he turned round, he saw a man whom he had not at first seen and who had risen.

The man was very pale and greeted him with a timid air.

Vaudrey recognized Garnier, the man whom he had seen previously at Ramel's, a cough-racked, patient, dying man.

The consumptive had nevertheless outlived the old man.

"It is good of you to have come, monsieur," said the workman. "He loved you dearly."

"He died suddenly then?"

Vaudrey was heartbroken the next day. Behind Ramel's coffin, not a person followed. Himself, Garnier, and one or two old women from the house on Rue Boursault, who did not go all the way to the cemetery of Saint-Ouen because it was too far, were all that were present. At the grave Sulpice Vaudrey stood alone with the grave-digger and the workman Garnier. They buried Ramel in a newly-opened part close to the foot of a railway embankment.

"Follow journalism and you make the fame of others," said Vaudrey, shaking his head.

"After all," answered Garnier, "there are dupes in every trade, and they are necessarily the most honest."

When this man, who had been a minister, left the grave above which the whistling trains passed, a freezing rain was falling and he passed out of the cemetery in the company of the poor devil who coughed so sadly within the collar of his overcoat that was tightly drawn up over his comforter.

Before leaving him, Vaudrey, with a feeling of timidity, desired to ask him if work was at least fairly good.

He bowed and Vaudrey left in a gloomy mood. It seemed to him that his life was crumbling away, that he was sowing, shred by shred, his flesh on the road. The black hangings of Ramel's coffin—and he smiled sadly at this new irony—recalled to him the bills of the upholsterers that he still owed for the furnishing of that fête at the ministry on the last day of his power and his happiness. The official decorations of Belloir and the Gobelins were not sufficient for him. He had desired more modern decorations. He gave the coachman the upholsterer's address, Boulevard des Capucins. He hardly dared to enter and say: "I have come to pay the account of the furnishing supplied at the ministry!" It still seemed like a funeral bill he was paying. This upholsterer's account, paid for forgotten display, seemed to him a sort of mortuary transaction.

When he paid the upholsterer, the latter seemed to wear a cunning smile.

On finding himself again outside, he felt a sensation of relief; being cold, he was inclined to walk with a view to warming his chill blood.

On hearing his name spoken by some one, he turned round and perceived before him his compatriot Jéliotte, the friend of his childhood, the comrade, who, with a smile, cordially extended his hands toward him.

"Ah!" said Vaudrey.

Jéliotte took his arm.

"Probably you are going to the Chamber?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Well, I will accompany you!—Ah, since you are no longer minister, my dear friend, and that one does not appear to be a flatterer or a seeker of patronage, one can speak to you—You have faults enough!—You are too confident, too moderate—It is necessary to have a firm hand—And then that could not last. Those situations are all very fine but they are too easily destroyed!—They are like glass, my old friend!—A place is wanted for everybody, is it not?—Bah! must I tell you?—Why, you are happier! I like you better as it is!"

Vaudrey felt strongly inclined to shake off this pretentious ninny who was clinging to his arm.

"That is like me!" continued Jéliotte. "I like my friends better when they are down! What would you have? It is my generous nature. By the way, do you know that the reason I have not seen you before is because I have not been in Paris! I have returned from Isère!"

"Ah!" said Vaudrey, thinking of Adrienne.

"How?" asked Sulpice.

"Why, Thibaudier is stirring up Grenoble. He has got the whole city with him. He is very much liked and is a model mayor. He is a very mère—mother—that mayor!—Jéliotte laughed heartily, believing that he was funny.—If there is a list balloted for, and there certainly will be, Thibaudier will head the list. If they had maintained the scrutin d'arrondissement, he would have been capable of passing muster, all the same!"

"Against me?"

"Against you. Thibaudier is very popular!—And as firm as a rock!—He thinks you moderate, too moderate, as everybody else does!"

"He?—He was a member of the Plebiscite Committee under the Empire!"

"Exactly! He is an extreme Republican, just as he was an extreme Bonapartist. Oh! Thibaudier is a man, there is no concession with him. Never! He is always the same. He will beat you. Moreover, in Isère, they want a homogeneous representation—"

"Again!" said Vaudrey, who felt that he was pursued by this word.

"Let us drop Thibaudier. By the way," said Jéliotte, "I saw your wife at Grenoble."

Vaudrey grew pale.

He again repeated: "Ah!"

"She is greatly changed. She doesn't leave the house of her uncle, the doctor, nor does she receive any one."

"Is she sick, then?"

"Yes, slightly."

"And you are separated, then?"

"No," replied Sulpice.

Jéliotte smiled.

"Ah! joker, I understand!—Your wife was too strict!—Bless me, a provincial! Bah! that will come right! And if it doesn't, why, you will be free, that's all! But, say, then, if you are not re-elected, you will rejoin her at Grenoble. Oh! your clients will return to you. You are highly esteemed as an advocate, but as a minister, I ought to say—"

"I shall be re-elected," said Vaudrey, in a decisive tone, so as to cut short Jéliotte's interminable phrases.

He was exceedingly unnerved. This man's stupidity would exasperate him. He would never come across any but subjects of irritation or disheartenment. He felt inclined to seek a quarrel with some one. He would have liked to wrench Marianne's wrist with his fingers.

"Yet I know him!"

He had not gone three steps before he perfectly recalled this eternal lobbyist, always bending before him and clinging to the armchairs of the antechambers, like an oyster to a rock, and whom the messengers, accustomed to his soliciting, bowing and scraping for years past, called Monsieur Eugène—out of courtesy.

It was too much! And, in truth, this strange fellow's impoliteness was ill-timed.

Sulpice suddenly turned round, approached Renaudin, and said to him sharply:

"You bowed more obsequiously to me a short time since, monsieur! It seems to me that you were in the ministerial antechambers every morning!"

He expected a haughty reply from Renaudin, and that this man would have compensated him for the others.

Monsieur Eugène smiled as he answered:

"Why, I am still there, monsieur!"

Vaudrey looked at him with a stupefied air, then in an outburst of anger, as if he conveyed in the reply that he hurled at this contemptible fellow, all the projects of his future revenge upon the fools, the knaves, the dull valets and the ungrateful horde, he said, boldly:

"Well, you will salute me again, for I shall return there."

He heard an outburst of bravos; a perfect tempest of enthusiasm reached him. He looked on and bit his lips.

Lucien Granet was in the tribune, and the majority were applauding him.