Sulpice Vaudrey had married Adrienne for love. She brought to him from
the convent at Grenoble where she had been educated, the charming
innocence of a young girl and the innate devotion of a woman. She was an
orphan with a considerable fortune, but although Sulpice had only
moderate resources, he had scarcely thought of her wealth, not even
inquiring of her guardian, Doctor Reboux, on the occasion of his formal
demand for her hand, about the dowry of Mademoiselle Gérard.
He had met her at more than one soirée at Grenoble, where she appeared
timid, dazzled and retiring, and quietly interrogating everything by her
sweet glance. Some few words exchanged carelessly, music which they had
listened to side by side, the ordinary everyday intercourse in society,
had made Sulpice acquainted with his wife; but the sight of the pretty
blonde--so sweet and gentle--the childlike timidity of this young girl,
something rather pensive in the confiding smile of this blooming
creature of eighteen summers, had won him completely. He was free, and
alone, for he had lost, but a short time before, the only creature he
loved in the world, his mother, of whom he was the son in the double
sense of flesh and spirit, by the nourishment of her breast and by the
patient teaching that she had implanted in his mind.
He remembered only his father's dreamy and refined face in the portrait
of a young, sad-looking man in a lawyer's black gown, before which he
had stood when quite small, and spelled out as he might have lisped a
prayer, the four letters: _papa_. Alone in this little town of Grenoble,
for which he had left his native village of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, he
had, just before meeting Adrienne, fallen a victim to a profound
melancholy and realized the necessity of deciding upon his career.
He was then thirty-four. Except the years spent in the study of law at
Paris amid the turmoil of the left bank of the Seine, he had always
lived in the province--his own province of Dauphiné. He had grown up in
the old house at Saint-Laurent, where every nook and corner kept for him
its own sweet memory of his childhood and youth. The great white
drawing-room with its wainscotings of the time of Louis XVI., which
opened out upon a flight of steps leading down into a terraced garden;
the portraits of obscure ancestors: lawyers in powdered wigs and wearing
the robes of the members of the Third estate, fat and rosy with double
chins resting upon their broad cravats, amiable old ladies with oddly
arranged hair and flowered gowns, coquettish still as they smiled in
their oval, wooden frames, and then the old books in their old-fashioned
bindings slumbering in a great bookcase with glass doors, or piled up on
shelves below the fowling-pieces, the game-bags and the powder-horns.
With this dwelling of which he thought so often now, his whole past was
linked, about it still clung something of its past poetry, and it was
sacred through the memories it preserved, and as the scene of the
unforgotten joys of childhood. He could see again, the great
stone-flagged kitchen, where they sat up at nights telling stories, the
chamber above it, the bed with its heavy serge curtains, where he
lay--sometimes shaking with terror--all alone, adjoining the room once
occupied by his father, and the moonlight shining through the tall old
trees in the courtyard outside, that entering by the half-open blinds
cast shadows like trembling lace on the wall opposite to him. It seemed
to Sulpice then that he could hear the sounds of the weird demon's chase
as told by old Catherine, the cook, in bated tones during their vigils.
It was there that he went every year to pass his holidays with his
mother, who had had the courage to send him away,--just as during winter
she had plunged him into cold water--to the Lyceum at Grenoble, whence
he would return to Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, "so thin, poor child!" as his
mother said.
And how fat she would send him back again to school,--to make the
masters ashamed of their stinginess.
How pleasant were the reminiscences of those sunny days amongst the
mountains, the excursions to Grande Chartreuse, where the murmuring
brook trickled among the rocks, the halts at Guiers-Mort or under the
trees in the stillness of a drowsy day in summer; how delightful to
stretch one's self out at the foot of the cliffs or on a grassy slope
with a book, pausing now and then to indulge in day-dreams or glance up
at the fleecy clouds floating in the blue sky above his head and watch
them gathering, then vanishing and melting away like smoke wreaths! Ah!
how sweet were those long, idle days full of dreams, when the noise of
the waterfall dashing over the rocks lulled the senses like some merry
song, or a nurse's tender, crooning lullaby.
In those days Sulpice made no plans for his future, where he would go,
what he would do, or what would become of him; but he felt within
himself unbounded hope, a hope as limitless and bright as the azure sky
above him, the inspiration of devotion, love and poetry. He asked
himself whether he should be a missionary or a representative of the
people. It seemed to him that his heart was large enough to contain a
world, and as he grew up he began to ask himself the terrible question:
"Will a woman ever love me?"
