"With this difference however, Ramel is a Puritan, an ancient, a man of marble, and I am a boulevardier and a skeptic. He is a man of bronze—your Ramel! And your friend Lissac of simili-bronze! The proof of it is that I have been seeking you for half the evening to ask you to do me a favor."
"What favor, my dear fellow?" cried Vaudrey, his face lighting up with joy. "Anything in the world to please you."
"I was in Madame Marsy's box—you do not know Madame Marsy? She is a great admirer of yours and makes a point to applaud you in the Chamber. She has prayed for your advent. She saw you in the manager's box a while ago, and she has asked me to present you to her, or rather, to present her to you, for I presume for your Excellency the ceremony is modified."
"Madame Marsy!" said Vaudrey. "Is she not an artist's widow? Her salon is a political centre, is it not?"
"Exactly. A recent salon opened in opposition to that of Madame Evan. An Athenian Republic! You do not object to that?"
"On the contrary! A republic cannot be founded without the aid of women."
"Ah!" cried Lissac, laughing. "Politics and honors have not changed you, I see."
"Changed me? With the exception that I have twenty years over my head, and alas! not so much hair as I had then upon it, I am the same as I was in 1860."
"Hôtel Racine! Rue Racine!" said Lissac. "In those days, I dreamed of being Musset, I a gourmand, and what have I become? A spectator, a trifler, a Parisian, a rolling stone.—Nothing. And you who dreamed of being a second Barnave, Vergniaud or Barbaroux, your dream is realized."
"Realized!" said Vaudrey.
He made an effort to shake his head deprecatingly as if his vanity were not flattered by those honeyed words of his friend; but his glance displayed such sincere delight and so strong a desire to be effusive and in evidence, that he could not repress a smile upon hearing from the companion of his youth, such a confirmation of his triumph. They are our most severe critics, these friends of our youth, they who have listened to the stammering of our hopes and dreams of the future. And when at length we have conquered the future, these are often the very ones to rob us of it! Lissac, however, was not one of these envious ones.
"Let us go to Madame Marsy's box, my dear Guy," said Sulpice. "The more so because if she at all resembles her portrait at the last Salon, she must be lovely indeed."
He left the greenroom, leaning on the arm of Lissac, after throwing a glance backward, however, at the girls whirling about there, and where in the presence of their stiff, ancient superiors, the young sub-prefects still hid their faces behind their opera hats. Granet with Molina went to take leave of Vaudrey, leaving little Marie Launay smiling artlessly because the financier, the Tumbler, had said to her, in drawing down her eyelids with his coarse finger: "Will you close your periwinkles—you kid?"
"Your Excellency," the banker had said, cajoling his Excellency with his meaning glance, "I am always at your orders you know."
"To-morrow, at the Prisons' Commission, Monsieur le Ministre," said Granet. And amid salutations on every side Vaudrey withdrew, smiling and good-humored as usual.
In order to reach the box, Vaudrey had to cross the stage. The new scene was set. Buddhist temples with their grotesque shapes and huge statues stood out against a background of vivid blue sky, and on the canvas beyond, great pink flowers glowed amid refreshing verdure. Over all fell a soft fairy-like light from an electric lamp, casting on the floor a fantastic gleam, soft and clear as the rays of the moon. Sulpice smiled as he passed beneath this flood of light and saw his shadow projected before him as upon the glassy waters of a lake. It seemed to him that this sudden illumination, a sort of fantastic apotheosis as it were, was like the fairy-like aureole that attended his progress.
At the very moment of leaving the greenroom, Sulpice had jostled accidentally against a man of very grave aspect wearing a black coat closely buttoned. He was almost bald save for some long, thin, gray locks that hung about his huge ears, his cheeks had a hectic color and his skull was yellow. He entered this salon in a hesitating, inquisitive way, with wide-open eyes and a gourmand's movement of the nostrils, and gazed about the room, warm with lights and heavy with perfume.
Sulpice glanced at him carelessly and recognized him as the man whom he himself had superseded on Place Beauvau—a Puritan, a Huguenot, a widower, the father of five or six daughters, and as solemn and proper in his ordinary demeanor as a Sunday-school tract. Sulpice could not refrain from crying out merrily: "Bless me! Monsieur Pichereau!"
The other shook his butter-colored skull as if he had suddenly received a stinging blow on it with a switch, and his red face became crimson-hued at the sight of Sulpice, his successor in office, standing before him, politely holding out to him his two gloved hands.
Guy de Lissac was no longer laughing.
Their two Excellencies found themselves face to face at the foot of the greenroom staircase, in the midst of a crowd of brahmins, dancers, negresses, and female supernumeraries; two Excellencies meeting there; one smiling, the other grimacing beneath the glance of this curious, shrewd little world.
"Ah! I have caught you, my dear colleague," cried Sulpice, very much amused at Pichereau's embarrassed air, his coat buttoned close like a Quaker's and his little eyes blinking behind his spectacles, and looking as sheepish as a sacristan caught napping.
"Me?" stammered Pichereau. "Me? But my dear Minister, it's you—yes, you whom I came expressly to seek!"
"Here?" said Vaudrey.
"Yes, here!"
"Really?"
"I had something to say to you—I—yes, I wanted—"
The unlucky Pichereau mechanically pulled and jerked at his waistcoat, then assuming a dignified, grave air, he whistled and hesitated, and finally stammered:
"I wished to speak with you—yes—to consult with you upon a matter of grave importance—concerning Protestant communities."
Sulpice could not restrain his laughter.
Pichereau, with his look of a Calvinistic preacher, was throwing from behind his spectacles glowing looks in the direction where Marie Launay stood listening to and laughing at the badinage of Molina. Some newspaper reporters, scenting a handy paragraph, came sauntering up to overhear some fragment of the conversation between the minister of yesterday and him of to-day.
Guy de Lissac stood carelessly by, secretly very much amused at Pichereau, who did not move, but rubbing his hands nervously together was trying to appear at ease, yet by his sour smile at his successor allowing it to be plainly seen how gladly he would have strangled Vaudrey.
"My dear colleague," said Sulpice, gayly, "we will talk elsewhere about your communities. This is hardly the place. Non est hic locus! Good-bye!"
"Good-bye, your Excellency," replied Pichereau with forced politeness.
Vaudrey drew Lissac away, saying with a suppressed laugh:
"Oh! oh! the Quaker! He has laid down his portfolio, but he has kept the key to the greenroom, it seems."
"It would appear," replied Guy, "that the door leading into the greenroom may open to scenes of consolation for fallen greatness. The blue eyes of Marie Launay always serve as a sparadrap to a fallen minister!"
"Was the fat Molina right? To lose the votes of the majority is perhaps the malady of the knee of ministers," said Vaudrey merrily.
He laughed again, very much amused at the irritable, peevish yet cringing attitude of Pichereau, the Genevan doctrinaire, who sought consolation in the greenroom of the ballet, whilst his five or six daughters sat at home, probably reading some chaste English romance, or practising sacred music within the range of the green spectacles of their governess.
"But!" said he gayly, "to fall from power is nothing, provided one falls into the arms of ballet-girls."