"Idiot that I am!" thought Marianne. "Suppose I play my cards for
marriage?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"It will cost no more!"
Married! Duchess! and Duchesse de Rosas! At first she laughed. Duchess!
I am asking a little from you! The mistress of Pierre Méran, the
artist's drudge, the wretch who abducted her and debauched her, adding
his depravity to hers, and who died of consumption while quite young,
after having plunged this girl into vice, this Marianne Kayser, born and
moulded for vice: she a duchess!
"It would be too funny, my dear!" she thought.
Never had Vaudrey, whom she saw that evening at Rue Prony, seemed so
provincial, or, as she said, so _Sulpice_. Besides, he was gloomy and
unable to express himself clearly at first, but finally he brought
himself to acknowledge that he was embarrassed about providing for the
bill of exchange--she understood--
"No, I do not know!"
"The bill of exchange in favor of Monsieur Gochard!"
"Ah! that is so. Well! if you cannot pay it, my dear, I will advise--I
will seek--"
There was nothing to seek. Vaudrey would evidently get himself out of
the affair--but the document matured at an unfortunate time. He did not
dare to mortgage La Saulière, his farm at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont. He had
reflected that Adrienne might learn all about it. And then--
Marianne broke in upon his confidences.
"Don't speak to me about these money matters, my friend, you know that
sort of thing disgusts me!--"
"I understand you and ask your pardon."
They were to see each other again the next day, as parliament was to
take a rest.
"What joy! Not to be away from you for the whole of the day!" remarked
Vaudrey.
"Well then, till to-morrow!"
She felt intense pleasure in being alone again, wrapped in her sheets,
with the light of the lamp that ordinarily shone upon her hours of love
with Sulpice, still burning, and to be free to dream of her Spanish
grandee who had said, plainly, with the trembling of passion on his
lips: "I should esteem you enough to become your husband!"
She passed the night in reverie.
Vaudrey, in spite of the joy of the morrow,--a long tête-à-tête with his
mistress,--thought with increasing vexation of the approaching maturity
of his bill of exchange; within two months he would have to pay the
hundred thousand francs which he had undertaken to pay Marianne's
creditor.
"It is astonishing how quickly time passes!"
At breakfast the following day, Adrienne saw that her husband was more
than usually preoccupied.
"Are political affairs going badly?"
"No--on the contrary--"
"Then why are you melancholy?"
"I am a little fatigued."
"Then," said Madame Vaudrey, "you will scold me."
"Why?"
"I have led Madame Gerson to hope--You know whom I mean, Madame Marsy's
friend,--I have almost promised her that you would accept an invitation
to dine at her house."
For a moment Vaudrey was put out.
Another evening taken! Hours of delight stolen from Marianne!
"I have done wrong?" asked Adrienne, as she rested her pretty but
somewhat sad face on her husband's bosom. "I did it because it is so
great a pleasure to me to spend an entire evening with you, even at
another's house. Remember you have so many official dinners, banquets
and invitations that you attend alone. When the minister's wife is
invited with him, it is a fête-day for the poor, little forsaken thing.
I do not have much of you, it is true, but I see you, I hear you talking
and I am happy. Do not chide me for having said that we would go to
Madame Gerson's. The more so, because she is a charming woman. Ah! when
she speaks of you! 'So great a minister!' Don't you know what she calls
you?--'A Colbert!'"
Vaudrey could not restrain a smile.
"Come, after that, one cannot refuse her invitation. It is the
_Monseigneur_ of the beggar," said he, kissing Adrienne's brow. "And
when do we dine at Madame Gerson's?"
"On Monday next; I shall have at least one delightful evening to see
you," said the young wife sweetly.
The minister entered his cabinet. Almost immediately after, a messenger
handed him a card: _Molina, Banker_.
"How strange it is!" thought Sulpice. "I had him in mind."
In the course of his troublesome reflections concerning the Gochard
paper, Vaudrey persistently thought of that fat, powerful man who
laughed and harangued in a loud voice in the greenroom of the ballet, as
he patted with his fat fingers the delicate chin of Marie Launay.
Why! if he were willing, this Molina--Molina the Tumbler!--for him it is
a mere bagatelle, a hundred thousand francs!
Salomon Molina entered the minister's cabinet just as he made his way
into the foyer of the Opéra, with swelling chest, tilted chin and
stomach thrust forward.
"Monsieur le Ministre," he said in a clear voice, as he spread himself
out in the armchair that Vaudrey pointed out to him, "I notify you that
you have my maiden visit!--I am still in a state of innocency! On my
honor, this is the first time I have set my foot within a minister's
office!"
