The Complete Works: Short Stories, Novels, Plays, Poetry, Memoirs and more. Guy de Maupassant
“By Jove, what a campaign! If we don’t succeed after all?”
He hoped, indeed, to succeed in getting hold of the portfolio of foreign affairs, which he had had in view for a long time.
He was one of those many-faced politicians, without strong convictions, without great abilities, without boldness, and without any depth of knowledge, a provincial barrister, a local dandy, preserving a cunning balance between all parties, a species of Republican Jesuit and Liberal mushroom of uncertain character, such as spring up by hundreds on the popular dunghill of universal suffrage. His village machiavelism caused him to be reckoned able among his colleagues, among all the adventurers and abortions who are made deputies. He was sufficiently well-dressed, correct, familiar, and amiable to succeed. He had his successes in society, in the mixed, perturbed, and somewhat rough society of the high functionaries of the day. It was said everywhere of him: “Laroche will be a minister,” and he believed more firmly than anyone else that he would be. He was one of the chief shareholders in Daddy Walter’s paper, and his colleague and partner in many financial schemes.
Du Roy backed him up with confidence and with vague hopes as to the future. He was, besides, only continuing the work begun by Forestier, to whom Laroche-Mathieu had promised the Cross of the Legion of Honor when the day of triumph should come. The decoration would adorn the breast of Madeleine’s second husband, that was all. Nothing was changed in the main.
It was seen so well that nothing was changed that Du Roy’s comrades organized a joke against him, at which he was beginning to grow angry. They no longer called him anything but Forestier. As soon as he entered the office some one would call out: “I say, Forestier.”
He would pretend not to hear, and would look for the letters in his pigeon-holes. The voice would resume in louder tones, “Hi! Forestier.” Some stifled laughs would be heard, and as Du Roy was entering the manager’s room, the comrade who had called out would stop him, saying: “Oh, I beg your pardon, it is you I want to speak to. It is stupid, but I am always mixing you up with poor Charles. It is because your articles are so infernally like his. Everyone is taken in by them.”
Du Roy would not answer, but he was inwardly furious, and a sullen wrath sprang up in him against the dead man. Daddy Walter himself had declared, when astonishment was expressed at the flagrant similarity in style and inspiration between the leaders of the new political editor and his predecessor: “Yes, it is Forestier, but a fuller, stronger, more manly Forestier.”
Another time Du Roy, opening by chance the cupboard in which the cup and balls were kept, had found all those of his predecessor with crape round the handles, and his own, the one he had made use of when he practiced under the direction of Saint-Potin, ornamented with a pink ribbon. All had been arranged on the same shelf according to size, and a card like those in museums bore the inscription: “The Forestier-Du Roy (late Forestier and Co.) Collection.” He quietly closed the cupboard, saying, in tones loud enough to be heard: “There are fools and envious people everywhere.”
But he was wounded in his pride, wounded in his vanity, that touchy pride and vanity of the writer, which produce the nervous susceptibility ever on the alert, equally in the reporter and the genial poet. The word “Forestier” made his ears tingle. He dreaded to hear it, and felt himself redden when he did so. This name was to him a biting jest, more than a jest, almost an insult. It said to him: “It is your wife who does your work, as she did that of the other. You would be nothing without her.”
He admitted that Forestier would have been no one without Madeleine; but as to himself, come now!
Then, at home, the haunting impression continued. It was the whole place now that recalled the dead man to him, the whole of the furniture, the whole of the knicknacks, everything he laid hands on. He had scarcely thought of this at the outset, but the joke devised by his comrades had caused a kind of mental wound, which a number of trifles, unnoticed up to the present, now served to envenom. He could not take up anything without at once fancying he saw the hand of Charles upon it. He only looked at it and made use of things the latter had made use of formerly; things that he had purchased, liked, and enjoyed. And George began even to grow irritated at the thought of the bygone relations between his friend and his wife. He was sometimes astonished at this revolt of his heart, which he did not understand, and said to himself, “How the deuce is it? I am not jealous of Madeleine’s friends. I am never uneasy about what she is up to. She goes in and out as she chooses, and yet the recollection of that brute of a Charles puts me in a rage.” He added, “At the bottom, he was only an idiot, and it is that, no doubt, that wounds me. I am vexed that Madeleine could have married such a fool.” And he kept continually repeating, “How is it that she could have stomached such a donkey for a single moment?”
His rancor was daily increased by a thousand insignificant details, which stung him like pin pricks, by the incessant reminders of the other arising out of a word from Madeleine, from the manservant, from the waiting-maid.
One evening Du Roy, who liked sweet dishes, said, “How is it we never have sweets at dinner?”
His wife replied, cheerfully, “That is quite true. I never think about them. It is all through Charles, who hated— “
He cut her short in a fit of impatience he was unable to control, exclaiming, “Hang it all! I am sick of Charles. It is always Charles here and Charles there, Charles liked this and Charles liked that. Since Charles is dead, for goodness sake leave him in peace.”
Madeleine looked at her husband in amazement, without being able to understand his sudden anger. Then, as she was sharp, she guessed what was going on within him; this slow working of posthumous jealousy, swollen every moment by all that recalled the other. She thought it puerile, may be, but was flattered by it, and did not reply.
He was vexed with himself at this irritation, which he had not been able to conceal. As they were writing after dinner an article for the next day, his feet got entangled in the foot mat. He kicked it aside, and said with a laugh:
“Charles was always chilly about the feet, I suppose?”
She replied, also laughing: “Oh! he lived in mortal fear of catching cold; his chest was very weak.”
Du Roy replied grimly: “He has given us a proof of that.” Then kissing his wife’s hand, he added gallantly: “Luckily for me.”
But on going to bed, still haunted by the same idea, he asked: “Did Charles wear nightcaps for fear of the draughts?”
She entered into the joke, and replied: “No; only a silk handkerchief tied round his head.”
George shrugged his shoulders, and observed, with contempt, “What a baby.”
From that time forward Charles became for him an object of continual conversation. He dragged him in on all possible occasions, speaking of him as “Poor Charles,” with an air of infinite pity. When he returned home from the office, where he had been accosted twice or thrice as Forestier, he avenged himself by bitter railleries against the dead man in his tomb. He recalled his defects, his absurdities, his littleness, enumerating them with enjoyment, developing and augmenting them as though he had wished to combat the influence of a dreaded rival over the heart of his wife. He would say, “I say, Made, do you remember the day when that duffer Forestier tried to prove to us that stout men were stronger than spare ones?”
Then he sought to learn a number of private and secret details respecting the departed, which his wife, ill at ease, refused to tell him. But he obstinately persisted, saying, “Come, now, tell me all about it. He must have been very comical at such a time?”
She murmured, “Oh! do leave him alone.”
But he went on, “No, but tell me now, he must have been a duffer to sleep with?” And he always wound up with, “What a donkey he was.”
One evening, towards the end of June, as he was smoking a cigarette at the window, the fineness of the evening inspired him with a wish for a drive, and he said, “Made, shall we go as far as the Bois de Boulogne?”
“Certainly.”