Vaudrey was conscious of a strange and subtle charm in this intoxicating circle,--a charm full of temptations which made him secretly uneasy.
There pa.s.sed before his eyes visions of other days, he beheld the phantoms of gay dresses, the apparitions of spring landscapes, he felt the breezes of youth, laden with the scents of the upspringing gra.s.s, the lilacs at Meudon, the violets of Ville-d"Avray, the souvenirs of the escapades of his student days. Their short, full skirts reminded him of white frocks that whisked gayly around the hazel-trees long ago, those ballet-girls bore a striking resemblance to the pink and white grisettes that he had flirted with when he was twenty.
He extended his hand in turn towards the sheet of paper to which Molina had just signed his name, saying to Marie Launay as he did so:
"Let me have it, if you please, mademoiselle."
Granet began to laugh.
"Ah! ah!" he cried, "you are really going to write down under Monsieur Gigonnet"s signature the name of the Minister of the Interior?"
"Oh! bless me!" said Vaudrey, laughing, "that is true! You will believe it or not as you please, but I quite forgot that I was a minister."
"It was the same with me when I was decorated," said Molina. "I would not receive my great-coat from box-openers because I saw the morsel of red ribbon hanging on it, and I was sure the garment was not mine. But one grows used to it after a while! Now," and his laugh with the hundred-sou piece ring grew louder than ever, "I am really quite surprised not to find the rosette of red ribbon sticking to my flannel waistcoats."
Vaudrey left Marie Launay, greatly to her surprise, and listened to Molina"s chronicles of the ballet.
Ah! if his Excellency had but the time, he would have seen the funniest things. For instance, there was amongst the dancers a marble cutter, who during the day sold and cut his gravestones and came here at night to grin and caper in the ballet. He was on the scent of every funeral from the Opera; he would get orders for tombstones between two dances at the rehearsals. One day Molina had been present at one of these. It seems incredible, but there was a bank clerk in a gray coat, a three-cornered hat upon his head and a bra.s.s buckler on his arm, who sacrificed to Venus in the interval between his two occupations, dancing with the coryphees; a dancer by night and a receiver of money by day. A girl was rehearsing beside him, in black bands and skirt. Then Molina, astonished, inquired who she might be. He was told that it was a girl in mourning, whose mother had just died. The Opera is a fine stage upon which to behold the ironies and contrasts of life.
The financier might have related to Sulpice Vaudrey a description of a journey to Timbuctoo and have found him less amused and less interested than now. It was a world new and strange to him, attractive, and as exciting as acid to this man, still young, whose success had been achieved by unstinted labors, and who knew Paris only by what he had learned of it years ago, when a law student: the pit of the Comedie Francaise, the Luxembourg galleries and those of the Louvre, the Public Libraries, the Hall of Archives, the b.a.l.l.s in the Latin Quarter, the holidays and the foyer of the Opera once or twice on the occasion of a masked ball. And, besides that?--Nothing. That was all.
The great man from Gren.o.ble arrived in Paris with his appet.i.te whetted for the life of the city, and now he was here, suddenly plunged into the greenroom of the ballet, and all eyes were turned towards him, almost frightened as he was, on catching a glimpse of his own image reflected in the huge mirror glittering under the numerous lights, in the heart of this strange salon and surrounded by half-clad dancing girls. Then, too, everybody was looking at him, quizzing him, shrinking from him through timidity or running after him through interest. The new Minister of State! The chief of all the personnel of prefects, under-prefects, and secretaries-general represented there, lolling on these velvet divans in this vulgar greenroom.
All the glances, all the whisperings of the women, the frowns of his enemies, the cringing att.i.tudes of dandified hangers-on, were making Vaudrey feel very uncomfortable, when to his great relief he suddenly observed coming towards him, peering hither and thither through his monocle, evidently in search of some one, Guy de Lissac, who immediately on catching sight of Vaudrey came towards him, greeting him with evident cordiality, tinged, however, with a proper reserve.
Sulpice was not long in breaking through this reserve. He hurried up to Guy, and seizing him by the hand, cried gayly:
"Do you know that I have been expecting this visit! You are the only one of my friends who has not yet congratulated me!"
"You know, my dear Minister," returned Guy in the same tone, "that it is really not such a great piece of luck to be made Minister that every one of your friends should be expected to fall upon your neck, crying bravo!
You have mounted up to the capitol, but after all, the capitol is not such a very cheerful place, that I should illuminate _a giorno_. I am happy, however, if you are. I congratulate you, if you wash your hands of it, and that is all."
"You and my old friend Ramel," answered Sulpice, "are the two most original men that I know."
"With this difference however, Ramel is a Puritan, an ancient, a man of marble, and I am a _boulevardier_ and a skeptic. He is a man of bronze--your Ramel! And your friend Lissac of _simili-bronze_! The proof of it is that I have been seeking you for half the evening to ask you to do me a favor."
"What favor, my dear fellow?" cried Vaudrey, his face lighting up with joy. "Anything in the world to please you."
"I was in Madame Marsy"s box,--you do not know Madame Marsy? She is a great admirer of yours and makes a point to applaud you in the Chamber.
She has prayed for your advent. She saw you in the manager"s box a while ago, and she has asked me to present you to her, or rather, to present her to you, for I presume for your Excellency the ceremony is modified."
"Madame Marsy!" said Vaudrey. "Is she not an artist"s widow? Her salon is a political centre, is it not?"
