“You did not come to say farewell to the opera?” asked Lady Dudley, to whose house she went after the performance.
“No; I was at the Gymnase. It was a first night.”
“I can’t bear vaudeville. I feel to it as Louis XIV did to a Teniers,” said Lady Dudley.
“For my part,” remarked Mme. d’Espard, “I think they have improved very much. Vaudevilles now are charming comedies, full of wit, and the work of very clever men. I enjoy them immensely.”
“The acting is so good too,” said Marie. “The play tonight at the Gymnase went capitally; it seemed to suit the actors, and the dialogue is spirited and amusing.”
“A regular Beaumarchais business,” said Lady Dudley.
“M. Nathan is not a Molière yet, but—” said Mme. d’Espard, with a look at the Countess.
“But he makes vaudevilles,” said Mme. Charles de Vandenesse.
“And unmakes ministers,” retorted Mme. de Manerville.
The Countess remained silent; she racked her brains for pungent epigrams; her heart burned with rage, but nothing better occurred to her than—
“Some day perhaps he will make one.”
All the women exchanged glances of mysterious understanding. When Mme. de Vandenesse had gone, Moïna de Saint-Héren exclaimed:
“Why, she adores Nathan!”
“She makes no mystery of it,” said Mme. d’Espard.
VII
Suicide
With the month of May, Vandenesse took his wife away to their country seat. Here her only comfort was in passionate letters from Raoul, to whom she wrote every day.
The absence of the Countess might possibly have saved Raoul from the abyss over which he hung had Florine been with him. But he was alone amongst friends, secretly turned to enemies ever since his determination to take the whip hand became plain. For the moment he was an object of hatred to his staff, who reserved however the right of holding out a consoling hand in case he failed, or of cringing to him should he succeed. This is the way in the literary world where people are friendly only to their inferiors, and the rising man has everybody against him. This universal jealousy increases tenfold the chance of mediocrities, who arouse neither envy nor suspicion. Like moles, they work their way underground, and, with all their incompetence, find more than one snug corner in the official lists, while really able men are struggling and blocking each other at the door of promotion. Florine, with the inborn gift of such women for putting their finger on the real thing among a thousand presentments of it, would at once have detected the underhand animosity of these false friends.
But this was not Raoul’s greatest danger. His two partners, the barrister Massol and the banker du Tillet, had conceived the idea of harnessing his energy to the car in which they should loll at ease, with the full intention of turning him adrift as soon as his resources failed to keep the paper going, or of wresting it from his hands the moment they saw their way to using this powerful instrument for their own purposes. To their minds, Nathan represented so much capital to run through, a literary force, equal to that of ten ordinary writers, to exploit.
Massol belonged to the type of barrister who takes a flux of words for eloquence and can weary any audience by his prolixity, who in every gathering of men acts as a blight, shriveling up their enthusiasm, yet who is determined at all costs to be a somebody. Massol’s ambition, however, no longer pointed to the ministry of justice. Within four years he had seen five or six men clothed with the robes of office, and this had cured him of the fancy. Meanwhile he was ready to accept, as something in hand, a professorship or a post under the Council, with of course the Cross of the Legion of Honor to season the dish. Du Tillet and the Baron de Nucingen had guaranteed him the Cross and the desired post if he fell in with their views; and as he judged them to be in a better position than Nathan for fulfilling their promises, he followed them blindly.
The better to hoodwink Raoul, these men allowed him to exercise uncontrolled power. Du Tillet only made use of the paper for his stock-jobbing interests, which were outside Raoul’s ken. He had, however, already given Rastignac to understand, through the Baron de Nucingen, that this organ was ready to give a silent adhesion to the Government, on the one condition that the Government should support du Tillet’s candidature as successor to M. de Nucingen, who would be a peer some day, and who at present sat for a rotten borough, where the paper was lavishly circulated, gratis. Thus was Raoul jockeyed by both the banker and the barrister, who took a huge delight in seeing him lord it at the office, pocketing all the gains, as well as the less substantial dues of vanity and the like. Nathan could not praise them enough; again, as when they furnished his stables, they were “the best fellows in the world,” and he actually believed that he was duping them.
Men of imagination, whose whole life is based on hope, never will admit that in business the moment of danger is that when everything goes to a wish. Such a moment of triumph had come for Nathan, and he made full use of it, letting himself be seen both in political and financial circles. Du Tillet introduced him to the Nucingens, and he was received in a most friendly way by Mme. de Nucingen, not so much for his own sake as for that of Mme. de Vandenesse. Yet, when she alluded to the Countess, Nathan thought himself a marvel of discretion for taking refuge behind Florine, and he enlarged with generous self-complacency on his relations with the actress, which nothing, he declared, could break. How could any man abandon an assured happiness for the coquetry of the Faubourg Saint-Germain?
Nathan, beguiled by Nucingen and Rastignac, du Tillet and Blondet, lent an ostentatious support to the