He manifested his independence--born of his colossal influence--by his
satisfied and successful air. The former Marseillaise clothes-dealer, in
his youth pouncing upon the sailors of the port and Maltese and
Levantine seamen, to palm off on them a second-hand coat or trousers, as
the wardrobe dealers of the Temple hook the passer-by, Salomon Molina,
who had paraded his rags and his hopes on the Canebière, dreaming at the
back of his dark shop of the triumphs, the pleasures, the revels and the
indigestions that money affords, had, moreover, always preserved the
bitterness of those wretched days and his red, Jewish lip expressed the
gall of his painful experiences.
His first word as he entered Vaudrey's cabinet, asserting the virginity
of his efforts at solicitation, betrayed his bitterness.
Now, triumphant, powerful, delighted, feasted and fat, his massive form,
his gross flesh and his money were in evidence all over Paris. His huge
paunch, shaking with laughter, filled the stage-boxes at the theatres.
He expanded his broad shoulders as he reclined in the calèche that
deposited him on race-days at the entrance of the weighing-enclosure. He
held by the neck, as it were, everything of the Parisian quarry that
yelps and bounds about money, issues of stock, and the food of public
fortune: bankers, stock-brokers, and jobbers, financial, political and
exchange editors, wretches running after a hundred sous, statesmen in a
fair way to fortune; and he distributed to this little crowd, just as he
would throw food into a kennel, the discounts and clippings of his
ventures, taking malicious pleasure, the insolent delight of a fortunate
upstart, in feigning at the moment when loans were issued, sickness that
had no existence, in order to have the right of keeping his chamber, of
hearing persons of exalted names ringing at his door and dancing
attendance upon him,--powerful, influential and illustrious
persons,--him, the second-hand dealer and chafferer from Marseilles.
It was then that he tasted the joy of supreme power, that delight which
titillated even his marrow, and after having rested all day, the prey of
a convenient neuralgia, he experienced the unlimited pleasure of force
overcoming mind, the blow of a fist crushing a weakling, as with a white
cravat he appeared in some salon, in the greenroom of the ballet, or in
the dressing-room of a _première_, saying with the mocking smile of
triumph and the assurance attending a gorged appetite:
"I was sick to-day, I suffered from neuralgia! The Minister of Finance
called on me!--Baron Nathan came to get information from me!"
Among all the pleasures experienced by this man, he valued feminine
virtue occasionally purchased with gold as little in comparison with the
virgin souls, honor and virtue that he often succeeded in humiliating,
in bending before him like a reed, and snuffing out with his irony,
whenever necessity placed at his mercy any of those puritanical beings
who had passed sometimes with haughty brow before the millions of this
man of money. It was then that the clothes-dealer took his revenge in
all its hideousness. There was no pity to be expected from this fat,
smiling and easy-going man. His fat fingers strangled more certainly
than the lean hands of a usurer. Molina never pardoned.
Ah! if this fellow went to see the minister, most assuredly he wanted a
favor from him.
But what?
It was extraordinary, but before Vaudrey, Molina who could hold his own
among rascals, found himself ill at ease. There was in the frank look of
this _ninny_, as Molina the _Tumbler_ had one evening called him while
talking politics, such direct honesty that the banker, accustomed as he
was to dealings with sharks and intriguers, did not quite know how to
open the question, nevertheless a very important matter was in hand.
"A rich plum," thought Molina.
A matter of railways, a concession to be gained. A matter of private
interest, disguised under the swelling terms of the public welfare, the
national needs. Millions were to be gained. Molina was charged with the
duty of sounding the President of the Council and the Minister of Public
Works. Two honest men. The _dodge_, as the _Tumbler_ said, was to make
them swallow the affair under the guise of patriotism. A strategical
railroad. The means of rapid locomotion in case of mobilization. With
such high-sounding words, _strategy_, _frontier_, _safety_, they could
carry a good many points.
Unfortunately, Vaudrey was rather skittish on these particular
questions, besides he was informed on the matter. He felt his flesh
creep while Molina was speaking. Just before, on seeing the banker's
card, the idea of the money of which the fat man was one of the
incarnations, had suddenly dawned upon him as a hope. Who knows? By
Molina's aid, he might, perhaps, free himself from anxiety about the
Gochard bill of exchange!--But from the minister's first words, although
the banker could not get to the point, intimidated as he was by
Sulpice's honest look, it was clear that Vaudrey surmised some repugnant
suggestions in the hesitating words of this man.
What! Molina hesitating? He did not go straight to the point, squarely,
according to his custom, Molina the illustrious _Tumbler_? Eh! no! the
intentionally cold bearing of the minister decidedly discomposed him.
