There was a crowd at the _Mirlitons_ Exposition.
A file of waiting carriages lined the kerbstone the whole length of
Place Vendôme. Beneath the arch and within the portal, groups of
fashionable persons elbowed each other on entering or leaving, and
exchanged friendly polite greetings; the women quizzing the new hats,
little hoods of plush or large _Rembranesque_ hats in which the
delicate Parisian faces were lost as under the roof of a cabriolet. The
liveried lackeys perfunctorily glanced at the cards of admission that
the holders hardly took the trouble to present. One was seated at a
table mechanically handing out catalogues. Through the open door of the
Club's Theatre could be seen gold frames suspended from the walls, terra
cottas and marbles on their pedestals, and around the pictures and
sculptures a dense crowd, masses of black hats inclined toward the
paintings, side by side with pretty feminine heads crowned with
Gainsborough hats adorned with plumes. It was impossible to see at close
quarters the pieces offered for the sale that was for that day the
engrossing topic of conversation of _All Paris_.
"A veritable salon in miniature!" said Guy aloud to an art critic who
was taking notes. "But to examine it comfortably one should be quite
alone. For an hour past I have been trying to get a look at the
Meissonier, but have not been able to do so. It is stifling here. I will
return another time."
He quickly grasped the hand that held the pencil, and which was extended
to him, and tried to make a passage through the crowd to the exit.
Pushed and pushing, he smiled and apologized for his inability to
disengage his arms that were held by the crowd as if in a vise, in order
to salute the friends he recognized. At length he reached, giving vent
to a grunt of satisfaction, the hall where visitors were sitting on
divans, chatting, either less eager to view the pictures or satisfied
in their desires. There, Guy instinctively looked at a mirror and
examined the knot of his cravat. He did not notice that a gentleman with
a closely buttoned frock-coat, on seeing him, quietly rose from the
divan on which he had been sitting, and approached him, mechanically
pulling the skirts of his coat meanwhile, so as to smooth the creases.
He simply touched Monsieur de Lissac's shoulder with the tip of his
finger.
Guy turned round, expecting to recognize a friend.
"You are surely Monsieur de Lissac?" said the man in the frock-coat,
with the refined manners of a gentleman.
"Yes!" said Lissac, somewhat astonished at the coldness of his manner.
"Be good enough to accompany me, monsieur, I am a Commissioner of the
Judiciary Delegations!"
Lissac thought he misunderstood him.
"I confess that I don't quite understand you," he began, with a rather
significant smile.
"I am a Commissioner of Police," the other replied, "and I am ordered to
arrest you."
He suddenly exposed his insignia like the end of a sash, and by a very
polite gesture, with an amiable and engaging manner, pointed to the way
out by the side of the archway of the hôtel.
"I have two of my men yonder, monsieur, but you will not place me under
the necessity of--"
"What is this, monsieur?" said Lissac. "I frankly confess that I
understand nothing of this enigma. I hope you will explain it to me."
All this was said in a conversational tone, _mezzo voce_, and
accompanied with smiles. No one could have guessed what these two men
were saying to each other. Only, Guy was very pale and his somewhat
haughty glance around him seemed to indicate that he was seeking some
support or witness.
He uttered a slight exclamation of satisfaction on perceiving the
journalist to whom he had just before spoken a few words before a little
canvas by Meissonier.
"My dear Brévans," he said in a loud voice, "here is an unpublished item
for your journal. This gentleman has laid his hand on my collar."
With a sly look he indicated the Commissioner of Police, who did not
budge.
"What! my dear fellow?"
"They have arrested me, that is all," said Lissac.
"Monsieur," the Commissioner quickly interrupted in a low voice, "no
commotion, please. For my sake--and for yours."
He lightly touched Lissac's buttonhole with the end of his finger, as if
to intimate that there was the explanation of his arrest, and Guy
suddenly became very red and stamped his foot.
"Idiot that I am!--I am at your orders, monsieur," he said, making a
sign to the Commissioner to pass out.
He again saluted the stupefied journalist, and the Commissioner bowing
to him, out of politeness or prudence, Guy passed before him, angrily
twirling his mustache.
Besides Brévans, nobody in all that crowd suspected that a man had just
been arrested in the midst of the Exposition. Unless the journalist had
hawked the news from group to group, it would not have been suspected.
Lissac found at the door of the Club on Place Vendôme a hired carriage
which had come up as soon as the driver saw the Commissioner. Two
agents, having the appearance of good, peaceable bourgeois, were walking
about, chatting together on the sidewalk, as if on duty. The
Commissioner said to one of them:
"I have no further need of you, Crabot will do."
Crabot, a little man with the profile of a weasel, slowly mounted the
box beside the coachman, and the Commissioner of Police took his seat
next to Lissac, who had nervously plucked the rosette of the Portuguese
Order of Christ from his buttonhole.
"What!" he said. "Really, then, it is for this? Because I wear this
ribbon without having paid five or six louis into the Chancellery?--I
have always intended to do so, but, believe me, I have not had the time.
But a fiscal question does not warrant publicly insulting--"
"I do not know if it is for that," interrupted the Commissioner; "but it
is evident that a recent note in the _Officiel_ points directly to the
illegal wearing of foreign decorations. You do not read the _Officiel_,
Monsieur de Lissac."
Guy shrugged his shoulders as if he considered the matter perfectly
ridiculous. It seemed to him that behind the alleged pretext there was
some secret cause, something like a feminine intrigue. He vaguely
recalled that he had seen Marianne one evening at Madame de Marsy's
smile at the Prefect of Police, that Jouvenet who flirted so agreeably
with that pretty girl in a corner of the salon. And then, too, at the
theatre, in Marianne's box, the prefect found his way. At the first
moment, the idea that Marianne had a hand in this arrest took possession
of his mind. He saw her standing before him at his house, posing her
little nervous, fidgety hand on his breast at the very spot occupied by
this rosette; again he saw her smiling mysteriously, accompanying it
with a caress which seemed to suggest the desire to end in a scratch.
Was it really true that Marianne was sufficiently audacious to have
brought about this coup de théâtre? No, there was some error. The stupid
zeal of some subordinate officer was manifested in this outrage. Some
cowardly charge had perhaps been made against him at the prefecture.
Every man who crosses a street has so many enemies that look at him as
he passes as if they would spy on him! There are so many undeclared
hatreds crawling in the rotten depths of this Parisian bog! One fine
morning one feels one's self stung in the heel. It is nothing: only
some anonymous gossip; some unknown person taking revenge!
At the prefecture, they would doubtless inform Guy as to the cause of
the attack: in questioning him, he would himself certainly be permitted
to interrogate. He was stunned on arriving at the clerk's office to find
that they took his description, just as they would that of a common
offender, a night-walker or a rascal. He wished to enter a protest and
became annoyed. He flew into a rage for a moment, then he reflected that
there was nothing to be done but to submit to the bites of the iron
teeth of the police routine in which he was suddenly entangled. They
searched his pockets and he felt their vile hands graze his skin. He
experienced a strongly rebellious sentiment and notwithstanding his
present enforced calm, from time to time he demanded to see the Prefect
of Police, the Chief of the Municipal Police, the _Juge d'Instruction_,
he did not know whom, but at least some one who was responsible.
"You have my card, send my card to Monsieur Jouvenet; he knows me!"
They made no reply.
The Commissioner who had arrested him was not there. Guy found himself
in the presence of what were as pieces of human machinery, working
silently, without noise of wheels, and caring for his protests no more
than they did for the wind that blew through the corridors.
"See, on my honor, I am not a rascal!" he said. "What have I done? I
have stupidly passed this bit of red ribbon into my buttonhole. Well!
that is an offence, it is not a crime! People are not arrested for that!
I will pay the fine, if fine there is! You are not going to keep me here
with thieves?"
