He went first, and she followed him into their bedroom, tickling his
neck to make him go quicker, for he could not stand that.
The article appeared with the signature of George Duroy de Cantel, and
caused a great sensation. There was an excitement about it in the
Chamber. Daddy Walter congratulated the author, and entrusted him with
the political editorship of the _Vie Francaise_. The "Echoes" fell again
to Boisrenard.
Then there began in the paper a violent and cleverly conducted campaign
against the Ministry. The attack, now ironical, now serious, now
jesting, and now virulent, but always skillful and based on facts, was
delivered with a certitude and continuity which astonished everyone.
Other papers continually cited the _Vie Francaise_, taking whole
passages from it, and those in office asked themselves whether they
could not gag this unknown and inveterate foe with the gift of a
prefecture.
Du Roy became a political celebrity. He felt his influence increasing by
the pressure of hands and the lifting of hats. His wife, too, filled him
with stupefaction and admiration by the ingenuity of her mind, the value
of her information, and the number of her acquaintances. Continually he
would find in his drawing-room, on returning home, a senator, a deputy,
a magistrate, a general, who treated Madeleine as an old friend, with
serious familiarity. Where had she met all these people? In society, so
she said. But how had she been able to gain their confidence and their
affection? He could not understand it.
"She would make a terrible diplomatist," he thought.
She often came in late at meal times, out of breath, flushed, quivering,
and before even taking off her veil would say: "I have something good
to-day. Fancy, the Minister of Justice has just appointed two
magistrates who formed a part of the mixed commission. We will give him
a dose he will not forget in a hurry."
And they would give the minister a dose, and another the next day, and
a third the day after. The deputy, Laroche-Mathieu, who dined at the Rue
Fontaine every Tuesday, after the Count de Vaudrec, who began the week,
would shake the hands of husband and wife with demonstrations of extreme
joy. He never ceased repeating: "By Jove, what a campaign! If we don't
succeed after all?"
He hoped, indeed, to succeed in getting hold of the portfolio of foreign
affairs, which he had had in view for a long time.
He was one of those many-faced politicians, without strong convictions,
without great abilities, without boldness, and without any depth of
knowledge, a provincial barrister, a local dandy, preserving a cunning
balance between all parties, a species of Republican Jesuit and Liberal
mushroom of uncertain character, such as spring up by hundreds on the
popular dunghill of universal suffrage. His village machiavelism caused
him to be reckoned able among his colleagues, among all the adventurers
and abortions who are made deputies. He was sufficiently well-dressed,
correct, familiar, and amiable to succeed. He had his successes in
society, in the mixed, perturbed, and somewhat rough society of the high
functionaries of the day. It was said everywhere of him: "Laroche will
be a minister," and he believed more firmly than anyone else that he
would be. He was one of the chief shareholders in Daddy Walter's paper,
and his colleague and partner in many financial schemes.
Du Roy backed him up with confidence and with vague hopes as to the
future. He was, besides, only continuing the work begun by Forestier, to
whom Laroche-Mathieu had promised the Cross of the Legion of Honor when
the day of triumph should come. The decoration would adorn the breast of
Madeleine's second husband, that was all. Nothing was changed in the
main.
It was seen so well that nothing was changed that Du Roy's comrades
organized a joke against him, at which he was beginning to grow angry.
They no longer called him anything but Forestier. As soon as he entered
the office some one would call out: "I say, Forestier."
He would pretend not to hear, and would look for the letters in his
pigeon-holes. The voice would resume in louder tones, "Hi! Forestier."
Some stifled laughs would be heard, and as Du Roy was entering the
manager's room, the comrade who had called out would stop him, saying:
"Oh, I beg your pardon, it is you I want to speak to. It is stupid, but
I am always mixing you up with poor Charles. It is because your articles
are so infernally like his. Everyone is taken in by them."
Du Roy would not answer, but he was inwardly furious, and a sullen wrath
sprang up in him against the dead man. Daddy Walter himself had
declared, when astonishment was expressed at the flagrant similarity in
style and inspiration between the leaders of the new political editor
and his predecessor: "Yes, it is Forestier, but a fuller, stronger, more
manly Forestier."