To be loved! What a dream! One day he put this question to one of his
comrades at college, Guy de Lissac, the son of a country gentleman in
the neighborhood, who answered:
"Booby! every one is loved some day or other, and there are some who are
loved even too much!"
Sulpice had received a patriarchal and half-puritanical training, but
softened materially by his mother's almost excessive care, it had left,
as it were, a kind of poetic perfume that clung about him and never left
him.
Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of
political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at
Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his
father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing
again his mother's voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy
balusters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its
living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from
the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to
trample with bare feet the great clusters of grapes piled up in the
wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated! Even as a representative
or minister, musing over his past that seemed but yesterday, Sulpice
wandered again in thought to this quiet country spot, so loved by him,
so sweet, so still, reposing in the silence of provincial calm--far
away, removed from all the noise and bustle of Paris.
The farmers of Dauphiné generally think of making their sons tillers of
the soil, sending them to school and to college, perhaps to begin later
the study of law or medicine, but welcoming them joyfully back again to
their native fields, to their farms, where the youths soon forget all
they may have learned of the Code or the Codex and lead the healthy,
hardy life of the country. Good, well-built fellows, their chests
enlarged by their daily exercise, their thighs strengthened by
mountain-climbing, gay young men, liking to hunt and drink on the banks
of the Isère and caring more for good harvests than for the songs of the
wind amongst the branches of the poplars upon the river-banks.
Sulpice had an old uncle on his father's side who proposed to his
sister-in-law to give up his broad acres--a fortune in themselves--to
Sulpice, if his nephew would consent to marry his daughter. Sulpice
refused. He would not marry for money.
"Fiddle-faddle!" cried his uncle. "Sickly sentimentality! If he
cultivates that _grain_, my brother's son will not make much headway."
"There is where you are mistaken, brother-in-law. What my poor Raymond
had not time to become, his child will be: a lawyer at once eloquent and
honest."
"Well, well," replied the uncle, "but he shall not have my girl."
Sulpice, after finishing his studies at Paris, returned to his mother at
Grenoble, took her away from the old house at Saint-Laurent and
installed her in the town with himself, where he began the practice of
law and attracted everybody's attention from the first. He made pleading
a sacred office and not a trade. Everyone was astonished that he had not
remained in Paris.
Why? He loved his native province, the banks of the Isère, the healthy,
poetic atmosphere hanging over the desert of the Chartreuse and the
snows of the Grand-Som. A talented man could make his way
anywhere,--moreover, it was his pleasure to consider it a duty not to
leave this secluded corner of the earth where he would cause freedom of
speech to be known. Sulpice, whose heart was open to every ardent and
generous manifestation of human thought, had imbibed from his mother, as
well as from his father's writings and books, and from the
_Encyclopædia_ that Raymond Vaudrey had interlined with notes and
reflections, not merely traditional information, but also, so to speak,
the baptism of liberty. He had lived in the feverish days of the past
eighty years, through his reading of the _Gazette Nationale_ of those
stormy days. The speeches that he found in those pages--speeches that
still burned like uncooled lava--of Mirabeau, Barnave, and Condorcet, a
son of Grenoble, seemed to impart a glow to his fingers and fire to his
glance. Then, too, the magnificent dreams of freedom proclaimed from the
tribune inflamed his mind and made his heart beat fast. He saw as in a
vision applauding crowds, tricolors gleaming in the clear and golden
sunlight, processions moving, files marching past, and heard eternal
truths proclaimed and acclaimed.
His mother smiled at all this enthusiasm. She did not however try to
repress it. It would vanish at the touch of years, just as the leaves of
the trees fly before the winds of October. And besides, the dear woman
herself was in sympathy with his hopes, his dreams and visions,
remembering that her lost Raymond had loved what his son in his turn so
much adored.
The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a
popular man at Grenoble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how
generous he was, and by the middle-class who regarded him as a prudent
man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of
the National Assembly. He had just passed his thirty-fourth year.
His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by
this brilliant launch on his career.
With what deep emotion, even to-day, Vaudrey recalled that Sunday in
February, a foul, wet day, when he returned home in a closed carriage
with a friend, from an electioneering tour. The day before he had made a
speech in a wineshop to an audience of peasants, who listened,
open-mouthed, but withal suspicious, examining their candidate as they
would have handled a beast offered at the market, and who, step by step,
applauded his remarks, stretching out their rasp-like hands as he left
them, and crying out: "You are our man!"