In that jail, he endeavored to preserve his appearance as a fashionable
elegant and an ironical man of the world, treating his misadventure in a
spirit of haughty disdain; but his overstrained nerves led him to act
with a sort of cold fury that gave him the desire to openly oppose, as
in a duel, his many adversaries.
"I beg you to remain calm," one of these men repeated to him from time
to time in a passionless way.
"Oh! that is easy enough for you to say," cried Lissac. "I ask you once
more, where is Monsieur Jouvenet?--I wish to see Monsieur Jouvenet!"
"Monsieur le Prefect cannot be seen in this way," was the reply.
"Moreover, you haven't to see any one; you have only to wait."
"Wait for what?"
They led Guy de Lissac through the passages to the door of a new cell,
which they opened before him.
"Then," he said, as he tried to force a troubled smile, "I am a
prisoner? Quite seriously? As in melodrama? This is high comedy!"
He asked if he would soon be examined, at least. They didn't know. They
hardly replied to him. Could he write, at any rate? Notify any one?
Protest? What should he do? He heard from the lips of a keeper who had
the appearance of a very honest man, the information, crushing as a
verdict: "You are in close confinement, as it is called!"
_In close confinement?_ Were they mocking him? In secret, he, Lissac?
Evidently, they wanted to make fun; it was absurd, it was unlikely, such
things only happened in operettas. He would heartily relish it at the
Café Riche presently, when he went to dine. _In close confinement?_ He
was no longer annoyed at the jest, so amusing had it become. For an old
Parisian like him, it was a facetious romance and almost amusing.
"A climax!"
Evening passed and night came. They brought Lissac a meal, and the
_jest_, as he called it, in no way came to an end. He did not close his
eyes for the whole night. He was stifled, and grew angry within the
narrow cage in which they had locked him. All sorts of wild projects of
revenge passed through his brain. He would send his seconds to Monsieur
Jouvenet, he would protest in the papers. He would have public opinion
in his favor.
Then his scepticism came to his aid, and shrugging his shoulders, he
said:
"Bah! public opinion! It will ridicule me, that's all! It will accuse me
of desiring to make a stir, to cut off my dog's tail. To-day, Alcibiades
would thus cut off his, but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals would bring an action against him."
He waited for the next morning with the feverish anxiety of those who
cannot sleep. Certainly he would be examined at the first moment. They
did so in the case of the vagabonds gathered in during the night and
dumped into the _lions' den_. The whole day passed without Lissac's
seeing any other faces than those of his turnkeys, and these men were
almost mutes. Then his irritation was renewed. He turned his useless
anger against himself, as he could not insult the walls.
Night came round, and spite of himself, he slept for a short time on the
wretched prison pallet. He began to find the facetious affair too
prolonged and too gloomy. They took him just in time, the second day
after his arrest, before a kind of magistrate or police judge, who,
after having reminded him that the law was clear in respect of the
wearing of foreign orders, announced that the matter was settled by a
decree of _nolle prosequi_.
"That is to say," said Lissac, in anger, "that two nights passed in
close confinement is regarded as ample punishment? If I am guilty of a
crime, I deserve much more than that. But, if only a mere peccadillo is
attributable to me, I consider it too much; and I swear to you that I
intend, in my turn, to summon to justice for illegal arrest--"
"Keep quiet," curtly interrupted the magistrate. "That is the best thing
you can do!"
Lissac, meantime, felt a sort of physical delight in leaving those cold
passages and that stone dwelling.
The fresh breeze of a gray November day appeared to him to be as gentle
as in spring. It seemed that he had lived in that den for weeks. He
flung himself into a carriage, had himself driven home, and was received
by his concierge with stupefied amazement.
"You, monsieur?" he said. "Already!"
This _already_ was pregnant with suggestiveness, and puzzled Lissac. The
rumor had, in fact, spread throughout the quarter, and probably the
porter had helped it along--that Guy had been arrested for complicity in
some political intrigue, though of what nature was unknown.
Nevertheless, the previous evening, the agents of police had come to the
apartments in Rue d'Aumale and had searched everything, moved, tried and
probed everything. Evidently they were in quest of papers.
"Papers?" cried Lissac. "Her letter, _parbleu!_"
He was no longer in doubt. The delicate, dreaded hand of Marianne was at
the bottom of all that. She had made some bargain with Monsieur
Jouvenet, as between a woman and a debauchee! The Prefect of Police was
not the loser: Marianne Kayser had the wherewithal to satisfy him.
"The miserable wench!" Lissac repeated as he went up to his apartment.
He rang and his servant appeared, looking as bewildered as the porter.
The apartment was still topsy-turvy. The valet de chambre had not dared
to put the things in order, as if there reigned, amid the scattered
packages and the yawning drawers, the majesty of the official seal.
They had examined everything, forced locks and removed packets of
letters.
The small Italian cabinet, that contained Marianne's letter, had had its
drawers turned over, like pockets turned inside out. Marianne's letter
to Lissac, the scrap of paper which the police hunted, without knowing
whose will they were obeying, that confession of a crazy mistress to a
lover who was smitten to his very bones, was no longer there.
"Ah! I will see Vaudrey! I will see him and tell him!" said Lissac
aloud.
"Will monsieur breakfast?"
"Yes, as quickly as possible. Two eggs and tea, I am in a hurry."
He was anxious to rush off to the ministry. Was the Chamber sitting
to-day? No. He would perhaps then find Sulpice at his first call. The
messengers knew him.
He speedily hastened to Place Bréda, looking for a carriage. On the way,
he stumbled against a man who came down on the same side, smoking a
cigar.
"Oh! Monsieur de Lissac!"
Guy instinctively stepped back one pace; he recognized Uncle Kayser.
Then, suddenly, his anger, which up to that time he had been able to
restrain, burst forth, and in a few words energetic and rapid, he told
Simon, who remained bewildered and somewhat pale, as if one had tried
to force a quarrel on him, what he thought of Marianne's infamy.
The uncle said nothing, regretted that he had met Lissac, and contented
himself with stammering from time to time:
"She has done that?--What! she has done that?--Ah! the rogue."
"And what do you say about it, you, Simon Kayser?"
"I?--What do I say about it?--Why--"
Little by little he recovered his sang-froid, looking at matters from
the lofty heights of his artist's philosophy.
"It is rather too strong. What do you want?--It is not even moral, but
it has _character!_ And in art, after the moral idea comes _character!_
Ah! bless me! character, that is something!--Otherwise, I disapprove. It
is brutal, vulgar, that lack of ideal. I defy you to symbolize that.
_Love Avenging Itself Against Love_--_Jealousy Calling the Police to Its
Aid in Order to Triumph over Dead Love!_ It is old, it lacks
originality, it smacks of Prud'hon!--The Correggio of the décolleté!--It
is like Tassaert, it is of the sprightly kind!--I would never paint so,
that is what I say about it!"
Guy had no reply for this imperturbable moralist and he regretted that
he had lost time in speaking to him. But his uncontrollable rage choked
him. Enough remained however to show all his feelings to Vaudrey.
The minister was not in his cabinet. A messenger asked Lissac if he
would speak to Monsieur Warcolier, the Under Secretary of State.
"I, I," then said a man who rose from the chair in which he had been
sitting in the antechamber, "I should be glad to see Monsieur
Warcolier--Monsieur Eugène, you know."
"Very well, Monsieur Eugène, I will announce you." Lissac explained that
his visit was not official, he called on a personal matter.
"Is the minister in his apartments?"
"Yes, monsieur, but to-day, you know--"
What was going on to-day, then? Lissac had not noticed, in fact, that a
marquee with red stripes was being erected at the entrance to the hôtel,
and that upholsterers were bringing in wagons benches covered with red
velvet with which they were blocking the peristyle. There was a
reception at the ministry.
