_There was once a Minister of State who presented to his native land the
astonishing spectacle of a Cabinet Minister dying whilst in office. This
action was so astounding to the nation at large that a statue has since
been erected to his memory._
_I saw his funeral procession defile past me, I think I even made one of
the Committee sent by the Society of Men of Letters to march in the
funeral convoy. It was superb. This lawyer from the Provinces, good
honest man, eloquent orator, honest politician that he was, who came to
Paris but to die there, was buried with the greatest magnificence._
_De Musset had eight persons to follow him to the grave; his Excellency
had one hundred thousand._
_I returned home from this gorgeous funeral in a thoughtful mood,
thinking how much emptiness there is in glory, and particularly in
political glory. This man had been "His Excellency the Minister" and not
only his own province, but the whole country had placed its hopes on
him. But what had he done? He had left his home to cast himself into the
great whirlpool of the metropolis. It was the romance of a great
provincial plunged in Paris into the reality of contemporary history,
and become as ordinary as the commonplace items of the Journals. "What a
subject for a study at once profoundly modern and perfectly lifelike!"
The funeral convoy had hardly left the church of the Madeleine when my
plot of this romance was thought out, and appeared clearly before me in
this title, very brief and simple: _His Excellency the Minister_._
_I have not drawn any one in particular, I have thought of no individual
person, I even forgot all about this departed Minister, whose face I
hardly caught even a glimpse of, and of whose life I was completely
ignorant; I had only in my mind's eye a hero or rather a heroine:
Politics with all its discouragements, its vexations, its treacheries,
its deceptions, its visions as fair as the blue sky of summer, suddenly
bursting like soap bubbles; and to the woes of Politics, I naturally
endeavored to add those of the pangs of love._
_And this is how my book came to see the light. I have been frequently
asked from what living person I borrowed the character of Vaudrey, with
its sufferings, its disappointments, its falterings. From whom? An
American translator, better informed, it appears, than myself, has, I
believe, brought out in New York a _key_ to the characters presented in
my book. I should have publicly protested against this _Key_ which
unlocks nothing, however, had it been published in France. Reader, do
not expect any masks to be raised here--there are no masks; it is only a
picture of living people, of passions of our time. No portraits,
however, only types. That, at least, is what I have tried to do. And if
I expected to find indulgent critics, I have certainly succeeded, and
the two special characters which I sought to portray in my romance--in
Parisian and political life--have been fortunate enough to win the
approval of two critics whose testimony to the truth of my portraitures
I have set down here._
_An author of rare merit and an authority on Statecraft, Monsieur J.-J.
Weiss, was kind enough one day to analyze and praise, apropos of the
comedy founded upon my book, the romance which I am to-day republishing.
It has been extremely pleasant for me to put myself under the
sponsorship of a man of letters willing to vouch for the truth of my
portrayals. I must beg pardon for repeating his commendations of my
work, so grateful are they to me, coming from the pen of a critic so
renowned, and which I take some pride in reading again._
_"I had already twice read _Monsieur le Ministre_," wrote Monsieur J.-J.
Weiss in the _Journal des Débats_ the day following the production at
the Gymnase, "before having seen the drama founded on the book, and I do
not regret having been obliged to read it for the third time. The
romance is both well conceived and admirably executed. To have written
it, a union of character and talent was necessary. A Republican tried
and proved, permitting his ideal to be tarnished and sullied; a patriot
wronged by the vices of the times in which he lived; an honest,
clean-handed man; the representative of a family of rigid morality; the
strict impartiality of the artist who cares for nothing but his ideas of
art, and who protects those ideas from being injured or influenced by
the pretensions of any group or coterie; a close and long
acquaintanceship with the ins and outs of Parisian life; an eye at once
inquiring, calm and critical, a courageous indifference, hatred for the
mighty ones of the hour, and a loftiness of soul which refuses to yield
to the unjust demands of timid friendship: such are the qualities that
make the value of this matchless book. Monsieur Claretie has been
accused of having gathered together and exposed to the public gaze two
or three more or less scandalous episodes of private life, and using
them as the foundation of his romance. The fictitious name of Vaudrey
has been held to cloak that of such and such a Minister of State. Those,
however, who search for vulgar gossip in this book, or who look for
private scandal are far astray. They are quite mistaken as regards the
tendency and moral of Monsieur Claretie's book. The Vaudrey of the
romance is no minister in particular, neither this statesman nor that.
