there was amongst the dancers a marble cutter, who during the day sold and cut his gravestones and came here at night to grin and caper in the ballet. He was on the scent of every funeral from the Opéra; he would get orders for tombstones between two dances at the rehearsals. One day Molina had been present at one of these. It seems incredible, but there was a bank clerk in a gray coat, a three-cornered hat upon his head and a brass buckler on his arm, who sacrificed to Venus in the interval between his two occupations, dancing with the coryphées; a dancer by night and a receiver of money by day. A girl was rehearsing beside him, in black bands and skirt. Then Molina, astonished, inquired who she might be. He was told that it was a girl in mourning, whose mother had just died. The Opéra is a fine stage upon which to behold the ironies and contrasts of life.
The financier might have related to Sulpice Vaudrey a description of a journey to Timbuctoo and have found him less amused and less interested than now. It was a world new and strange to him, attractive, and as exciting as acid to this man, still young, whose success had been achieved by unstinted labors, and who knew Paris only by what he had learned of it years ago, when a law student: the pit of the Comédie Française, the Luxembourg galleries and those of the Louvre, the Public Libraries, the Hall of Archives, the balls in the Latin Quarter, the holidays and the foyer of the Opéra once or twice on the occasion of a masked ball. And, besides that?—Nothing. That was all.
The great man from Grenoble arrived in Paris with his appetite whetted for the life of the city, and now he was here, suddenly plunged into the greenroom of the ballet, and all eyes were turned towards him, almost frightened as he was, on catching a glimpse of his own image reflected in the huge mirror glittering under the numerous lights, in the heart of this strange salon and surrounded by half-clad dancing girls. Then, too, everybody was looking at him, quizzing him, shrinking from him through timidity or running after him through interest. The new Minister of State! The chief of all the personnel of prefects, under-prefects, and secretaries-general represented there, lolling on these velvet divans in this vulgar greenroom.
All the glances, all the whisperings of the women, the frowns of his enemies, the cringing attitudes of dandified hangers-on, were making Vaudrey feel very uncomfortable, when to his great relief he suddenly observed coming towards him, peering hither and thither through his monocle, evidently in search of some one, Guy de Lissac, who immediately on catching sight of Vaudrey came towards him, greeting him with evident cordiality, tinged, however, with a proper reserve.
Sulpice was not long in breaking through this reserve. He hurried up to Guy, and seizing him by the hand, cried gayly:
"Do you know that I have been expecting this visit! You are the only one of my friends who has not yet congratulated me!"
"You know, my dear Minister," returned Guy in the same tone, "that it is really not such a great piece of luck to be made Minister that every one of your friends should be expected to fall upon your neck, crying bravo! You have mounted up to the capitol, but after all, the capitol is not such a very cheerful place, that I should illuminate à giorno. I am happy, however, if you are. I congratulate you, if you wash your hands of it, and that is all."
"You and my old friend Ramel," answered Sulpice, "are the two most original men that I know."
"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