Another time Du Roy, opening by chance the cupboard in which the cup and
balls were kept, had found all those of his predecessor with crape round
the handles, and his own, the one he had made use of when he practiced
under the direction of Saint-Potin, ornamented with a pink ribbon. All
had been arranged on the same shelf according to size, and a card like
those in museums bore the inscription: "The Forestier-Du Roy (late
Forestier and Co.) Collection." He quietly closed the cupboard, saying,
in tones loud enough to be heard: "There are fools and envious people
everywhere."
But he was wounded in his pride, wounded in his vanity, that touchy
pride and vanity of the writer, which produce the nervous susceptibility
ever on the alert, equally in the reporter and the genial poet. The word
"Forestier" made his ears tingle. He dreaded to hear it, and felt
himself redden when he did so. This name was to him a biting jest, more
than a jest, almost an insult. It said to him: "It is your wife who does
your work, as she did that of the other. You would be nothing without
her."
He admitted that Forestier would have been no one without Madeleine; but
as to himself, come now!
Then, at home, the haunting impression continued. It was the whole place
now that recalled the dead man to him, the whole of the furniture, the
whole of the knicknacks, everything he laid hands on. He had scarcely
thought of this at the outset, but the joke devised by his comrades had
caused a kind of mental wound, which a number of trifles, unnoticed up
to the present, now served to envenom. He could not take up anything
without at once fancying he saw the hand of Charles upon it. He only
looked at it and made use of things the latter had made use of formerly;
things that he had purchased, liked, and enjoyed. And George began even
to grow irritated at the thought of the bygone relations between his
friend and his wife. He was sometimes astonished at this revolt of his
heart, which he did not understand, and said to himself, "How the deuce
is it? I am not jealous of Madeleine's friends. I am never uneasy about
what she is up to. She goes in and out as she chooses, and yet the
recollection of that brute of a Charles puts me in a rage." He added,
"At the bottom, he was only an idiot, and it is that, no doubt, that
wounds me. I am vexed that Madeleine could have married such a fool."
And he kept continually repeating, "How is it that she could have
stomached such a donkey for a single moment?"
His rancor was daily increased by a thousand insignificant details,
which stung him like pin pricks, by the incessant reminders of the other
arising out of a word from Madeleine, from the man-servant, from the
waiting-maid.
One evening Du Roy, who liked sweet dishes, said, "How is it we never
have sweets at dinner?"
His wife replied, cheerfully, "That is quite true. I never think about
them. It is all through Charles, who hated--"
He cut her short in a fit of impatience he was unable to control,
exclaiming, "Hang it all! I am sick of Charles. It is always Charles
here and Charles there, Charles liked this and Charles liked that. Since
Charles is dead, for goodness sake leave him in peace."
Madeleine looked at her husband in amazement, without being able to
understand his sudden anger. Then, as she was sharp, she guessed what
was going on within him; this slow working of posthumous jealousy,
swollen every moment by all that recalled the other. She thought it
puerile, may be, but was flattered by it, and did not reply.
He was vexed with himself at this irritation, which he had not been
able to conceal. As they were writing after dinner an article for the
next day, his feet got entangled in the foot mat. He kicked it aside,
and said with a laugh:
"Charles was always chilly about the feet, I suppose?"
She replied, also laughing: "Oh! he lived in mortal fear of catching
cold; his chest was very weak."
Du Roy replied grimly: "He has given us a proof of that." Then kissing
his wife's hand, he added gallantly: "Luckily for me."
But on going to bed, still haunted by the same idea, he asked: "Did
Charles wear nightcaps for fear of the draughts?"
She entered into the joke, and replied: "No; only a silk handkerchief
tied round his head."
George shrugged his shoulders, and observed, with contempt, "What a
baby."
From that time forward Charles became for him an object of continual
conversation. He dragged him in on all possible occasions, speaking of
him as "Poor Charles," with an air of infinite pity. When he returned
home from the office, where he had been accosted twice or thrice as
Forestier, he avenged himself by bitter railleries against the dead man
in his tomb. He recalled his defects, his absurdities, his littleness,
enumerating them with enjoyment, developing and augmenting them as
though he had wished to combat the influence of a dreaded rival over the
heart of his wife. He would say, "I say, Made, do you remember the day
when that duffer Forestier tried to prove to us that stout men were
stronger than spare ones?"
Then he sought to learn a number of private and secret details
respecting the departed, which his wife, ill at ease, refused to tell
him. But he obstinately persisted, saying, "Come, now, tell me all about
it. He must have been very comical at such a time?"