That very morning he returned to Grenoble in the rain, passing through
villages where the posters bearing his name and those of his friends,
half-demolished by the rain, flapped dismally in the wind. Before the
mayor's office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme
paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare.
But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened
pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the
fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much
indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France,
and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in
the struggle.
Moreover, at night, with what feverish transport he watched the returns
of the election as they reached the Palais de Justice, black with the
crowd, and filled with uproar! With what a fearfully fast-beating heart
he saw the rapidly swelling number of ballots cast for him! Dispatches
came, and pedestrians hurried in from the country, waving their
bulletins above their heads, and Sulpice heard on every lip the same
cry: "Vaudrey leads!"
Some cried bravo, while others clapped their hands. A crowd quickly
gathered about Vaudrey. It already seemed to him that he was lifted up
by a great wave and carried to a new world.
A friend seized him by the arm and drew him into a corner of the hall,
away from the others, and hurriedly said: "You know I am not one to ask
much of you, to ask anything of you, in fact. I merely reckon on a
receivership. That is easily done, eh? A mere nothing?"
Sulpice, whose feelings were overcome by this great popular
consecration, felt a kind of anger stir his heart against this
solicitor, who, in the triumph of a great popular cause, saw only a
means of self-advancement, of securing an appointment. The deputy--for
he was a deputy now, each commune adding its total to the Vaudrey
vote--was moved by a feeling of disgust.
The crowd followed him home that evening, shouting in triumph.
Amid the joy of victory, Sulpice felt the burden of the anxiety caused
by duties to be done: a treaty of peace to be signed, and what a peace!
Must he, alas! append his signature to a document devoted to the
dismemberment of his country? Far into the night he stood in reverie in
his chamber, his brow resting against the cold window-pane.
He retired to rest very late, and arose with the gray dawn of February,
but without having slept.
He looked across the street to a convent garden, with its square and
lozenge-shaped beds regularly arranged, its bare trees and box-wood
borders, that he had often gazed upon. Some nuns in their black robes
passed slowly across this cold and calm horizon that for many years had
also been the range of his vision.
Henceforth this familiar spot, this sad garden, whose cloistral
associations charmed him, would be lost to his view. It was Paris now
that awaited him, feverish Paris, burning with anger and odorous of
saltpetre. Its very pavements must burn. Sulpice was in haste, however,
to see it once more, to pass with head aloft beneath the garrets where
he had once dreamed as a student, fagging and striving to get knowledge.
How often he would regret that convent garden, those familiar
flower-beds, the deep silence that enveloped him as he sat working by
the open window, the passage of a bird near him, as if to fan him with
its wing, and the vague murmur of the canticles of the sisters ascending
to his window like the echo of a prayer!
In the recess during one of the years following his election to the
Assembly, he married Mademoiselle Gérard. Doctor Reboux, her guardian,
charmed to give his ward to a man with a future like Vaudrey's, had not
hesitated long about consenting to the marriage. Adrienne delighted
Sulpice, and the young girl herself was quite happy to be chosen by this
good-natured, distinguished young man whom everybody at Grenoble, not
excepting his political adversaries, admired and spoke well of. With
large, brilliant, black eyes lighting up a thin, fair face, a full
beard, a high forehead with a deep furrow between the eyebrows, giving
to his usually wandering, keen and restless glance a somewhat
contemplative expression, Sulpice was a decidedly attractive man. He was
not a handsome or a charming fellow, but a good-natured, agreeable,
refined man, a fine conversationalist, persuasive, enthusiastic and
alert; learned without being pedantic, a man who could inspire in a
young girl a perfect passion. Adrienne joyfully married him, as he had
sought her from love.
And now all the poetry and romance of his youth blossomed again in his
heart, in the thick of the political struggle in which he was engaged;
he forgot, amid the idyllic scenes of domestic life, the storms of
Versailles, the political troubles, forebodings as to the future, all
anxieties of the present, the routine life of the Assembly into which he
plunged with all his mind, and the excitement of his labors, his debates
and his duties.
Sulpice thought again and again of the summer morning when he led his
wife to the altar, and compared it to a day's halt in the course of a
journey under the blaze of the sun; he recalled the old house full of
noisy stir, the crowd of relatives and friends in festive attire, the
stamping of the horses' feet before the great open gate, the neighbors
standing at the windows, and the little street-boys scuffling upon the
pavement, all the joyous bustle of that happy day. It seemed to Sulpice
that the sunlight came streaming in with Adrienne's entrance into the
vast salon, from the walls of which her pictured ancestresses in their
huge leg-of-mutton sleeves seemed to smile at her.
