Alone in Paris now, a body without a soul, distracted, and the prey of
ennui, with sad and bitter regret for his wasted life, repeating to
himself that Adrienne, far away from him, would never forgive, and was
doubtless, at this moment, saying and saying again to herself in her
solitude at Grenoble, that these politicians, at least, owed her
divorce, Vaudrey, not knowing what to do after a weary day of troubled
rest, mechanically entered the Opéra House to distract his eyes if not
his mind.
They were rendering _Aida_ that evening, and a débutante had been
announced as a star.
Sulpice Vaudrey, since Adrienne's departure,--already two weeks!--had
wandered about Paris like a damned soul when he did not attend the
Chamber, where he experienced the discomforts and the weakness of a
fallen man. Weary, disgusted and melancholy, Vaudrey took his seat in
the theatre to kill an evening.
There was what was called in the language of a Paris editor, a _swell
house_. In front of the stage there was literally a shower of diamonds
and the boxes were gaily adorned. The _fauteuils_ were occupied by
Parisian glories and foreign celebrities. Not a stall in the
amphitheatre without its _celebrity_. Chance had placed in this
All-Paris gathering, Madame Sabine Marsy and Madame Gerson, the two
friends who detested each other. The pretty little Madame Gerson
occupied and filled with her prattle, the box of the Prefect of
Police--No. 30, in which Monsieur Jouvenet showed his churchwarden's
profile. She was talking aloud about her salon, her receptions, her
acquaintances. She was eclipsing Madame Marsy with her triumphs. At the
back of the box, Monsieur Gerson was sleeping, overcome by fatigue.
Madame Gerson laughed on observing Sulpice in the orchestra-stalls.
"See! there is Monsieur Vaudrey! He still looks a little _beaten!_" she
said.
And she told her friends, crowded in the box, leaning over her and
looking at the pretty, plump bosom of this little, well-made brunette,
how Vaudrey was to dine at her house on the very evening when he fell
from power.
"Of course, he did not come!" she said. "I remember what Madame Marsy
advised me, one day,--she has passed through that in her time: one
should think of the invitations to dinner before dismissing a ministry!
Oh! it is tiresome; think of it!--One invites the Secretary of the
President of the Council to dinner. He is named on the card. He comes.
It is all over; he is no longer Secretary of the President, the
President of the Council is no longer President, there is no longer a
President, perhaps not even a Council; one should be certain of one's
titles and rank before accepting an invitation to dinner!"
She laughed heartily and loud, and Madame Marsy, who was half dethroned,
fanned herself nervously in her box, or levelled her glass at some one
in the audience, affecting a little disdainful manner toward her fair
neighbor. A friendship turned to acid.
Vaudrey, looking fatigued and abstracted, sat in his stall during the
entr'acte. He looked unconsciously about the theatre and still felt
surprised at not receiving salutations and bows, as formerly. He felt
that he was becoming a waif. Bah! he consoled himself with the thought
that the human race is thus constructed: everything is in success, he
gets most who offers most. Why then trouble about it?
His eyes followed the movement of his glass and one after another he saw
Madame Marsy, Jouvenet, Madame Gerson, so many living and exceedingly
taunting recollections, when suddenly Sulpice trembled, shaken by a
keener and almost angry feeling as his glance was directed to a box
against the dark-red of which two faces were boldly outlined: those of
Rosas and Marianne.
He was excited and unpleasantly piqued.
There before him he saw, between two large pillars, bearing gigantic,
gilded masts that seemed to mock at him, the woman whom he had adored
and the sight of whom still tore his heart. Pale and dressed in a white
gown, she was leaning toward Rosas in a most adorable attitude, with her
fair hair half-falling on her white shoulders--those shoulders that he
still saw trembling under his kisses, those shoulders on which he might
have pressed his burning lips and his teeth.
That livid beauty, strangely adorable, with her hair and ears dazzling
with jewels, stood clearly out against the background of the box in
which, like an enormous Cyclopean eye, appeared the round, ground glass
let into the door, forming a nimbus of light around Marianne's brow.
Paler than her, with a sickly but smiling countenance, Rosas showed his
bloodless, pale, Spanish face beside that of Marianne, as tragic looking
as a portrait by Coello. His tired-looking, pensive, thin face was
resting on his hand, which through the opera-glass looked a transparent
hand of wax, on which an enormous emerald ring flashed under the
gaslight. Monsieur de Rosas did not move.