"That will not prevent Monsieur Vaudrey from seeing me," he said.
One of the messengers opened the doors in front of him and conducted him
to the floor above, where Monsieur le Ministre was then resting near the
fire and glancing over the papers after breakfast.
He appeared pleased but a little astonished at seeing Lissac.
"Eh! my dear Guy, what a good idea!--Have you arrived already for the
soirée? You received your invitation?"
"No," answered Lissac, "I have received nothing, or if the invitation
arrived, the agents of Monsieur Jouvenet have taken it away with many
other things."
"The agents! what agents?" asked the minister.
He had risen to receive Guy and remained standing in front of the
fireplace looking at his friend, who questioned him with his glance to
discover if Vaudrey could really be in ignorance as to such a matter.
"Ah, so! but," said Lissac with trembling voice and in a tone of angry
bitterness, "do you not know then, what takes place in Paris?"
"What is happening?" asked Sulpice, who had turned slightly pale.
"They arrest men for nothing, and keep them in close confinement for two
days in order to have time to search their correspondence for a document
that compromises certain persons. It is very proper, no doubt; but that
smacks too much of romanticism and the Bridge of Sighs. It is very
old-fashioned and worn-out. I would not answer for your long employing
such methods of government."
"Come, are you mad? What does it all signify?" asked the minister, in
astonishment.
He appeared as if he really did not understand. It was clear that he did
not know what Guy meant.
"Don't you read the papers, then?" Lissac asked him.
"I read the reports of the Director of the Press."
"Well, if those reports have not informed you of my arrest in the heart
of the Exposition des Mirlitons, on Wednesday, they have told you
nothing!--"
"Arrested! you?"
"By the agents of Monsieur Jouvenet, your Prefect of Police, to gratify
your mistress, Mademoiselle Kayser!"
"Ah! my dear Guy!" said the minister, whose cheek became flushed in
spots. "I should be glad if you--"
He paused for a phrase to express clearly and briefly that he required
Lissac to be silent, but could not frame one. He received, as it were, a
sudden and violent blow on the head. Beyond question, he did not know a
word of all that Lissac had informed him. And yet this was the gossip of
Paris for two days! Either naming in full, or in indicating him
sufficiently clearly, the newspapers had related the adventure on their
front page. Moreover, much attention had been attracted to an article in
a journal with which Lucien Granet was intimately connected, wherein, in
well-turned but perfidious phrases, a certain Alkibiades--Lissac had
guessed that this name was applied to him--had been arrested by the
orders of the archon Sulpicios at the instance of a certain Basilea, one
of the most charming hetaires of the republic of Perikles. Under this
Greco-Parisian disguise it was easy for everyone to discover the true
names and to see behind the masks the faces intended.
At the very moment that Lissac called to ask the minister for an
explanation of the acts of the Prefect Jouvenet, Madame Vaudrey was
opening a copy of a journal in which these names travestied by some
Hellenist of the boulevard were underlined in red pencil. The article
entitled _The Mistress of an Archon_, had been specially sent to her
under a cover bearing the address in a woman's handwriting, Sabine Marsy
or Madame Gerson! Some friend. One always has such.
It was of Adrienne that Vaudrey thought while Lissac was giving vent to
his ironical, blunt complaint. Was Guy mad to speak of Marianne aloud in
this way, and in this place, a few feet away from his wife, who could
hear everything? Yes, Lissac was over-excited, furious and apparently
crazy. He did not lower his tone, in spite of the sudden terror
expressed by Vaudrey, who seized his hand and said to him eagerly: "Why,
keep quiet! Suppose some one is listening?"
He felt himself, moreover, impelled by a violent rage. If what Guy told
him were correct, Marianne had made use of him and of the title of
mistress that she ought to have concealed. She had played it in order to
compel Jouvenet to commit an outrage.
"Nonsense!" said Lissac, sneeringly. "Are you innocent enough to believe
that she has seduced the Prefect of Police by simply telling him that
she was your mistress? You don't know her. She only did this in becoming
his!"
Sulpice had become livid, and he looked at Lissac with a sudden
expression of hatred, as if this man had been his enemy. Guy had
directly attacked his vanity and his heart with a knife-thrust, as it
were, without sparing either his self-love or his passion.
"Ah! yes," said Lissac, "I know very well that that annoys you, but it
is so! I knew this young lady before you did. Let her commit all the
follies that she chooses with others and throw me overboard at a pinch,
as she did three days ago, all is for the best. She is playing her rôle.
I am only an imbecile and I am punished for it, and it is well; but, in
order to attack me, to secure a very tiny paper, which put her very
nicely at my mercy, that she should commit a foolish and brutal outrage
against you who answer for the personnel of your administration, I
cannot forgive. She thought then that I would make use of this note
against her? She takes me for a rascal? If I wished to commit an act of
treachery, could I not go this very moment, even without the weapon that
Jouvenet's agents have taken from me, straight to her Rosas?"
"Rosas?" asked Sulpice, whose countenance contorted, and who feverishly
twisted his blond beard.
"Eh! _parbleu_, yes, Rosas! On my honor, one would take you for the
Minister of the Interior of the Moon! Rosas, who perhaps is her lover,
but will be her husband if she wishes it! and she does!"
Poor Sulpice looked at Lissac with a terrified expression which might
have been comic, did it not in its depth portray a genuine sorrow. He
was oblivious to everything now, where he was, if Guy spoke too loudly,
or if Adrienne could hear. He was only conscious of a terrible strain of
his mind. This sudden revelation lacerated him--as if his back received
the blows of a whip. He wished to know all. He questioned Lissac,
forcing him into a corner, and making him hesitate, for he now feared
that he would say too much, and limited himself to demanding Jouvenet's
punishment.
"As to Marianne, one would see to that after," he said.
Ah! yes, certainly, Jouvenet should be punished! How? Vaudrey could not
say, but from this moment the Prefect of Police was condemned. Guy's
arrest, which was an act of brutal aggression, was tantamount to a
dismissal signed by the Prefect himself. And Marianne! she then made a
sport of Sulpice and took him for a child or a ninny!
"Not at all. For a man who loves, that is enough," replied Lissac.
Vaudrey had flung himself into an armchair, striking his fist upon the
little table, covered with the journals that he had scarcely opened, and
absent-mindedly pushing the chair back, the better to give way to his
excessively violent threats, after the manner of weak natures.
"Do you want my advice?" Lissac abruptly asked him. "You have only what
you deserve, ah! yes, that is just it! I tell you the sober truth. A
wife like yours should never be forsaken for a creature like Marianne!"
"I love Adrienne sincerely!" replied Vaudrey eagerly.
"And you deceive her entirely. That is foolish. You deserve that
Mademoiselle Kayser should have ridiculed, deceived and ruined you
irretrievably, and that your name should never be uttered again. When
one has the opportunity to possess a wife like yours, one adores her on
bended knees, you understand me, and one doesn't destroy her true
happiness to divert it in favor of the crowd. And what pleasure!
Jouvenet has had the same dose at a less cost!"
"You abuse the rights of friendship, somewhat," said Sulpice, rising
suddenly. "I do what pleases me, as it pleases me, and I owe no account
to any one, I think!"
He stopped suddenly. His feet were, as it were, nailed to the floor and
his mouth closed. He seized Guy's hand and felt his flesh creep, as he
saw Adrienne standing pale, and supporting herself against the doorpost,
as if she had not the strength to proceed, her eyes wide open, like
those of a sick person.
Assuredly, beyond all possible doubt, she had heard everything.
She was there! she heard!
She said nothing, but moved a step forward, upheld by a terrible effort.
Her look was that of a whipped child, of a poor creature terrified and
in despair, and expressed not anger but entire collapse. She was so wan,
so sad-looking, that neither Lissac nor Vaudrey dared speak. A chill
silence fell upon these three persons.
