"Booby! every one is loved some day or other, and there are some who are loved even too much!"
Sulpice had received a patriarchal and half-puritanical training, but softened materially by his mother's almost excessive care, it had left, as it were, a kind of poetic perfume that clung about him and never left him.
Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing again his mother's voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy balusters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to trample with bare feet the great clusters of grapes piled up in the wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated! Even as a representative or minister, musing over his past that seemed but yesterday, Sulpice wandered again in thought to this quiet country spot, so loved by him, so sweet, so still, reposing in the silence of provincial calm—far away, removed from all the noise and bustle of Paris.
The farmers of Dauphiné generally think of making their sons tillers of the soil, sending them to school and to college, perhaps to begin later the study of law or medicine, but welcoming them joyfully back again to their native fields, to their farms, where the youths soon forget all they may have learned of the Code or the Codex and lead the healthy, hardy life of the country. Good, well-built fellows, their chests enlarged by their daily exercise, their thighs strengthened by mountain-climbing, gay young men, liking to hunt and drink on the banks of the Isère and caring more for good harvests than for the songs of the wind amongst the branches of the poplars upon the river-banks.
Sulpice had an old uncle on his father's side who proposed to his sister-in-law to give up his broad acres—a fortune in themselves—to Sulpice, if his nephew would consent to marry his daughter. Sulpice refused. He would not marry for money.
"Fiddle-faddle!" cried his uncle. "Sickly sentimentality! If he cultivates that grain, my brother's son will not make much headway."
"There is where you are mistaken, brother-in-law. What my poor Raymond had not time to become, his child will be: a lawyer at once eloquent and honest."
"Well, well," replied the uncle, "but he shall not have my girl."
Sulpice, after finishing his studies at Paris, returned to his mother at Grenoble, took her away from the old house at Saint-Laurent and installed her in the town with himself, where he began the practice of law and attracted everybody's attention from the first. He made pleading a sacred office and not a trade. Everyone was astonished that he had not remained in Paris.
Why? He loved his native province, the banks of the Isère, the healthy, poetic atmosphere hanging over the desert of the Chartreuse and the snows of the Grand-Som. A talented man could make his way anywhere—moreover, it was his pleasure to consider it a duty not to leave this secluded corner of the earth where he would cause freedom of speech to be known. Sulpice, whose heart was open to every ardent and generous manifestation of human thought, had imbibed from his mother, as well as from his father's writings and books, and from the Encyclopædia that Raymond Vaudrey had interlined with notes and reflections, not merely traditional information, but also, so to speak, the baptism of liberty. He had lived in the feverish days of the past eighty years, through his reading of the Gazette Nationale of those stormy days. The speeches that he found in those pages—speeches that still burned like uncooled lava—of Mirabeau, Barnave, and Condorcet, a son of Grenoble, seemed to impart a glow to his fingers and fire to his glance. Then, too, the magnificent dreams of freedom proclaimed from the tribune inflamed his mind and made his heart beat fast. He saw as in a vision applauding crowds, tricolors gleaming in the clear and golden sunlight, processions moving, files marching past, and heard eternal truths proclaimed and acclaimed.
His mother smiled at all this enthusiasm. She did not however try to repress it. It would vanish at the touch of years, just as the leaves of the trees fly before the winds of October. And besides, the dear woman herself was in sympathy with his hopes, his dreams and visions, remembering that her lost Raymond had loved what his son in his turn so much adored.
The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a popular man at Grenoble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how generous he was, and by the middle-class who regarded him as a prudent man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of the National Assembly. He had just passed his thirty-fourth year.
His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by this brilliant launch on his career.
With what deep emotion, even to-day, Vaudrey recalled that Sunday in February, a foul, wet day, when he returned home in a closed carriage with a friend, from an electioneering tour. The day before he had made a speech in a wineshop to an audience of peasants, who listened, open-mouthed, but withal suspicious, examining their candidate as they would have handled a beast offered at the market, and who, step by step, applauded his remarks, stretching out their rasp-like hands as he left them, and crying out: "You are our man!"
That very morning he returned to Grenoble in the rain, passing through villages where the posters bearing his name and those of his friends, half-demolished by the rain, flapped dismally in the wind. Before the mayor's office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare. But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France, and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in the struggle.
Moreover, at night, with what feverish transport he watched the returns of the election as they reached the Palais de Justice, black with the crowd, and filled with uproar! With what a fearfully fast-beating heart he saw the rapidly swelling number of ballots cast for him! Dispatches came, and pedestrians hurried in from the country, waving their bulletins above their heads, and Sulpice heard on every lip the same cry: "Vaudrey leads!"
Some cried bravo, while others clapped their hands. A crowd quickly gathered about Vaudrey. It already seemed to him that he was lifted up by a great wave and carried to a new world.
A friend seized him by the arm and drew him into a corner of the hall, away from the others, and hurriedly said: "You know I am not one to ask much of you, to ask anything of you, in fact. I merely reckon on a receivership. That is easily done, eh? A mere nothing?"
Sulpice, whose feelings were overcome by this great popular consecration, felt a kind of anger stir his heart against this solicitor, who, in the triumph of a great popular cause, saw only a means of self-advancement, of securing an appointment. The deputy—for he was a deputy now, each commune adding its total to the Vaudrey vote—was moved by a feeling of disgust.
The crowd followed him home that evening, shouting in triumph.
Amid the joy of victory, Sulpice felt the burden of the anxiety caused by duties to be done: a treaty of peace to be signed, and what a peace! Must he, alas! append his signature to a document devoted to the dismemberment of his country? Far into the night he stood in reverie in his chamber, his brow resting against the cold window-pane.
He retired to rest very late, and arose with the gray dawn of February, but without having slept.
He looked across the street to a convent garden, with its square and lozenge-shaped beds regularly arranged, its bare trees and box-wood borders, that he had often gazed upon. Some nuns in their black robes passed slowly across this cold and calm horizon that for many years had also been the range of his vision.
Henceforth this familiar spot, this sad garden, whose cloistral associations charmed him, would be lost to his view. It was Paris now that awaited him, feverish Paris, burning with anger and odorous of saltpetre. Its very