She, on the contrary, at times inclined toward him, bringing her mouth
close to the Castilian's ear, standing out against his reddish beard as
if detached therefrom, and she whispered to Rosas words that Vaudrey
surmised, and which caused a spark of feverish delight to lighten up
José's sad eyes. As she leaned back tilting her chair, her satin corsage
below the bust was hidden from Sulpice by the edge of the box and he saw
only her face, neck and white shoulders, and she seemed to him to be
quite naked, the lines of her serpentine body sharply marked by the red
line of the velvet border. And with his greedy glance he continued to
trace the curves of that exquisite torso, the back that he had pressed,
all the being moulded by voluptuousness, that had been his.
This was the vanishing of his last dream! This love gone, this deception
driven into his heart like a knife, his last faith mocked at, insulted,
and branded with its true name, _folly_, he felt as if a yawning chasm
had been opened in him. Life was over! He was old now and he had wasted,
yes, wasted his happiness in playing at youth. He had believed himself
loved! Loved! Imbecile that he was!
He felt himself urged by a strong temptation to go to that box and open
its door and cry out to that man who had not yet given his name to that
woman:
"You do not know her! She is debauchery and falsehood itself!"
It seemed to Vaudrey that at times a bearded face, surmounting a white
cravat, appeared behind Rosas and Marianne: the haughty face of Uncle
Simon.
While the throng of Egyptians filed on the stage, Sulpice endeavored to
turn away his thoughts and remove his glances from that group that
attracted him. He still, however, looked at it, in spite of himself, and
voluntarily wounded his own heart.
Marianne did not seem to have even noticed him.
The curtain fell and he wandered into the wings, less to be there than
to escape that irritating sight. In breathing that atmosphere of a
theatre, he experienced a strange sensation that pained and consoled him
at the same time. The scene-shifters were rolling back the illuminating
apparatus pierced with light, and dragged to the rear the huge white
sphinxes and the immense canvas on which the palm-trees were outlined
upon a blue sky. Sulpice felt the cruelly ironical sensation of finding
himself, disheartened and defeated, once more on the very boards where
he had entered the first time, smiling, swelling with joy, saluting and
saluted and hearing on every side the same murmur, sweet as a May
zephyr:
"Monsieur le Ministre."
It was the same scene, the same dress-coats upon the same luminous
boards, the same electric rays that fell around him in the hour of his
accession, creating the same vulgar aureole. Some firemen crossed the
stage slowly and with a wearied expression made their examinations; some
water-carriers were sprinkling the parquet, while others were brushing
away the dust. And as if these common duties interested Sulpice, he
looked on with a vacant expression, as if his thoughts had taken wing.
Suddenly, in the centre of a group, with his hat on, escorted by bending
men, whose lips expressed flattery, Sulpice recognized Lucien Granet,
who in the dazzling triumph of his new kingdom, crossed and recrossed
the stage, distributing here and there patronizing bows.
The coarse Molina accompanied the new minister, laughing in a loud tone
like the sound of a well-filled cash-box suddenly shaken.
Vaudrey felt just as if he had received a blow full in the chest.
He recalled his own meeting as a successful man with Pichereau the
beaten one, on these very boards and almost in the same place, and in
order to avoid having to endure the friendly ironical hand-shake that
Pichereau was approaching him to give--the hand-shake formerly given to
Pichereau--he quickly hid himself behind a wing, receiving as he did so,
a blow, accompanied with a: _Pardon, monsieur_, from a workman who was
pushing along a piece of scenery, and a: _What a clumsy fellow!_ from a
little danseuse, the tip of whose pink slipper he had unwittingly grazed
with his heel.
He turned to the danseuse to apologize, when he perceived a young girl,
all in pink, whose blue eyes looked frightened and her cheeks reddened
when she recognized Vaudrey. It was Marie Launay, whom he had seen in
the greenroom the previous year, who had not yet scored a _success_,
while he was _retired_.
"Oh! I did not recognize you," she said. "I beg your pardon, Monsieur le
Ministre!"
He wished to make some reply; but this title used by the young girl,
ignorant of the political change, grated on his heart like the
scratching of a nail and he saw on the other side of the stage, reaching
the house by the communicating door, Lucien Granet, surrounded by his
staff, and followed by the eternal cortége of powerful ones, among whom
Warcolier was talking loudly, and Molina the Tumbler was recognizable by
his enormous paunch and loud laugh.
"Perhaps Madame Marsy has asked that this Granet be presented to her,"
thought Vaudrey as he mockingly recalled how Guy de Lissac ran after him
there in order to conduct him to the fashionable woman's box.
How long it was since then!