Vaudrey's glance never wandered from his for a moment. When the promoter
pronounced the word Bourse, a disdainful curl played upon Sulpice's
lips, but not a word escaped him. Molina heard his own voice break the
silence of the ministerial cabinet and he felt himself entangled. He
came to propose a combination, a bonus, and he did not suspect that
Vaudrey would refuse to have a hand in it. And here, this devilish
minister appeared not to understand, did not understand, perhaps, or
else he understood too well. Molina was not accustomed to such
hard-of-hearing people. With his fat hand, he had dropped into the hands
of senators and ministers of the former régime, a sum for which the only
receipt given was a smile. He was accustomed to the style of
conversation carried on by hints and ended between intelligent people by
a _shake of the hand_, that in which some bits of paper rested:
bank-notes or paid-up shares. And this Vaudrey knew nothing! So he felt
himself obliged to explain himself clearly, to stoop to dotting every
_i_, at the risk of being shown out of doors.
Molina was too shrewd to run this risk. He would return at another time,
seeing that the minister turned a deaf ear, but _pécaïre_! he sweat huge
drops in seeking roundabout phrases, this man who never minced his words
and habitually called things by their proper names. Was the like ever
seen! A pettifogger from Grenoble to _floor_ Salomon Molina!
"It made me warm," said the money-maker, on leaving the cabinet, "but,
deuce take it! I'll have my revenge. One is not a minister always. You
shall pay me dearly, my little fellow, for that uncomfortable little
time."
Vaudrey had thoroughly understood the matter, but he did not intend to
allow it to be seen that he did. That was a simpler way. He had not had
to dismiss the buyer of consciences; he had enjoyed his embarrassment
and that was sufficient.
"What, however, if I had spoken to him of money before he had shown his
hand! If I had accepted from him--!" he said to himself.
He shuddered at the thought as he had previously done while Molina was
talking to him. A single imprudence, a single confidence might easily
have placed him under the hand of this fat man. He must, however, find
some solution. The days were rolling away and the bills signed for
Marianne would in a very short time reach maturity.
"When I think that this Molina could in one day enable me to gain three
times this sum."
Salomon had just told him: "To forestall the news on the Bourse is
sometimes worth gold ingots!" A _forestaller_! As well say the
revelation of a State secret, base speculation, almost treachery! And
yet on hearing these words that covered up an insult, he had not even
rung for the messenger to show Molina out, but had striven to comprehend
nothing!
As the result of this conversation, he felt uncomfortable. The man had
left an odor of pollution, as it were, behind him.
Vaudrey must needs be soon reassured respecting the Gochard paper. In
visiting Marianne, he observed that his mistress was a shrewd woman. She
informed him immediately that Claire Dujarrier whom she had seen, would
secure a renewal from Gochard, who was unknown to Vaudrey, from three
months to three months until the expiration of six months in
consideration of an additional twenty thousand francs for each period of
ninety days.
"I did not understand that at first," Marianne began by remarking.
"Oh!" said Sulpice, "I understand perfectly, it is absolute usury. But
time is ready money, and in six months it will be easier for me to pay
one hundred and forty thousand francs than a hundred thousand to-day. I
have plans."
"What?"
"Very difficult to explain, but quite clear in my mind! The important
part is not to have the date of maturity on the first of June, but on
the first of December."
"Then nothing is more simple. Madame Dujarrier will arrange it."
"Is Madame Dujarrier a providence then?"
"Almost," said Marianne coldly.
Sulpice was intoxicated with joy, realizing that he had before him all
the necessary time in which to free himself from his embarrassment, when
Marianne should have returned him his first acceptance for one hundred
thousand francs against a new one for one hundred and forty thousand. He
breathed again. From the twenty-sixth of April to the first of December,
he had nearly seven months in which to free himself. He repeated the
calculation that he had formerly made when he said: "I have ample time!"
He reëntered the Hôtel Beauvau in a cheerful mood, Adrienne was
delighted. She feared to see him return nervous and dejected.
"Then you will be brilliant presently at Madame Gerson's."
"Stop! that's so. It is this evening in fact!--"
He had forgotten it.
Marianne, too, was not free. She was going, she said, to Auteuil for
that bill of exchange. Vaudrey did not therefore, regret the soirée. His
going to Madame Gerson's was now a matter of indifference to him.
"As for me, I am so happy, oh! so happy!" said Adrienne, clapping her
little hands like a child.
In undressing, Vaudrey fortunately found this document which he had
folded in four and left in his waistcoat pocket:
"On the first of June next, I will pay to the order of Monsieur
Adolphe Gochard of No. 9, Rue Albouy, the sum of One Hundred
Thousand Francs, value received in cash.
"SULPICE VAUDREY,
"Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, 37."