While Adrienne approached the table upon which the journals were piled,
Guy was the first to force a smile to throw her off the scent; Adrienne
stopped him with a gesture that was intended to express that to
undeceive her, that is to say, to deceive her afresh, would be a still
more cowardly act. She took from among the journals that which she had
just been reading without at first quite understanding it, the one that
had been sent to her, underlined as with a venomous nail, and showing to
Vaudrey the article that spoke of Sulpicios and Basilea, she said gently
in a feeble voice, crushed by this crumbling of her hopes:
"That is known then, that affair!"
Then she sunk exhausted into the armchair in which Sulpice had been
sitting, and her breast heaved with a violent sob that tore it as if it
would rend it.
Sulpice looked at Lissac who was standing half-inclined, as in the
presence of a misfortune. He instinctively seized the minister by the
shoulder and gently forced him toward Adrienne, saying to him in a
whisper, in ill-assured tones:
"Kiss her then! One pardons when one loves!"
With a supplicating cry, Vaudrey threw himself on his knees before
Adrienne, while Lissac hastily opened the door and left, feeling indeed
that he could not say a word and that Vaudrey only could obtain
Vaudrey's pardon.
"I, in my anger," he said, "he, in his jealousy, have allowed ourselves
to get into a passion. It is stupid. One should speak lower."
He went away, much dissatisfied with himself and but little less with
Vaudrey. Again he considered this man foolish, adored as he was by such
a wife, whom he deceived. He was not sure that at the bottom of his own
heart he did not feel a sentiment of love toward Adrienne. Ah! if he had
been loved by such a creature, he would have been capable of great
things!--He would have arranged and utilized his life instead of
spoiling it. In place of vulgar love, he would have kept this unique
love intact from the altar to the tomb!
Pale and tottering, and a child once more under her sorrow, as he had
just seen her, she was so adorably lovely that he had received an
entirely new impression, one of almost jealousy against Sulpice, and
therefore, brusquely overcoming this strange, unseemly emotion, he had
himself thrust Vaudrey toward his wife and had departed hastily, as if
he felt that he must hurry away and never see them again. But as he
left, on the contrary, he saw her again with her sad, wretched,
suffering look and the young wife's sorrowful voice went with him,
repeating in a tone of broken-hearted grief:
"That is known then!"
"Ah! that miserable fellow, Vaudrey!" thought Guy.
In going out, he had to wait a moment in the antechamber, to admit of
the passage of some vases of flowers, green shrubs and variegated
foliage plants that were being brought in to decorate the salons. A
fête! And this evening! In the arrival of those flowers for decoration,
at the moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed
that crushing news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear
looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their
hothouse bloom.
Would Adrienne have the courage or strength to undertake the reception
of the evening, within a few hours? Guy was annoyed at having come.
"I could well have waited and kept my anger to myself. The unhappy woman
would have known nothing."
"Bah!" he added. "She is kind, she adores Sulpice, it is only a passing
storm. She will forgive!"
He promised himself, moreover, to return in the evening, to excuse
himself to Adrienne, to comfort her if he could.
"There is some merit, after all, in that," he thought again. "On my
word! I believe I love her and yet I am angry with that animal Vaudrey
for not loving her enough."
She will forgive!--Lissac knew courtesans but he did not know this
woman, energetic as she was under her frail appearance, a child, a
little provincial lost in the life of Paris, lost and, as it were,
absorbed in the hubbub of political circles, smitten with her husband,
who comprehended in her eyes every seduction and superiority, having
given herself entirely and wishing to wholly possess the elect being who
possessed her, in whom she trusted and to whom she gave herself, body
and soul, with all her confidence, her innocence and her modesty. He did
not know what such a sensitive, nervously frail nature could feel on the
first terrible impulses, full of enthusiasm under her exterior coldness,
of resolution concealed under her timid manners, capable of madness,
distracted in spite of her reason and calm; this candor of thought, of
education, and associations that made her, with all her irresistible
attractiveness, the virtuous woman with all her charm.
Adrienne had at first read the journal that had been sent to her without
understanding anything about it. Alkibiades, Basilea, the mistress of
the Archon, what signified that to her? What did it mean? Then suddenly
her thought rested on the name of Sulpice, travestied in the Greek of
parody, Sulpicios. Was it of her husband that they intended to speak?
She immediately felt a bitter anguish at heart, but it was a matter only
of allowing one's self to be impressed by a journalistic pleasantry, as
contemptible as an anonymous letter! She would think no more about it.
She must concentrate her thoughts on the evening's reception. There was
to be an official repast, followed by a soirée. She had nothing to
concern herself about in regard to the menu; Chevet undertook that. For
the ministerial dinners there was a fixed price as in restaurants. Hosts
and guests live _au cabaret_, they dine at so much a head. Adrienne
endeavored to occupy herself with the musical soirée, with the
programmes that they brought her, with the names of comedians and female
singers, printed on vellum, and with those bouquets with which the vases
of her little salon were decorated. Ah! well, yes, in spite of the
feverish activity, she could think only of that article in the journal,
that miserable article, every line of which flamed before her eyes just
as when one has looked too long at a fire. She had been seized with the
temptation there and then to openly ask Sulpice what these veiled
illusions meant.
"I hope, indeed," she thought, with her contempt of all lying, "that he
will not charge me with suspecting him. No, certainly, I do not suspect
him."
She went to the little cabinet where Sulpice sometimes read or worked
after breakfast, and there, as if she had thrown herself upon an open
knife, she suddenly heard those sinister words which pierced her very
flesh like pointed blades.
They were speaking of another woman. Lissac said in a loud tone: Your
mistress! and Vaudrey allowed it to be said!--
A mistress! what mistress? Marianne Kayser! Oh, that woman of whom
Sulpice had so often spoken in an indifferent manner, that pretty
creature, so often seen, seductive, wonderfully beautiful, terrifyingly
beautiful, it was she! Your mistress! Sulpice had a mistress! He lied,
he deceived. He? She was betrayed! Was it possible? If it were possible?
But it was true! Eh! _parbleu_, yes, it was true--And this, then, was
why they had sent her this horrible article! She knew now.
She had been tempted to enter the room suddenly, to throw herself
between these men and interrupt their conversation. She had not the
strength. And then, what Lissac said had the effect of consoling
her!--Guy's reproaches to Sulpice were such as she would have liked to
cast at him, if she could have found speech now. But not a word could
she frame. She was stunned, dumb and like a crushed being. She knew only
one thing, that she suffered horribly, as she had never before suffered.
At first she allowed Vaudrey, who knelt at her feet, as Lissac had told
him on going away, to take her hand that hung listlessly down. Then she
gently withdrew it as if she felt herself seized by an instinctive sense
of outraged modesty.
Vaudrey tried to speak. At first only confused words, silly excuses,
clumsy falsehoods, cruelly absurd phrases--_caprices_, _nothing serious_,
_whim_, _madness_--so many avowals, so many insults, came to his lips. But
then, before the silence of Adrienne, he could say nothing more, he was
speechless, overwhelmed, and sought a hand that was refused.
"Will you never forgive me?" he asked at last, not knowing too well what
he said.
"Never!" she said coldly.
She rose and with as much sudden energy as but a moment before she had
felt of weakness, she crossed the room.
"Are you going away?" stammered Sulpice.
"Yes, I must be alone--Ah! quite alone," she said, with a sort of
gesture of disgust as she saw her husband approach her.
He stopped and said, as if by chance:
"You know that--this evening--"
"Yes, yes," she replied, "do not be anxious about anything! I am still
the minister's wife, if I am Madame Vaudrey no longer."
He tried in vain to reply.
Adrienne had already disappeared.