"Exactly. A recent salon opened in opposition to that of Madame Evan. An Athenian Republic! You do not object to that?"
"On the contrary! A republic cannot be founded without the aid of women."
"Ah!" cried Lissac, laughing. "Politics and honors have not changed you, I see."
"Changed me? With the exception that I have twenty years over my head, and alas! not so much hair as I had then upon it, I am the same as I was in 1860."
"_Hotel Racine! Rue Racine!_" said Lissac. "In those days, I dreamed of being Musset, I a gourmand, and what have I become? A spectator, a trifler, a Parisian, a rolling stone.--Nothing. And you who dreamed of being a second Barnave, Vergniaud or Barbaroux, your dream is realized."
"Realized!" said Vaudrey.
He made an effort to shake his head deprecatingly as if his vanity were not flattered by those honeyed words of his friend; but his glance displayed such sincere delight and so strong a desire to be effusive and in evidence, that he could not repress a smile upon hearing from the companion of his youth, such a confirmation of his triumph. They are our most severe critics, these friends of our youth, they who have listened to the stammering of our hopes and dreams of the future. And when at length we have conquered the future, these are often the very ones to rob us of it! Lissac, however, was not one of these envious ones.
"Let us go to Madame Marsy"s box, my dear Guy," said Sulpice. "The more so because if she at all resembles her portrait at the last Salon, she must be lovely indeed."
He left the greenroom, leaning on the arm of Lissac, after throwing a glance backward, however, at the girls whirling about there, and where in the presence of their stiff, ancient superiors, the young sub-prefects still hid their faces behind their opera hats. Granet with Molina went to take leave of Vaudrey, leaving little Marie Launay smiling artlessly because the financier, the _Tumbler_, had said to her, in drawing down her eyelids with his coa.r.s.e finger: "Will you close your periwinkles--you _kid_?"
"Your Excellency," the banker had said, cajoling his Excellency with his meaning glance, "I am always at your orders you know."
"To-morrow, at the Prisons" Commission, Monsieur le Ministre," said Granet. And amid salutations on every side Vaudrey withdrew, smiling and good-humored as usual.
In order to reach the box, Vaudrey had to cross the stage. The new scene was set. Buddhist temples with their grotesque shapes and huge statues stood out against a background of vivid blue sky, and on the canvas beyond, great pink flowers glowed amid refreshing verdure. Over all fell a soft fairy-like light from an electric lamp, casting on the floor a fantastic gleam, soft and clear as the rays of the moon. Sulpice smiled as he pa.s.sed beneath this flood of light and saw his shadow projected before him as upon the gla.s.sy waters of a lake. It seemed to him that this sudden illumination, a sort of fantastic apotheosis as it were, was like the fairy-like aureole that attended his progress.
At the very moment of leaving the greenroom, Sulpice had jostled accidentally against a man of very grave aspect wearing a black coat closely b.u.t.toned. He was almost bald save for some long, thin, gray locks that hung about his huge ears, his cheeks had a hectic color and his skull was yellow. He entered this salon in a hesitating, inquisitive way, with wide-open eyes and a gourmand"s movement of the nostrils, and gazed about the room, warm with lights and heavy with perfume.
Sulpice glanced at him carelessly and recognized him as the man whom he himself had superseded on Place Beauvau--a Puritan, a Huguenot, a widower, the father of five or six daughters, and as solemn and proper in his ordinary demeanor as a Sunday-school tract. Sulpice could not refrain from crying out merrily: "Bless me! Monsieur Pichereau!"
The other shook his b.u.t.ter-colored skull as if he had suddenly received a stinging blow on it with a switch, and his red face became crimson-hued at the sight of Sulpice, his successor in office, standing before him, politely holding out to him his two gloved hands.
Guy de Lissac was no longer laughing.
Their two Excellencies found themselves face to face at the foot of the greenroom staircase, in the midst of a crowd of brahmins, dancers, negresses, and female supernumeraries; two Excellencies meeting there; one smiling, the other grimacing beneath the glance of this curious, shrewd little world.
"Ah! I have caught you, my dear colleague," cried Sulpice, very much amused at Pichereau"s embarra.s.sed air, his coat b.u.t.toned close like a Quaker"s and his little eyes blinking behind his spectacles, and looking as sheepish as a sacristan caught napping.
"Me?" stammered Pichereau. "Me? But my dear Minister, it"s you--yes, you whom I came expressly to seek!"
"Here?" said Vaudrey.
"Yes, here!"
"Really?"
"I had something to say to you--I--yes, I wanted--"
The unlucky Pichereau mechanically pulled and jerked at his waistcoat, then a.s.suming a dignified, grave air, he whistled and hesitated, and finally stammered:
"I wished to speak with you--yes--to consult with you upon a matter of grave importance--concerning Protestant communities."
Sulpice could not restrain his laughter.
Pichereau, with his look of a Calvinistic preacher, was throwing from behind his spectacles glowing looks in the direction where Marie Launay stood listening to and laughing at the badinage of Molina. Some newspaper reporters, scenting a handy paragraph, came sauntering up to overhear some fragment of the conversation between the minister of yesterday and him of to-day.
Guy de Lissac stood carelessly by, secretly very much amused at Pichereau, who did not move, but rubbing his hands nervously together was trying to appear at ease, yet by his sour smile at his successor allowing it to be plainly seen how gladly he would have strangled Vaudrey.