He is the Minister whom we have had before our eyes for the last quarter
of a century. He is that one, at once potential and universal. In him
are united and portrayed all the traits by which the species may be
determined. He had been elected to office without knowing why, and to do
him this justice, at least without any fault of his; he was deposed from
power without knowing the reason, and we have no hesitation in saying,
without his having done anything either good or bad to deserve his fall.
There he is minister, however; Minister of the Interior, and who knows?
in a fair way, perhaps, to be swept by some favorable wind to the post
of President of the Council; while not so very long ago to have been
made sub-prefect of the first class, would have surpassed the wildest
visions of his youth. In Monsieur Claretie's romance it is the old
Member of Parliament, Collard--of Nantes--converted late in life to
Republicanism, who chose the provincial Vaudrey for his Minister of the
Interior; this may, with equal probability be Marshal MacMahon._
_"In Monsieur Claretie's romance, _Monsieur le Ministre_ is of the Left
Centre or the so-called Moderate Party, he is therefore on the side of
Law and Order. He enters into the Cabinet with the determination to
reform every abuse, to recast everything; to seek for honest men, to
make merit and not faction, the touchstone of advancement. In short, to
apply in his political life the glorious principles which--and the noble
maxims that--He is only, however, forty-eight hours in office when he
becomes quite demoralized, paralyzed and stultified for the rest of his
ministerial life. It is the phenomenon of crushing demoralization and of
complete enervation of which the public, from the situation in which it
is placed, sees only the results of which Monsieur Claretie, with a
skilful hand describes for us the mechanism and the cause. This Minister
of State, supposed to be omnipotent in office, has not even the power to
choose an undersecretary of State for himself. The Minister who only the
day before, from his seat upon one of the benches of the Opposition, sat
with his head held aloft, his long body erect, with rigid dignity, as if
made of triple brass, cannot now take the initiative in the appointment
of a '_garde champêtre_.' His undersecretaries of State, his _gardes
champêtres_, he himself, his whole environment, in fact, are only
painted dummies and the meek puppets that a director of the staff, a
chief of a division, or a chief of a bureau sets in motion, to the tune
he grinds out of his hand-organ, or moves them about at his will like
pawns upon a chess-board. The Minister will read with smiling confidence
the reports by which his subordinates who are his masters, inform
him--what no one until then had thought of--that he has been called by
the voice of the nation to his high office, and that he can in future
count upon the entire and complete confidence of the country. To please
these obliging persons, the hangers-on of governments that he has passed
a quarter of his life infighting against and whom he will call gravely,
and upon certain occasions, very drolly, the hierarchy, he will betray
without any scruples all those whose disinterested efforts and great
sacrifices have brought about the triumph of the cause which he
represents._
_"Monsieur le Ministre is from the Provinces! You understand. Solemn and
pedantic, if his youth has been passed upon the banks of the Isère, a
puppy with his muzzle held aloft and giddy, if Garonne has nourished
him, broad faced and vulgarly pedantic if his cradle has been rocked in
upper Limousin. But whether he comes from Corrèze, from Garonne or
Isère, it is always as a Provincial that he arrives in Paris, the air of
which intoxicates him. He is in the same situation and carries with him
the same sentiments as Monsieur Jourdain when invited to visit the
Countess Dorimène. For the first adventuress who comes along, a born
princess who has strayed into a house of ill fame, or one who frequents
such a house, who masquerades as a princess in her coquettish house in
Rue Brèmontier, he will forsake father, mother, children, state
documents, cabinet, councils, Chamber of Deputies, everything in fact.
