She gazed at him from under her drooping eyelids. He lowered his voice, while he bent his head closer to her face.
“Yes! you frighten me! Perhaps I am offending you? Forgive me! I did not intend to say all that I have said! ’Tis not my fault! You are so beautiful!”
Madame Dambreuse closed her eyes, and he was astonished at his easy victory. The tall trees in the clouds streaked the sky with long strips of red, and on every side there seemed to be a suspension of vital movements. Then he recalled to mind, in a confused sort of way, evenings just the same as this, filled with the same unbroken silence. Where was it that he had known them?
He sank upon his knees, seized her hand, and swore that he would love her forever. Then, as he was leaving her, she beckoned to him to come back, and said to him in a low tone:
“Come by-and-by and dine with us! We’ll be all alone!”
It seemed to Frederick, as he descended the stairs, that he had become a different man, that he was surrounded by the balmy temperature of hothouses, and that he was beyond all question entering into the higher sphere of patrician adulteries and lofty intrigues. In order to occupy the first rank there all he required was a woman of this stamp. Greedy, no doubt, of power and of success, and married to a man of inferior calibre, for whom she had done prodigious services, she longed for someone of ability in order to be his guide. Nothing was impossible now. He felt himself capable of riding two hundred leagues on horseback, of travelling for several nights in succession without fatigue. His heart overflowed with pride.
Just in front of him, on the footpath, a man wrapped in a seedy overcoat was walking, with downcast eyes, and with such an air of dejection that Frederick, as he passed, turned aside to have a better look at him. The other raised his head. It was Deslauriers. He hesitated. Frederick fell upon his neck.
“Ah! my poor old friend! What! ’tis you!”
And he dragged Deslauriers into his house, at the same time asking his friend a heap of questions.
Ledru-Rollin’s ex-commissioner commenced by describing the tortures to which he had been subjected. As he preached fraternity to the Conservatives, and respect for the laws to the Socialists, the former tried to shoot him, and the latter brought cords to hang him with. After June he had been brutally dismissed. He found himself involved in a charge of conspiracy—that which was connected with the seizure of arms at Troyes. He had subsequently been released for want of evidence to sustain the charge. Then the acting committee had sent him to London, where his ears had been boxed in the very middle of a banquet at which he and his colleagues were being entertained. On his return to Paris—
“Why did you not call here, then, to see me?”
“You were always out! Your porter had mysterious airs—I did not know what to think; and, in the next place, I had no desire to reappear before you in the character of a defeated man.”
He had knocked at the portals of Democracy, offering to serve it with his pen, with his tongue, with all his energies. He had been everywhere repelled. They had mistrusted him; and he had sold his watch, his bookcase, and even his linen.
“It would be much better to be breaking one’s back on the pontoons of Belle Isle with Sénécal!”
Frederick, who had been fastening his cravat, did not appear to be much affected by this news.
“Ha! so he is transported, this good Sénécal?”
Deslauriers replied, while he surveyed the walls with an envious air:
“Not everybody has your luck!”
“Excuse me,” said Frederick, without noticing the allusion to his own circumstances, “but I am dining in the city. We must get you something to eat; order whatever you like. Take even my bed!”
This cordial reception dissipated Deslauriers’ bitterness.
“Your bed? But that might inconvenience you!”
“Oh, no! I have others!”
“Oh, all right!” returned the advocate, with a laugh. “Pray, where are you dining?”
“At Madame Dambreuse’s.”
“Can it be that you are—perhaps—?”
“You are too inquisitive,” said Frederick, with a smile, which confirmed this hypothesis.
Then, after a glance at the clock, he resumed his seat.
“That’s how it is! and we mustn’t despair, my ex-defender of the people!”
“Oh, pardon me; let others bother themselves about the people henceforth!”
The advocate detested the workingmen, because he had suffered so much on their account in his province, a coal-mining district. Every pit had appointed a provisional government, from which he received orders.
“Besides, their conduct has been everywhere charming—at Lyons, at Lille, at Havre, at Paris! For, in imitation of the manufacturers, who would fain exclude the products of the foreigner, these gentlemen call on us to banish the English, German, Belgian, and Savoyard workmen. As for their intelligence, what was the use of that precious trades’ union of theirs which they established under the Restoration? In 1830 they joined the National Guard, without having the common sense to get the upper hand of it. Is it not the fact that, since the morning when 1848 dawned, the various trade-bodies had not reappeared with their banners? They have even demanded popular representatives for themselves, who are not to open their lips except on their own behalf. All this is the same as if the deputies who represent beetroot were to concern themselves about nothing save beetroot. Ah! I’ve had enough of these dodgers who in turn prostrate themselves before the scaffold of Robespierre, the boots of the Emperor, and
