Madeleine’s drawing-room had been an influential center, in which several members of the Cabinet met every week. The President of the Council had even dined twice at her house, and the wives of the statesmen who had formerly hesitated to cross her threshold now boasted of being her friends, and paid her more visits than were returned by her. The Minister for Foreign Affairs reigned almost as a master in the household. He called at all hours, bringing dispatches, news, items of information, which he dictated either to the husband or the wife, as if they had been his secretaries.
When Du Roy, after the minister’s departure, found himself alone with Madeleine, he would break out in a menacing tone with bitter insinuations against the goings-on of this commonplace parvenu.
But she would shrug her shoulders contemptuously, repeating: “Do as much as he has done yourself. Become a minister, and you can have your own way. Till then, hold your tongue.”
He twirled his moustache, looking at her askance: “People do not know of what I am capable,” he said. “They will learn it, perhaps, some day.”
She replied, philosophically: “Who lives long enough will see it.”
The morning on which the Chambers reassembled the young wife, still in bed, was giving a thousand recommendations to her husband, who was dressing himself in order to lunch with M. Laroche-Mathieu, and receive his instructions prior to the sitting for the next day’s political leader in the Vie Francaise, this leader being meant to be a kind of semiofficial declaration of the real objects of the Cabinet.
Madeleine was saying: “Above all, do not forget to ask him whether General Belloncle is to be sent to Oran, as has been reported. That would mean a great deal.”
George replied irritably: “But I know just as well as you what I have to do. Spare me your preaching.”
She answered quietly: “My dear, you always forget half the commissions I entrust you with for the minister.”
He growled: “He worries me to death, that minister of yours. He is a nincompoop.”
She remarked quietly: “He is no more my minister than he is yours. He is more useful to you than to me.”
He turned half round towards her, saying, sneeringly: “I beg your pardon, but he does not pay court to me.”
She observed slowly: “Nor to me either; but he is making our fortune.”
He was silent for a few moments, and then resumed: “If I had to make a choice among your admirers, I should still prefer that old fossil De Vaudrec. What has become of him, I have not seen him for a week?”
“He is unwell,” replied she, unmoved. “He wrote to me that he was even obliged to keep his bed from an attack of gout. You ought to call and ask how he is. You know he likes you very well, and it would please him.”
George said: “Yes, certainly; I will go some time today.”
He had finished his toilet, and, hat on head, glanced at himself in the glass to see if he had neglected anything. Finding nothing, he came up to the bed and kissed his wife on the forehead, saying: “Goodbye, dear, I shall not be in before seven o’clock at the earliest.”
And he went out. Monsieur Laroche-Mathieu was awaiting him, for he was lunching at ten o’clock that morning, the Council having to meet at noon, before the opening of Parliament. As soon as they were seated at table alone with the minister’s private secretary, for Madame Laroche-Mathieu had been unwilling to change her own meal times, Du Roy spoke of his article, sketched out the line he proposed to take, consulting notes scribbled on visiting cards, and when he had finished, said: “Is there anything you think should be modified, my dear minister?”
“Very little, my dear fellow. You are perhaps a trifle too strongly affirmative as regards the Morocco business. Speak of the expedition as if it were going to take place; but, at the same time, letting it be understood that it will not take place, and that you do not believe in it in the least in the world. Write in such a way that the public can easily read between the lines that we are not going to poke our noses into that adventure.”
“Quite so. I understand, and I will make myself thoroughly understood. My wife commissioned me to ask you, on this point, whether General Belloncle will be sent to Oran. After what you have said, I conclude he will not.”
The statesman answered, “No.”
Then they spoke of the coming session. Laroche-Mathieu began to spout, rehearsing the phrases that he was about to pour forth on his colleagues a few hours later. He waved his right hand, raising now his knife, now his fork, now a bit of bread, and without looking at anyone, addressing himself to the invisible assembly, he poured out his dulcet eloquence, the eloquence of a good-looking, dandified fellow. A tiny, twisted moustache curled up at its two ends above his lip like scorpion’s tails, and his hair, anointed with brilliantine and parted in the middle, was puffed out like his temples, after the fashion of a provincial lady-killer. He was a little too stout, puffy, though still young,