He will break away from his young wife who has grown up under his eyes
in the same town with him, among all the sweet domestic graces, moulded
amid all the fresh and sapid delicacies of the provinces, but pshaw! too
provincial for a noble of his importance, and he will go in pursuit of
some flower, no matter what, be it only redolent of Parisian patchouli.
He will break the heart of the one, while for the other, he will bring
before the councils of administration suspected schemes, blackmailings,
concessions, treachery and ruin. Monsieur Claretie had shown us the
Vaudrey of his romance involved in all these degradations, although he
has checked him as to some, and in his novel, at least, with due
submission to the exalted truth of art, he has not shrunk from punishing
this false, great man and pretended tribune of the people, by the very
vices he espoused._
_"I do not stop to inquire if even in the story, Monsieur Claretie's
'Marianne Kayser' is frequently self-contradictory, and if in some
features I clearly recognize his Guy de Lissac; two characters that play
an important part in the narrative! But after all, what does it matter?
It suffices for me that his Excellency the Minister and all his
Excellency's entourage are fully grasped and clearly described. Granet,
the low _intriguer_ of the lobbies; Molina, the stock-company cut-throat
and Bourse ruffian; Ramel, the melancholy and redoubtable publicist, who
has made emperors without himself desiring to become one, who will die
in the neighborhood of Montmartre and the Batignolles, forgotten but
proud, poor, and unsullied by money, true to his ideals, among the
ingrates enriched by his journal and who have reached the summit only by
the influence of his authority with the public; Denis Garnier, the
Parisian workman who has had an experience of the hulks as the result of
imbibing too freely of sentimental prose and of lending too ready an ear
to the golden speech of some tavern demagogue, who has now had enough of
politics and who scarcely troubles to think what former retailer of
treasonable language, what Gracchus of the sidewalk may be minister,
Vaudrey or Pichereau, or even Granet: all these types are separately
analyzed and vigorously generalized. Monsieur Claretie designated no one
in particular but we elbow the characters in his book every day of our
lives. He has, moreover, written a book of a robust and healthy novelty.
The picture of the greenroom of the Ballet with which the tale opens and
where we are introduced in the most natural way possible to nearly all
the characters that play a part in the story of Vaudrey is masterly in
execution and intention. It is Balzac, but Balzac toned down and more
limpid."_
_I will stop here at the greenroom of the Ballet commended by Monsieur
J.-J. Weiss, to give a slight sketch, clever as a drawing by Saint' Aubin
or a lithograph by Gavarni, which Monsieur Ludovic Halévy has
contributed to a journal and in which he also praises the romance that
the _feuilletoniste_ of the _Débats_ has criticized with an authority so
discriminating and a benevolence so profound._
_It was very agreeable for me to observe that such a thorough Parisian
as the shrewd and witty author of _Les Petites Cardinal_ should find
that the Opéra--which certainly plays a rôle in our politics--had been
sufficiently well portrayed by the author of _Monsieur le Ministre_. And
upon this, the first chapter of my book, Monsieur Ludovic Halévy adds,
moreover, some special and piquant details which are well worth
quoting:_
_"That which gave me very great pleasure in this tale of a man of
politics is that politics really have little, very little place in the
novel; it is love that dominates it and in the most despotic and
pleasant way possible. This great man of Grenoble who arrives at Paris
in order to reform everything, repair everything, elevate everything,
falls at once under the sway of a most charming Parisian adventuress.
See Sulpice Vaudrey the slave of Marianne. Marianne's gray eyes never
leave him--But she in her turn meets her master--and Marianne's master
is Adolphe Gochard, a horrid Parisian blackguard--who is so much her
master that, after all, the real hero of the romance is Adolphe Gochard.