Beneath the orange wreath sent from Paris, her face expressed the happy,
surprised, and sweetly anxious look of a young communicant wrapped in
her veil.
Sulpice had never seen her look more beautiful. How prettily she came
towards him, blushing vividly, and holding out her two little white
gloved hands! He, somewhat bored by the company that surrounded them,
cast an involuntary glance at a mirror hanging opposite and decided that
he looked awkward and formal with his hair too carefully arranged. How
they had laughed since then and always with new pleasure at these
recollections, so sweet even now.
His happiness on that joyous day would have been complete had his mother
been present, when in the presence of the old priest who had instructed
Adrienne in her catechism, Sulpice stood forward and took by its velvet
shield the taper that seemed so light to him, and awkwardly held the
wafer that the priest extended to him. It was a great event in Grenoble
when the leader of the Liberal Party, who headed the list at the last
election, was seen being married like a believing bourgeois. The organ
pealed forth its tender vibrations, some Christmas anthem, mysterious
and tremulous, like an alleluia sounding through the aisles of
centuries; the light streamed through the windows in floods and rested
upon Adrienne, who was kneeling with her childlike head leaning on her
gloved hands, kissing her fair locks with sunlight and illumining the
gleaming satin of her dress with its long train spreading out over the
carpet.
Sulpice took away from this ceremony in the presence of a crowded
congregation an impression at once perfumed and dazzling: the perfumes
of flowers, the play of light, the greetings of the organ, and within
and about him, all the intoxication of love, singing a song of
happiness.
All that was now far away! nearly six years had elapsed since that day,
six years of bitter struggle, during which Vaudrey fought the harder,
defended his ideas of liberty with fervid eloquence, disputed step by
step, and through intense work came to the front, living at Paris just
as he did in the province, having his books brought from there to his
apartment in the Rue de la Chaussée d'Antin, close to the railroad that
he took every morning when he regretfully left Adrienne, Adrienne to
whom he returned every evening that political meetings and protracted
sittings did not rob him of those happy evenings, which were in truth
the only evenings that he really lived.
Adrienne seldom went out, not caring to display herself and shunning the
bustle, living at Paris, as at Grenoble, in peaceful seclusion, caring
only for the existence of her husband, his work, and his speeches that
he prepared with so much courageous labor. She sat up with him until
very late, glancing over the books, the summaries of the laws and the
old parliamentary reports.
At times she was terrified at the ardor with which Sulpice devoted
himself to these occupations. She greatly desired to take her part and
was grieved at being unable to assist him by writing from his dictation,
or by examining these old books. She felt terribly anxious when Vaudrey
had to make a speech from the tribune. She dared not go to hear him,
but knowing that he was to speak, she had not the courage to remain at
home. Anxiously she ascended to the public gallery. She shuddered and
was almost ready to faint, when she heard the voice of the president
break what seemed to her an icy silence, with the words: _Monsieur
Vaudrey has the ear of the Assembly_.
The sound of Sulpice's voice seemed changed to her. Fearfully she asked
herself if fright was strangling him. She dared not look at him. It
seemed to her that the people were laughing, making a disturbance and
coughing, but not listening to him. Why had she come? She would never do
so again. An icy chill took possession of her. Then suddenly she heard a
storm of applause that seemed like an outburst of sympathy. Hands were
clapped, voices applauded. She half raised herself, and leaning upon the
rail of the gallery, saw Sulpice between the crowded heads, towering
above the immense audience, radiant and calm, standing with his arms
folded or his hands resting on the tribune, below the chair occupied by
a motionless, white-cravatted man, and throwing back his fair head,
hurling, as from a full heart, his words, his wishes and his faith. All
this she saw with supreme happiness and felt proud of the man whose name
she bore.
At that moment, she would fain have cried out to every one that she was
his, that she adored him, that he was her pride, even as she was his
joy! She would like to have folded him to her, to cling to his neck and
to repeat before all that crowd: _I love you!_
But she reserved all her tender effusions for the intimacy of their
home, in order to calm the enthusiasm, oftentimes desperate, of this
nervous man whom everything threw into a feverish excitement, this grand
man, as they called him at Grenoble, who was for her only a great child
whom she adored and kept in check by her girlish devotion combined with
her motherly, delicate attentions.