"There is the end of my happiness!" Sulpice stammered as he suddenly
confronted an unknown situation dark as an abyss. "Ah! how wretched I
am! Very wretched! whose fault is it?"
He plunged gladly into the work of examining the bundles of reports from
the prefects, feverishly inspecting them to deafen and blind his
conscience, and seized at every moment with a desire to make an appeal
to Adrienne or to go and insult Marianne. Oh! especially to tell
Marianne that she had betrayed him, that she was a wretch, that she was
the mistress of Rosas, the mistress of Jouvenet, a strumpet like any
other strumpet, yes, a strumpet!
Amid all the disturbance of that day of harsh misfortune, perhaps he
thought more of the Marianne that he had lost than of the Adrienne that
he had outraged; while the wife questioned with herself if it were
really she coming and going, automatically trying on her ball costume,
abandoning her head to the hair-dresser, feeling that in two hours she
would be condemned to smile on the minister's guests, the senators and
the deputies and play the part of a spectre, marching in the land of
dreams, in a nightmare that choked her, fastened on her throat and heart
and prompted her to cry and weep, all her poor nerves intensely strained
and sick, subdued by the energy of a tortured person, imposing on
herself the task of not appearing to suffer and--a still more atrocious
thing--of not even suffering in reality and waiting, yes, waiting to
sob.
In the evening, everything blazed on the façade of the ministry. The
rows of gas-jets suggested that a public fête was being held in the
Hôtel Beauvau. The naming capital letters R.F. were boldly outlined
against the dark sky, the three colors of the flags looked bright in the
ruddy light of the gas. Carriages rolled over the sanded courtyard,
giving up at the carpeted entrance to the hôtel the invited guests
dressed in correct style, the women wrapped in ample cloaks with gold
fringe or trimmed with fur, and all poured into the antechamber,
brushing against the _Gardes de Paris_ in white breeches, with grounded
arms, forming a row and standing out like Caryatides against the
shining, large leaved green flowers on which their white helmets shone
by the light of the lustres. In the dressing-room, the clothing was
piled up, tied together in haste; the antechamber was quickly crossed,
the women in passing casting rapid glances at the immense mirrors; a
servant asked the names of the guests and repeated them to an usher,
whose loud voice penetrated these salons that for many years had heard
so many different names, of all parties, under all régimes, and
proclaimed them in the usual commonplace manner, while murdering the
most celebrated of them. Upon the threshold of the salon, filled with
fashionable people and flooded with intense light, stood the minister,
who had been receiving, greeting, bowing, ever since the opening of the
soirée, to those who arrived, some of whom he did not know; crowding
behind him, correctly dressed, stood his secretaries, the members of his
cabinet appropriating their shares of the greetings extended to the
Excellency, and at his side stood Madame Vaudrey, pale and smiling as
the creatures of the other world; she also bowed and from time to time
extended her gloved hand mechanically; pale she looked in her décolleté
gown of white satin, clasped at the shoulders with two pearl clasps, a
bouquet of natural roses in her corsage, and standing there like a
melancholy spectre on the very threshold of the festive salons.
When she perceived Guy enter, she greeted him with a sad smile, and
Vaudrey eagerly offered his hand to him as if he relied greatly on him
to arrange matters.
Adrienne's repressed grief had pained Lissac. While to the other guests
she appeared to be only somewhat fatigued, to him the open wound and
sorrow were visible. He plunged into the crowd. Beneath the streaming
light the diamonds on the women's shoulders gleamed like the lustres'
crystals. Within a frame of gobelins and Beauvais tapestry taken from
the repository, was an improvised scene that looked like a green and
pink nest of camellias, dracænas and palms. The bright toilettes of the
women already seated before this scenic effect presented a wealth of
pale blue, white or pink silk, mother-of-pearl shoulders, diamonds, and
bows of pink or feather headdresses. Guy recognized Madame Marsy in the
front row, robed in a very low-cut, sea-green satin robe with a bouquet
of flowers at the tip of the shoulder, who while fanning herself looked
with haughty impertinence at the pretty Madame Gerson, her former
friend. Madame Evan was numerously surrounded, she was the most charming
of all the stylish set and the woman whom all the others tried to copy.
Behind this species of female flower-bed the black coated ranks crowded,
their sombre hue relieved here and there by the uniform of some French
officer or foreign military attaché. There was a profusion of orders,
crosses and strange old faces, with red ribbons at the neck, deputies
evidently in dress, youthful attachés of the ministry or embassy,
correct in bearing and officious, their crush-hats under their arms and
holding the satin programme of the _musicale soirée_ in their hands,
some numbers of which were about to be rendered. Under the ceilings that
were dappled with painted clouds, surrounded by brilliant lights and a
wealth of flowers, this crowd presented at once an aspect of luxury and
oddity, with its living antitheses of old parliamentarians and tyros of
the Assembly.
Intermingled with strains of music, were whisperings and the confused
noise of conversations.
Guy watched with curiosity, as a man who has seen much and compares, all
this gathering of guests. From time to time he greeted some one of his
acquaintance, but this was a rare occurrence. He was delighted to see
Ramel whom he had often met at Adrienne's _Wednesdays_, and whom he
liked. He appeared to him to be fatigued and sick.
"I am not very well, in fact," said Ramel. "I have only come because I
had something serious to say to Vaudrey."
"What then?" asked Lissac.
"Oh! nothing! some advice to give him as to the course to be followed.
There is decidedly much underhand work going on about the President."
"Who is it?"
"Most of them are here!"
"His guests?"
"You know very well that when one invites all one's friends, one finds
that three-quarters of one's enemies will be present."
"At least," said Lissac.
He continued to traverse the salons, always returning instinctively
toward the door at which Adrienne stood, with pale face and wandering
look, and scarcely hearing, poor woman, the unfamiliar names that the
usher uttered at equal intervals, like a speaking machine.
"Monsieur Durosoi!--Monsieur and Madame Bréchet!--Monsieur the Minister
of Public Works!--Monsieur the Prefect of the Aube!--Monsieur the Count
de Grigny!--Monsieur Henri de Prangins!--Monsieur the General
d'Herbecourt!--Monsieur the Doctor Vilandry!--Monsieur and Madame
Tochard!"
She had vowed that she would be strong, and allow nothing to be seen of
the despair that was wringing her heart. She compelled herself to smile.
In nightmares and hours of feverish unrest, she had suffered the same
vague, morbid feeling that she now experienced. All that passed about
her seemed to be unreal. These white-cravatted men, these gaily-dressed
women, the file of guests saluting her at the same spot in the salon,
with the same expression of assumed respect and trite politeness,
appeared to her but a succession of phantoms. Neither a name nor an
association did she attach to those countenances that beamed on her with
an official smile or gravely assumed a correct seriousness. She felt
weary, overwhelmed and heavy-headed at the sight of this continued
procession of strangers on whom it was incumbent that she should smile
and to whom she must bow out of politeness, in virtue of that duty of
state which she wished to fulfil to the last degree, poor soul!
The distant music of Fahrbach's polkas or Strauss's waltzes seemed like
an added accompaniment that mocked the sadness of her unwholesome dream.
"And yet, in all that crowd of women who salute her, there are some who
are jealous of her! Many envy her!" thought Guy, who was looking on.
Adrienne did not look at Vaudrey. She was afraid that if her eyes met
her husband's fixed on her own, she would lose her sang-froid and
suddenly burst into sobs, there before the guests. That would have been
ridiculous. This blonde, so feebly gentle, isolated herself, therefore,
with surprising determination and seemed to see nothing save her own
thought, the unique thought: "Be strong. You shall weep at your ease
when you are alone, far away from these people, far away from this
crowd, alone with yourself, entirely alone, entirely alone!"