Such is the secret philosophy of this brilliant and ingenious romance._
_"I have, however, a little quarrel on my own account with Monsieur
Jules Claretie. Nothing can be more brilliantly original than the
introductory chapter of _Monsieur le Ministre_. Sulpice Vaudrey makes
his first appearance behind the scenes of the Opéra, and from the sides
of the stage, in the stage boxes, opera-glasses are turned upon him, and
he hears whispered:_
_"'It is the new Minister of the Interior.'_
_"'Nonsense! Monsieur Vaudrey?'_
_"'Yes, Monsieur Vaudrey--'_
_"In short, the appearance of his Excellency creates a sensation, and it
is against this statement that I protest. I go frequently to the Opéra,
very frequently. During the last ten years I have seen defile before me
in the wings, at least fifty Ministers of State, all just freshly ground
out. Curiosity had brought them there and the desire to see the dancers
at close quarters, and also the vague hope that by exhibiting themselves
there in all their glory, they would create a sensation in this little
world._
_"Well, this hope of theirs was never realized. Nobody took the trouble
to look at them. A minister nowadays is nobody of importance. Formerly
to rise to such a position, to take in hand the reins of one of the
great departments, it was necessary to have a certain exterior, a
certain prominence, something of a past--to be a Monsieur Thiers,
Monsieur Guizot, Monsieur Mole, Monsieur de Rémusat, Monsieur Villemain,
Monsieur Duchátel, Monsieur de Falloux or Monsieur de Broglie--that is
to say, an orator, an author, a historian, somebody in fact. But
nowadays, all that is necessary to be a minister is the votes of certain
little combinations of groups and subsidiary groups, who all expect a
share of the spoils. Therefore we are ruled by certain personages
illustrious perhaps at Gap or at Montélimar but who are quite unknown in
the genealogical records of the Boulevard Haussmann. Why should you
imagine that public attention would be attracted by news like this:_
_"'Look!--There is Monsieur X, or Monsieur Y, or Monsieur Z.'_
_"One person only during these last years ever succeeded in attracting
the attention of the songstresses and ballet-girls of the Opéra. And
that was Gambetta. Ah! when he came to claim Monsieur Vaucorbeil's
hospitality, it was useless to crouch behind the cherry-colored silk
curtains of the manager's box, many glances were directed toward him,
and many prowling curiosities were awakened in the vicinity of the
manager's box. Little lassies of ten or twelve came and seized your
hand, saying:_
_"'Please, monsieur, point out Monsieur Gambetta to me--he is here--I
would so much like to see him.'_
_"And then Gambetta was pointed out to them during the entr'acte--after
which, delighted, they went off caracoling and pirouetting behind the
scenes:_
_"'You did not see Monsieur Gambetta, but I saw him!'_
_"This was popularity--and it must be confessed that only one man in
France to-day receives such marks of it. This man is Gambetta._
_"Meanwhile Claretie's minister continues his walk through the corridors
of the Opéra house. He reaches the greenroom of the ballet at last and
exclaims:_
_"'And that is all!'_
_"Alas, yes, your Excellency, that is all!--"_
_And everything is only a _"that is all,"_ in this world. If one should
set himself carefully to weigh power or fame,--power, that force of
which Girardin said, however: "I would give fifty years of glory for one
hour of power,"--even if one tilted the scale, one would not find the
weight very considerable._
_It would be necessary to have the resounding renown of a personality
like that one who, if I am to believe Monsieur Halévy, alone enjoyed the
privilege of revolutionizing the foyer of the ballet, in order to boast
of having been someone, or of having accomplished something._
_A rather witty skeptic once said to a friend of his who had just been
appointed minister:_
_"My dear fellow, permit me as a practical man to ask you not to engage
in too many affairs. Events in this world are accomplished without much
meddling. If you attempt to do something to-day, everyone will cry out:
'What! he is going to demolish everything!' If you do nothing, they will
cry: 'What! he does not budge! If I were minister, which God forbid, I
would say nothing--and let others act--I would do nothing--and let