Vaudrey, however, more ambitious to do good than to obtain power, and
spending his life in the conflicts of the Chamber, saw the years
slipping away without realizing that he was making any progress, not a
single step forward in the direction of his goal. Since the war, the
years had passed for him as well as for those of his generation, with
confusing rapidity, and suddenly, all at once, after having been in some
sense slumbering, flattering himself that a man of thirty has a future
before him, he was rudely awakened to the astonishing truth that he was
forty.
Forty! Sulpice had experienced a certain melancholy in advancing the
figure by ten, and whatever position he had acquired within his party,
within the circle of his friends, his dream was to reach still higher,
he was tired of playing second-rate parts, and eager to stand before the
footlights in full blaze, in the first rôle.
In the snug interior that Adrienne furnished, he enjoyed all material
happiness. She soothed him, brought his dreams back to the region of the
real, terrified at times by his discouragements, his anger, and still
more by his illusions concerning men and things.
Sulpice often reproached her for having clipped the wings of his
ambition.
"I!" she would say, "it is rather the fans of your windmills that I
break, you Don Quixote!"
He would then smile at her, and look earnestly into the depths of the
timid creature's lovely blue eyes, causing her to blush as if ashamed of
having seemed to be witty.
Her chief aim was to be the devoted, loving friend of this man whom she
thought so superior to herself, and although she was totally ignorant of
political intrigues, she was by virtue of the mere instinct of love, his
best and most perspicacious adviser and felt delighted only when
Vaudrey, by chance, listened to her counsel.
"I love you so dearly!" she confessed with the unlimited candor of a
poor creature who has but a single affection, a single pretext for
loving.
He saw in the life he led, only the penumbra: his neglected youth, his
hopes fled, his fears, the disgust which at times filled him as he
thought of the never-ending recommencements and trickeries of political
life. So dearly cherished, so beloved, it seemed to him, nevertheless,
that his life lacked something. He would have liked a child, a son to
bring up, a domestic tie, since political conditions prevented him from
accomplishing a civic duty. Ah! yes, a son, a being to mould, a brow to
kiss, a soul to fashion after the image of his own, a child who would
not know all the sorrows of life that his own generation had laid on
him! Perhaps it was only a child that he needed. Something, however, he
evidently lacked.
Still he smiled, always in love with that young woman of twenty-four
years, delicate, slender, and full of the fears and artlessness of a
child. Accustomed to the quiet solitude of the house of her guardian,
she, when at Paris, in her husband's study, arranging his books, his
papers, his legislative plans and reports, sought to surround her dear
Sulpice with the comforting felicity of bourgeois happiness that was
enjoyed calmly, like a cordial sipped at the fireside.
Then suddenly one day, the news of a startling political change broke in
on this household.
Sulpice reached home one evening at one and the same time nervous,
anxious, and happy.
His name was on almost every lip, in connection with a ministerial
combination. His last speech on domestic policy had more than ever
brought him into prominence and he was considered to have boldly
contributed to the development of a fearful crisis.
A minister! he might, before the morning, be a minister! His policy was
triumphant.
The advocate Collard--of Nantes,--who was pointed out as the future head
of the Cabinet, was one of his intimate friends. It was
suggested--positively--that Sulpice should be intrusted with one of the
most _important portfolios_, that of the Interior or of Foreign Affairs,
the _lesser portfolios_ being considered those of Public Instruction and
of Agriculture and Commerce, the former of which concerns itself with
the spiritual welfare of the people, and the latter with their food
supply.
Sulpice told all this to Adrienne while eating his dinner mechanically
and without appetite.
There was to be a meeting of his coterie at eight o'clock. It was
already seven. He hurried.
Adrienne saw that he was very pale. She experienced a strange sensation,
evidently a joyful one although mingled with anxiety. Politics drew him
away from his wife so frequently, and for so long a time, that she was
already compelled to live in such solitude that the secluded creature
wondered if in future she would not be condemned to still greater
isolation. But all anxiety disappeared under the influence of Sulpice's
manifest joy. He was feverishly impatient. It seemed to him that never
had he known so decisive a moment in his life.
The sound of the bell, suddenly ringing out its clear note in the
silence, caused him to start.
The dining-room door was opened by a servant, who handed a letter to
Vaudrey, bearing on one corner of the envelope the word: _Urgent_.
Sulpice recognized the writing.
It was from Collard of Nantes.