Vaudrey was very pale, but carried away, in spite of himself, by the joy
which he felt in receiving all the illustrious and powerful men of the
state, foreign ambassadors, the Presidents of the Senate and the
Chamber, the ministers, his colleagues, deputies, wealthy financiers,
renowned publicists, in fact, everything that counts and has a name in
Paris,--this minister, happy to see the crowd running to him, at his
house, bowing, paying homage to him, for a moment forgot the crushing
events of that day, the sudden thunderbolt falling on him and perhaps,
as he had said, crushing his hearthstone.
He no longer thought of anything but what he saw: salutations, bowed
heads, inclinations that succeeded each other with the regularity of a
clock, that succession of homages to the little Grenoble advocate, now
become Prime Minister.
Oblivious of everything else, he had lost the recollection of his
mistress, and he suddenly grew pale and looked instinctively with terror
at Adrienne, who was as pale as a corpse.--A visitor had just been
announced by the usher, in his metallic voice, and the name that he
cried mechanically, as he had uttered all the others, echoed there like
an insult.
Guy de Lissac shook through his entire frame, as he too heard it.
"Monsieur Simon Kayser and Mademoiselle Kayser!"--cried the usher.
Still another name rang out from that clarion voice:
"Monsieur le Duc de Rosas!"
Neither Vaudrey nor Adrienne heard this name. Sulpice felt urged to rush
toward Marianne to entreat her to leave. It is true, he had invited her.
In spite of Jouvenet who knew all, and in spite of so many others who
suspected the truth, she desired to be present at that fête at the
ministry and to show herself to all. Vaudrey had warned her, however. He
had written to her a few hours before, entreating her, nay, almost
commanding, her, not to come, and she was there. She entered, advancing
with head erect, leaning on the arm of her uncle, his white cravat
hidden by his artist's beard and on his lips a disdainful smile.
Adrienne asked herself whether she was really dreaming now. Approaching
her, she saw, crossing the salon with a queenly step, that lovely,
insolent creature, trailing a long black satin skirt, her superb bosom
imprisoned in a corsage trimmed with jet, and crossed, as it were, with
a blood-red stripe formed by a cordon of roses. Marianne's fawn-colored
head seemed to imperiously defy from afar the pale woman who stood with
her two hands falling at her side as if overwhelmed.
The vision, for vision it was, approached like one of the nightmares
that haunt people's dreams. Adrienne's first glance encountered the
direct gaze of Marianne's gray eyes. Behind Mademoiselle Kayser came De
Rosas, his ruddy Castilian face that was ordinarily pensive beamed
to-day, but Madame Vaudrey did not perceive him. She saw only this
woman, the woman who was approaching her, in her own house, insolently,
impudently, to defy her after having outraged her, to insult her after
having deceived her!
Adrienne felt a violent wrath rising within her and suddenly her entire
being seemed longing to bound toward Marianne, to drive her out after
casting her name in her teeth.
Instinctively she looked around her with the wild glance of a wretched
woman who no longer knows what to do, as if seeking for some assistance
or advice.
Vaudrey's wan pallor and Lissac's supplicating gesture appealed to her
and at once restored her to herself. It was true! she had no right to
cause a scandal. She was within the walls of the ministry, in a common
salon into which this girl had almost a right to enter, just like so
many others lost in the crowd of guests. For Adrienne, it was not merely
a question of personal vanity or honor that was at stake, but also
Vaudrey's reputation. She felt herself _in view_, ah! what a word:--in
view, that it to say, she was like an actress to whom neither a false
step nor a false note is permitted; compelled to smile while death was
at her heart, to parade while her entrails were torn with grief, forced
to feign and to wear a mask in the presence of all who were there, and
to lie to all the invited guests, indifferent and inimical, as Ramel
said, and who were looking about ready at any moment to sneer and to
hiss.
She recovered, by an effort that swelled her heart, strength to show
nothing of the feeling of indignant rebellion that was stifling her.
She closed her eyes.
Marianne Kayser passed onward, losing herself with Simon and De Rosas in
the human furrow that opened before her and immediately closed upon her,
and followed by a murmur of admiration.
Adrienne had not however seen the pale, insolent countenance of the
young woman so closely approach her suffering and disconsolate face.
Above all, she had not seen the jealous, rapid glance that flashed
unconsciously in Vaudrey's eyes when he saw José de Rosas triumphantly
following the imperious Marianne. Ah! that look of sorrowful anger would
have penetrated like a red-hot iron into Adrienne's soul. That glance
that Guy caught a glimpse of told eloquently of wounded love and bruised
vanity on the part of that man who, placed here between these two women,
his mistress and the other, suffered less from the sorrow caused to
Adrienne than from Marianne's treason in deserting him for this
Spaniard.
Lissac was exasperated. He felt prompted to rush between Marianne and
Rosas and say to him:
"You are mad to accompany this woman! Mad and ridiculous! She is
deceiving you as she has deceived Vaudrey, as she has deceived me, and
as she will deceive everybody."
He purposely placed himself in Mademoiselle Kayser's way. She had
appeared scarcely to recognize him and had brushed against him without
apparent emotion, but with a disdainful pout. Her arm had sought that
of Rosas, as if she now were sure of her duke.
Guy too, felt that he could not cause a scene at the ball, for this
would have brought a scandal on Vaudrey. He had just before repeated to
Adrienne: "Courage." This was now his own watchword, and yet he sought
out Jouvenet to whisper to the Prefect of Police what he thought of his
conduct. Jouvenet had come and gone. Granet, as if he had divined
Lissac's preoccupation, looked at him sneeringly as he whispered to the
fat Molina who was seated near him:
"Alkibiades!"
The soirée, moreover, was terribly wearisome to Lissac. He wandered from
group to group to find some one with whom to exchange ideas but he
hardly found anyone besides Denis Ramel. The same political commonplaces
retailed everywhere, at Madame Gerson's or at Madame Marsy's, as in the
corridors of the Chamber, were re-decocted and reproduced in the corners
of the salon of the Ministry, and around the besieged buffet attacked by
the most ferocious gluttony. _Interpellation_, _Majority_, _New
Cabinet_, _Homogeneous_, _Ministry of the Elections_, _Ballot_, _One Man
Ballot_. Guy went, weary of the conflict, to the room in which the
concert was given and listened to some operatic piece, or watched
between the heads, the hidden profile of some female singer or an actor
and heard the bursts of laughter that greeted the new monologue _The
Telephone_, rendered in a clear voice with the coolness of an English
clown, by a gentleman in a dress coat: _See! I am Monsieur Durand--you
know, Durand--of Meaux?--Exactly--A woman deceives me--How did I learn
it?--By the telephone. My friend Durand--Durand--of Etampes--We are not
related--Emile Durand said to me: Durand, why haven't you a
telephone?--It is true, I hadn't one--Durand--the other
Durand--Durand--of Etampes--has one--Then--_And Lissac, somewhat
listless, left this corner of the salon and stumbled against a group of
men who surrounded an old gentleman much decorated, wearing the _grand
cordon rouge_ crosswise, a yellow ribbon at his neck, who, with the
gravity of an English statesman, said, thrusting his tongue slightly
forward to secure his false teeth from falling:
"I like monologues less than chansonnettes!--I, who address you, have
taken lessons from Levassor."
"Levassor, Your Excellency?" answered in chorus a lot of little
bald-headed young men--diplomats.
"Levassor," replied the old gentleman who was the very celebrated
ambassador of a great foreign power. "Oh! I was famous in the song: _The
Englishman Who Was Seasick_!"
While the little young men smiled, approved and loudly applauded, the
old ambassador to whom the interests of a people were entrusted, hummed
in a low tone, amid the noise of the reception:
"Aoh! aoh! Je suis _mélède_,
Bien _mélède_! Très _mélède_!"