others talk.'"_
_Everybody, very fortunately--and all ministers do not reason like this
jester. But the truth is that it is very difficult for an honest man in
the midst of political entanglements as Vaudrey was, to realize his
dream. When opportunities arise--those opportunities that march only at
a snail's pace--one is not allowed to make use of them, they are
snatched from one. They arrive, only to take wings again. And in those
posts of daily combat, one has not only against one the enemies who
attack one openly, which would be but a slight matter, a touch with a
goad or a prick of the spur, at most--but one has to contend with
friends who compromise, and servants who serve one badly._
_Every man who occupies an office, whatever it may be, has for his
adversaries those who covet it, those who regret it, those who have once
filled it, and those who desire to fill it. What assaults too! Against a
successful rival, there is no infamy too base, no mine too deep, no
villainy too cruel, no lie too poisoned to be made use of--and the
minister, his Excellency, is like a hostage to Power._
_And yet one more point, it is not in his enemies or his calumniators
that his danger lies. The real, absolute evil is in the system of
routine and ill-will which attack the statesmen of probity. It will be
seen from these pages that there is a warning bell destined, alas! to
keep away from those in power the messengers who would bring them the
truth from outside, the unwelcome and much dreaded truth._
_The novel may sometimes be this stroke of the bell,--a stroke honest
and useful,--a disinterested _warner,_ and I have striven to make
_Monsieur le Ministre_ precisely that, in a small degree, for the
political world. I have essayed to paint this hell paved with some of
the good intentions. The success which greeted the appearance of this
book, might justify me in believing that I have succeeded in my task. I
trust that it will enjoy under its new form--so flattering to an author,
that an editor-artist is pleased to give it,--the success achieved under
its first form._
__Monsieur le Ministre_ is connected with more than one recollection of my
life. I was called upon one day to follow to his last resting-place--and
it is on an occasion like this that one discovers more readily and
perceives more clearly life's ironies--one of those men "who do nothing
but create other men," a journalist. It was bitterly cold and we stood
before the open grave, just in front of a railway embankment, in an out
of the way cemetery of Saint-Ouen,--the cemetery called _Cayenne,_
because the dead are "deported" thither. We were but four faithful
ones. Yes, four, but amongst these four must be included a young man,
bare-headed and wearing the uniform of an officer, who stood by the
deceased man's son._
_Whilst one of us bade the last farewell to the departed on the brink of
the grave, the scream of the railway engine cut short his words, and
seemed to hiss for the last time the fate of the vanquished man lying
there. As we were quitting the cemetery, a worthy man, a song-writer,
observed to me: "Well, if all those whom Léon Plée helped during his
lifetime had remembered him when he was dead, this little _Campo Santo_
of Saint-Ouen would not have been large enough to hold them all!"_
_Doubtless. But they did not remember him._
_And from the contrast between the shabby obsequies of the old
journalist and the solemn pomp of that of the funeral service of the
four days' minister came the idea of my book. It seemed to me that here
was an appropriate idea and a useful reparation. Art has nothing to
lose--rather the contrary, when it devotes itself to militant tasks._
_Ah! I forgot--When one mentions to-day the name of this illustrious
minister whose funeral convoy was in its day one of the great spectacles
of Paris, and one of the great surprises to those who know how difficult
it is for a minister to die in office--like the Spartan still grasping
his shield--those best informed, shaking their heads solemnly will say:_
_"Ricard?--Oh! he had great talent, Ricard--I saw lately a portrait of
Paul de Musset by him--It is superb!"_
_They confound him with the painter to whom no statue has been erected,
but whose works remain._
_Be, then, a Cabinet Minister!_
_JULES CLARETIE._
_Viroflay, September 1, 1886._