Part 43

“I know. I have read it,” said the minister, moving closer to the fire.

“I sincerely hope that your excellency does not believe these infamies. Besides, I have here--I bring the proof.”

With his strong hairy hands, trembling with emotion, he hunted among the papers in an enormous shagreen portfolio which he had under his arm.

“Never mind that--never mind. I am acquainted with the whole affair. I know that, wilfully or not, they have mixed you up with another person, whom family considerations--”

The duke could not restrain a smile at the bewilderment of the Nabob, stupefied to find him so well informed.

“A Minister of State has to know everything. But don’t worry. Your election will be declared valid all the same. And once declared valid--”

Jansoulet heaved a sigh of relief.

“Ah, M. le Duc, how it cheers me to hear you speak thus! I was beginning to lose all confidence. My enemies are so powerful. And a piece of bad luck into the bargain. Do you know that it is Le Merquier himself who is charged with the report on my election?”

“Le Merquier? The devil!”

“Yes, Le Merquier, Hemerlingue’s agent, the dirty hypocrite who converted the baroness, no doubt because his religion forbade him to have a Mohammedan for a mistress.”

“Come, come, Jansoulet.”

“Well, M. le Duc? One can’t help being angry. Think of the situation in which these wretches are placing me. Here I ought to have had my election made valid a week ago, and they arrange the postponement of the sitting expressly because they know the terrible position in which I am placed--my whole fortune paralyzed, the Bey waiting for the decision of the Chamber to decide whether or not he can plunder me. I have eighty millions over there, M. le Duc, and here I begin to be short of money. If the thing goes on only a little longer--”

He wiped away the big drops of sweat that trickled down his cheeks.

“Ah, well, I will look after this validation myself,” said the minister sharply. “I will write to what’s-his-name to hurry up with his report; and even if I have to be carried to the Chamber--”

“Your excellency is unwell?” asked Jansoulet, in a tone of interest which, I swear to you, had no affectation about it.

“No--a little weakness. I am rather anaemic--wanting blood; but Jenkins is going to put me right. Aren’t you, Jenkins?”

The Irishman, who had not been listening, made a vague gesture.

“Tonnerre! And here am I with only too much of it.”

And the Nabob loosened his cravat about his neck, swollen like an apoplexy by his emotion and the heat of the room. “If I could only transfer a little to you, M. le Duc!”

“It would be an excellent thing for both,” said the Minister of State with pale irony. “For you, especially, who are a violent fellow, and who at this moment need so much self-control. Take care on that point, Jansoulet. Beware of the hot retorts, the steps taken in a fit of temper to which they would like to drive you. Repeat to yourself now that you are a public man, on a platform, all of whose actions are observed from far. The newspapers are abusing you; don’t read them, if you cannot conceal the emotion which they cause you. Don’t do what I did, with my blind man of the Pont de la Concorde, that frightful clarinet-player, who for the last ten years has been blighting my life by playing all day ‘De tes fils, Norma.’ I have tried everything to get him away from there--money, threats. Nothing has succeeded in inducing him to go. The police? Ah, yes, indeed. With modern ideas, it becomes quite a business to clear off a blind man from a bridge. The Opposition newspapers would talk of it, the Parisians would make a story out of it--‘The Cobbler and the Financier.’ ‘The Duke and the Clarinet.’ No, I must resign myself. It is, besides, my own fault. I never ought to have let this man see that he annoyed me. I am sure that my torture makes half the pleasure of his life now. Every morning he comes forth from his wretched lodging with his dog, his folding-stool, his frightful music, and says to himself, ‘Come, let us go and worry the Duc de Mora.’ Not a day does he miss, the wretch! Why, see, if I were but to open the window a trifle, you would hear his deluge of little sharp notes above the noise of the water and the traffic. Well, this journalist of the Messenger, he is your clarinet; if you allow him to see that his music wearies you, he will never finish. And with this, my dear deputy, I will remind you that you have a meeting at three o’clock at the office, and I must send you back to the Chamber.”

Then turning to Jenkins:

“You know what I asked of you, doctor--pearls for the day after to-morrow; and let them be extra strong!”

Jenkins started, shook himself as at the sudden awakening from a dream:

“Certainly, my dear duke. You shall be given some stamina--oh, yes; stamina, breath enough to win the great Derby stakes.”

He bowed, and left the room laughing, the veritable laugh of a wolf showing its gleaming white teeth. The Nabob took leave in his turn, his heart filled with gratitude, but not daring to let anything of it appear in the presence of this sceptic in whom all demonstrativeness aroused distrust. And the Minister of State, left alone, rolled up in his wraps before the crackling and blazing fire, sheltered in the padded warmth of his luxury, doubled that day by the feverish caress of the May sunshine, began to shiver with cold again, to shiver so violently that Felicia’s letter which he had reopened and was reading rapturously shook in his hands.

A deputy is in a very singular situation during the period which follows his election and precedes--as they say in parliamentary jargon--the verification of its validity. It is a little like the position of the newly married man during the twenty-four hours separating the civil marriage from its consecration by the Church. Rights of which he cannot avail himself, a half-happiness, a semi-authority, the embarrassment of keeping the balance a little on this side or on that, the lack of a defined footing. One is married and yet not married, a deputy and yet not perfectly sure of being it; only, for the deputy, this uncertainty is prolonged over days and weeks, and since the longer it lasts the more problematical does the validation become, it is like torture for the unfortunate representative on probation to be obliged to attend the Chamber, to occupy a place which he will perhaps not keep, to listen to discussions of which it is possible that he will never hear the end, to fix in his eyes and ears the delicious memory of parliamentary sittings with their sea of bald or apoplectic foreheads, their confused noise of rustling papers, the cries of attendants, wooden knives beating a tattoo on the tables, private conversations from amid which the voice of the orator issues, a thundering or timid solo with a continuous accompaniment.

This situation, at best so trying to the nerves, was complicated in the Nabob’s case by these calumnies, at first whispered, now printed, circulated in thousands of copies by the newspapers, with the consequence that he found himself tacitly put in quarantine by his colleagues.

The first days he went and came in the corridors, the library, the dining-room, the lecture-hall, like the rest, delighted to roam through all the corners of that majestic labyrinth; but he was unknown to most of his associates, unacknowledged by a few members of the Rue Royale Club, who avoided him, detested by all the clerical party of which Le Merquier was the head. The financial set was hostile to this multi-millionaire, powerful in both “bull” and “bear” market, like those vessels of heavy tonnage which displace the water of a harbour, and thus his isolation only became the more marked by the change in his circumstances and the same enmity followed him everywhere.