Guy de Lissac shrugged his shoulders. He had heard a great deal of this
man. This diplomat of the chansonnette evoked his pity. Where was he
then? At Paris or at Brives-la-Gaillarde? At a ball at the Hôtel Beauvau
or in some provincial sub-prefecture?
Just before, he had heard Warcolier utter this epic expression:
"If I were minister, I would give fireworks. They are warlike and
inoffensive at the same time!"
The voice of a young man with a Russian accent who talked politics in a
corner, pleased him:
"I am," he said aloud, "from a singular country: the Baltic provinces,
where society is governed by deputies who, by birth, have the right to
make laws, and I consider politics so tiresome, fatiguing and full of
disgust and weariness as an occupation, that one ought to consider one's
self most fortunate that there are people condemned to take hold of this
rancid pie, while others pass their lives in thinking, reading, talking
and loving."
"That is good," thought Lissac. "There is one, at least, who is not so
stupid. It is true, perhaps because I think just the same."
Nevertheless, he went and listened, mixing with the crowd, haphazard.
His preoccupation was not there. In reality, he thought only of
Adrienne. How the poor woman must suffer!
With a feeling of physical and moral overthrow, she had left the
threshold of the salon, where she had been standing since the
commencement of the soirée. She was mixing with the crowd in her desire
to forget her sorrows amid the deafening of the music, the songs, the
laughter, and the murmur of the human billows that filled her salons.
She had taken her place in front of the little improvised theatre,
beside all those ladies who dissected her toilette, scanned her pallid
face, analyzed and examined her piece by piece, body and soul. But
there, seated near the stage, exactly in front of her, exposing, as in a
stall, her blonde beauty, and radiant as a Titian, was that Marianne
whose gleaming white shoulders appeared above her black satin corsage.
Again she saw her, as but a little while before, unavoidable, haughty
and bold, smiling with insolence.
At every minute she was attracted by a movement of a head, or fan, or a
laugh from this pretty creature, who leaned toward Sabine Marsy, then
raised her brow and showed, in all the brilliancy of fatal beauty, her
black corsage, striped with those fine red roses. And now Adrienne's
anger, the grief that she had trampled under for some hours, increased
from moment to moment, heightened and stung by the sight of this
creature, by all kinds of bitter thoughts and by visions of treason and
baffled love. She felt that she was becoming literally mad at the
thought that, upon those red and painted lips, Sulpice had rested his,
that his hands had stroked those shoulders, unwound that hair, that
this woman's body had been folded in his arms. Ah! it was enough to make
her rise and cry out to that creature: "You are a wretch. Get you gone!
Get you gone, I say!"
And if she did so?
Why not? Had they the right to scorn her thus in public because she
owned an official title and position? Was not this vulgar salon of a
furnished mansion _her_ salon then?
Now it seemed to her that they were whispering about her; that they were
sneering behind their fans, and that all these women knew her secret and
her history.
Why should they not know them? All Paris must have read that mocking,
offensive and singular article: _The Mistress of an Archon_! All these
people had, perhaps, learned it by heart. There were people here who
frequented the salons and who probably kept the article in their
pockets.
Yes, that would be to commit a folly, to brave everything and to destroy
all!
Sulpice, then, did not know her; he believed her to be insignificant
because she was gentle, resigned to everything because she was devoted
to his love and his glory?--Ah! devoted even to the point of killing
herself, devoted to the extent of dying, or living poor, working with
her own hands, if only he loved her, if only he never lied to her!
"And here was his mistress!"
His mistress! His mistress!
She repeated this name with increasing rage, reiterating it, inwardly
digesting it, as if it were something terribly bitter. His mistress,
that lovely, insolent creature! Yes, very lovely, but manifestly
terrible and capable of driving a feeble being like Vaudrey to commit
every folly, nay, worse, infamy.
"And it is such women that are loved! Ah! Idiots! idiots that we are!"
The first part of the concert was terminating. Happily, too, for
Adrienne was choking. The minister must, as a matter of politeness,
express his thanks to the cantatrices from the Opéra, and to the
actresses from the Comédie Française, the artistes whose names appeared
on the programme. Vaudrey was obliged to pass the rows of chairs in
order to reach the little salon behind the stage, which served as a
foyer. Adrienne saw him coming to her side, and looking very pale,
though he made an effort to smile. He was uncomfortable and anxious. In
passing before Marianne, he tried to look aside, but Mademoiselle Kayser
stopped him in spite of himself, by slightly extending her foot and
smiling at him, when he turned toward her, with a prolonged, interested
and strange expression.
Adrienne felt that she was about to faint. She took a few tottering
steps out of the salon, then she stopped as if her head were swimming.
Some one was on hand to support her. She felt that a hand was holding
her arm, she heard some one whisper in her ear:
"It is too much, is it not?"
She recognized Lissac's voice.
Guy looked at her for a moment, quite prepared for this great increase
of suffering.
"Take me away," she murmured. "I can bear no more!--I can bear no more!"
She was longing to escape from all that noise, that atmosphere that
lacked air, and from Marianne's look and smile that pierced her. She
went, as if by chance, instinctively guiding Lissac, led by him to a
little, salon far from the reception rooms, and which was reserved for
her and protected by a door guarded by an usher. It might have been
thought that she expected this solitude would be necessary to her as an
escape from the fright of that reception, to which her overstrained and
sick nerves made her a prey.
In passing, Lissac had whispered to Ramel, who was at his elbow:
"Tell Sulpice that Madame Vaudrey is ill!"
"Ill?"
"You see that she is!"
When Adrienne was within the little salon hung with garnet silk
draperies, in which the candelabras and sconces were lighted, she sank
into an armchair, entirely exhausted and overwhelmed by the fearful
resistance she had made to her feelings. She remained there motionless,
her eye fixed, her face pale, and both hands resting on the arms of her
chair, abstractedly looking at the pattern of the carpet.
Guy stood near, biting his lips as he thought of the madman Vaudrey and
that wretched Marianne.
"She at least obeys her instincts! But he!"
"Ah! it is too much; yes, it is too much!" repeated Adrienne, as if
Lissac were again repeating that phrase.
It seemed to her that she had been thrust into some cowardly situation;
that she had been subjected to a shower of filth! It was hideous,
repugnant. She now saw, in the depths of her life, events that she had
never before seen; her vision had suddenly become clear. Dark details
she could now explain. Vaudrey's falsehoods were suddenly manifested.
"He lied! Ah! how he had lied!"
She recalled his anxiety to hide the journals from her, his oft-repeated
suggestions, his precautions, the increasing number of his
night-sessions that made him pale. Pale from debauchery! And she pitied
him! She begged him not to kill himself for the politics that was eating
his life. Again she saw on the lips of her _Wednesday's_ guests the
furtive smiles that were hidden behind muffs when she spoke of those
nocturnal sessions of the Chamber, which were only nights passed in
Marianne's bed! How those Parisians must have laughed at her and
ridiculed the credulity of the woman who believes herself loved, but who
is deceived and mocked at! Madame Gerson, Sabine! How overjoyed they
must have been when, in their salons, they referred to the little,
stupid Provincial who was ignorant of these tricks!
She felt ridiculed and tortured, more tortured than baffled, for her
vanity was nothing in comparison with her love, her poor, artless and
trusting love!
"Sulpice, I should never have believed--Never!--"
Why had they left Grenoble, their little house on the banks of the
Isère? They loved each other there, it was Paris that had snatched him
away! Paris! She hated it now. She hated that reputation that had
carried Vaudrey into office, the politics that had robbed her of a kind
and loving husband,--for he had loved her, she was sure of that,--and
which had made him the lover of a courtesan, the liar and coward that he
was!
"Do you see?" she said to Lissac suddenly. "I detest these walls!"