Adrienne saw her husband's cheek flush as he read this letter, which
Sulpice promptly handed her, while his eyes sparkled with delight.
"It is done! Read!"
Adrienne turned pale.
Collard notified his "colleague" that the ministerial combination of
which he was the head had succeeded. The President awaited at the Élysée
the arrival of the new ministers. He tendered Vaudrey the portfolio of
the Interior.
"A minister!" said Adrienne, now overcome with delight.
Vaudrey had risen and, a little uneasy, was mechanically searching for
something, still holding his napkin in his hand.
"My hat," he said. "My overcoat. A carriage."
Adrienne, with her hands clasped in a sort of childish admiration,
looked at him as if he had become suddenly transformed. All his being,
in fact, expressed complete satisfaction. He embraced Adrienne almost
frantically, kissed her again and again, and left her, then descended
the staircase with the speed of a lover hastening to a rendezvous.
This political honeymoon was still at its height at the moment when the
delighted Vaudrey, seeing everything rosy-hued, was satisfying his
astonished curiosity in the greenroom of the ballet. He entered office,
animated by all the good purposes inspired by absolute faith. It seemed
to him that he was about to save the world, to regenerate the
government, and to destroy abuses.
"It is very difficult to become a minister," he said, smiling, "but
nothing is easier than to be a great minister. It only demands a
determination to do good!"
"And the power to do it," replied his friend Granet, somewhat
ironically.
What! power? Nothing was more simple, since Vaudrey held the reins of
power!--If others wrecked the hopes of their friends, it was because
they had not dared, because they had not the will!
They would now see what he would do himself! Not to-morrow either, nor
in a month--but at once.
He entered the ministry boldly, like a good-natured despot, determined
to reform, study and rearrange everything; and a victim to the feverish
and glorious zeal of a neophyte, he was a little surprised to encounter,
at the very outset, the obstinate resistance of routine, ignorance, and
the unyielding mechanism of that vast machine, more eternal than
empires: Ad-min-is-tra-tion.
Bah! he would have satisfaction! Patience would overcome all. After all,
time is on one's side.
"Time? Already!" replied Granet, who was a perpetual scoffer.
Adrienne, overwhelmed with surprise, enjoyed the reflections from the
golden aurora of power that so sweetly tinted Sulpice's life. She
shared her husband's triumphs without haughtiness, and now, however she
might love her domestic life, it was incumbent upon her to pass more of
her time in society than formerly, _to show herself_, as Sulpice said,
and, surrounded by the success and flattery she enjoyed, she felt that
that obligation was only an added joy, whose contentment she reflected
on her husband.
When she entered a salon, she was greeted with a flattering murmur of
admiration and good-natured curiosity. The women looked at her and the
men surrounded her.
"Madame Vaudrey?"
"The minister's wife!"
"Charming!"
"Quite young!"
"Somewhat provincial!"
"So much the more attractive!"
"That is true, as fresh as a peach!"
She endeavored to atone by a gracious, very sincere modesty, for the
enviable position in which chance had suddenly placed her. It was said
of her that she accepted a compliment as timidly as a boarding-school
miss receives a prize. They forgave her for retaining her rosy cheeks
because of her white and exquisitely shaped hands. She was not
considered to be "_trop de Grenoble_." Witty people called her the
pretty _Dauphinoise_, and the flatterers the little Dauphine.
In short, her _success_ was great! So said the chroniclers; the entrance
of a fashionable woman into a salon being daily compared with that of an
actress on the stage.
It was especially because Vaudrey appeared to be so happy, that his
young wife was so contented. She felt none of the vainglory of power.
Generally alone in the vast, deserted apartments of the ministry, with
all their commonplace, luxurious appointments, she more than once
regretted the home in the Chaussée-d'Antin, where they enjoyed--but too
rarely--a renewal of the cherished solitude of the first months of their
union, the familiar chats of the Grenoble days, the prolonged
conversations, exchanges of thoughts, hopes and reminiscences--already!
only recollections,--and she sometimes said to Sulpice, who was
feverishly excited and glowed with delight at having reached the summit
of power:
"Do you know what this place suggests to me? Why, living in a hotel!"
"And you are right," Vaudrey gaily answered; "we are at a hotel, but it
is the hotel in which the will of France lodges!"
"You understand, my dear, that if you are happy--"
"Very happy! it is only now that I can show what I am made of. You shall
see, Adrienne, you shall see what I will do and become within a year."
Within a year!