She pointed to the gilded ceilings with an angry gesture.
"Since I entered here, my life has come to a close!--It is that, that
which has taken him from me!--Ah! this society, this politics, these
meannesses, this life exposed to every one and everything, to temptation
and to fall, I am entirely sick of, I am disgusted with. Let me be
snatched from it, let me be taken away! Everywhere here, one might say,
there is an atmosphere of lying!"
"Do you hear? She laughs, she is happy! She! And I, ah! I!"
She had risen to her feet, suddenly recovering all her energy, as if
stirred by the air of a Hungarian dance, whose strains dimly reached
them from the distant, warm salons, where Marianne was disporting her
beauty--
"Ah! I hate this hôtel, the noise and the women!" said Adrienne. "This
horde ranged about the buffet, this salon turned into a restaurant, the
false salutations, the commonplace protestations,--this society, all
this society, I detest it!--I will have no more of it!--It seems to me
that it all is mocking me, and that its smiles are only for that
courtesan!--But if I had driven her out?--Who brought her?"
"Her uncle and Monsieur de Rosas!"
"Monsieur de Rosas?"
"Who marries her!"
Adrienne nervously uttered a loud, harsh laugh, as painful as if it were
caused by a spasm.
"Who marries her! Then these creatures are married?--Ah! they are
married--They are honored, too, are they not? And because they are more
easy of approach, they are thought more beautiful and more agreeable
than those who are merely honest wives? Ah! it is too silly!--Rosas! I
took him for a man of sense!--If I were to tell him myself that she is
my husband's mistress, what would the duke answer?"
"He would not believe you, and you would not do that, madame!" said
Lissac.
"Why?"
"Because it would be an act of cowardice, and because you are the best,
the noblest of women!"
Instinctively he drew near her, lowering his voice, embracing with his
glance that fine, charming beauty, that grief heightened by a burning
brilliancy.
She raised her fine, clear eyes to Lissac, whose look troubled her, and
said:
"And how have these served me?--Kindness, trickery!--Trickery,
chastity!--Ask all these men! All of them will go to Mademoiselle Kayser
and not to me!"
"To you, madame," murmured Guy, "all that there is of devotion and
earnestness, yes, all of the tenderest and the truest will go to you as
respectful homage."
"Respect?--Yes, respect to us!--And with it goes the home! But to her!
Ah! to her, love! And what if I wish to be loved myself?"
"Loved by him!" said Lissac in a low tone, as if he did not know what he
said; and his hands instinctively sought Adrienne's. They trembled.
A woman's perfume and something like the keen odor of flowers assailed
his nostrils. He had never felt the impulse of burning compassion which
at a sign from this saint, would have driven him to attempt the
impossible, to affront the noisy throng yonder.
"Loved by him, yes, by him!" answered Adrienne, with the mournful shake
of the head of one who sees her joy vanish in the distance like a
sinking bark.
She had been so happy! She had thought herself so dearly loved! Ah!
those many cowardly lies uttered by Sulpice!
"Do not speak to me of him!" she suddenly said. "I hate him, too!--I do
more than that! I despise him! I never wish to see him again!--never.
You hear! never!"
"What will you do?" Lissac asked.
"I know nothing about it!--I wish to leave! Now, I have no more parading
to make in this ball, I think, I have no longer to receive the guests
whose insulting smiles were like blows! I will go, go!"
"Adrienne!"
"Will go at once!"
She felt no astonishment at hearing the name Adrienne spoken suddenly
and unreflectingly by Guy de Lissac.
She looked at him with a glance that reached his soul, not knowing what
she said:
"Leave now! While the ball is in progress. To leave solitude to him,
suddenly--here! And that woman, if he wishes her, and if the other who
is marrying her will yield her to him!"
She was carried away, her mind wandered, as if unbalanced by her grief,
all her efforts at self-control ending in a relaxation of her strained
nerves.
"I will leave!--I do not wish to see him again!"
"Leave to-night?"
"For Grenoble--I don't know where!--But to fly from him; ah! yes; to
escape from him! Take me away, Monsieur de Lissac!" she said
distractedly, as she seized his hand. "I should go mad here!"
She had unconsciously taken refuge, as it were, in the arms of the man
who loved her, and Lissac felt the exquisite grace of the body abandoned
to him, without the woman's reflecting upon it, without loving him,
lost--
It is quite certain that in her nervous, heart-broken condition,
Adrienne was not considering whether his affection for her sprung from
friendship or from love.
For a moment this master skeptic, Guy, felt that he was committing the
greatest folly of his life.
The young woman did not understand; nevertheless, even without love, he
clearly felt that this chasteness and grace, all that there was
exquisitely seductive about her, belonged to him--if he dared--
"You are feverish, Adrienne," he said, as he took her hands as he would
a child's.
"I am choking here!--I wish to leave!--take me away!"
"Nonsense," said Lissac. "What are you thinking about? They are calling
for you, yonder."
"It is because they call for me that I wish to escape. Don't you see
that I abhor all those people; that I detest them as much as I despise
them? Take me away!"
Lissac had become very pale. He tried to smile at Adrienne--the heroic
smile of a wounded man undergoing amputation--and he whispered:
"Don't you know very well, madame, that you would not have taken two
steps in the street, on my arm, before you would become a lost woman?"
"Well," she said, "what of that, since it is they who are loved!--"
"No, madame," Guy replied, "I love you. I may say so, because you are a
virtuous woman, and I have no right to take you away, do you understand?
because I love you."
He, too, had summoned all his strength to impart to his confession,
which he would have expressed with ardor, the cold tone of a phrase.
But that was enough. Adrienne recoiled before this avowal.
He loved her. He told her so!
It is true, she could not leave the mansion on his arm.
She rested her glance on Lissac and extended her hand to him, saying, as
she felt suddenly recalled to herself:
"You are an honest man!"
"According to my moods," said Guy, with a sad smile.
The door of the little salon opened, and Ramel entered.
"I have called in a doctor," he said.
"For me?" asked Adrienne. "Thanks! I am quite strong!"
Then boldly going to Ramel:
"Will you have the goodness to take me to Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin,
Monsieur Ramel?"
"Why?"
"Because I will not remain one hour longer in a house where my husband
has the right to receive his mistress!--Monsieur de Lissac refuses to
accompany me. Your arm, Ramel!"
"Madame," Ramel answered gently, "I knew that Monsieur de Lissac was a
man of intelligence. It seems to me that he is a man of heart. You
should remain here for your own sake, for your name's sake, for your
husband's. It is your duty. As to Mademoiselle Kayser, you can return to
the salons, for she has just left with Monsieur de Rosas."
Adrienne remained for a moment with her sad eyes fixed on Ramel; then
shaking her head:
"You knew it also? Everybody knew it then, except me?"
"Well!" said Ramel, a good-natured smile playing in his white mustache,
"now it is necessary to forget."
"Never!" replied Adrienne.
Then proudly drawing herself up, she took Denis's arm and without even
glancing in her mirror, she went off toward the salons.
"Your bouquet, madame," said Lissac, who was still pale and his voice
trembled.
"True!" said Adrienne.
She fastened her bouquet of drooping roses to her corsage and without
daring to look at Lissac again, she re-entered, leaning on Ramel's arm.
Left alone in the salon, Guy remained a moment to shake his head.
"Poor, dear creature!" he said. "If I had been young enough not to
understand the position in which her madness placed me, or base enough
to profit by it, what a pretty little preface to a great folly she was
about to commit this evening! Well! this attack of morality will perhaps
count in my favor some day."
He stooped down and picked up a rose that had fallen from Adrienne's
bouquet to the carpet.
He smiled as he took up the flower and looked at it.
"One learns at any age!" he thought, as he put the flower in his coat.
"That, at least, is a love souvenir that they will not send the police
to rob me of."