"He is a simpleton—Vaudrey—but a very charming simpleton, nevertheless."

The iron gates of the Place Beauvau were thrown back for his Excellency's carriage to enter. The gravel creaked under the wheels, as the coupe turning off to the left, stopped under the awning over the door.

Sulpice alighted. The great door opened to admit him. Two white-cravatted servants occupied a bench while awaiting the minister's return.

Sulpice ran lightly up the great marble staircase leading to his private apartments. Handing his hat and coat to a servant in the antechamber, he gayly entered the little salon, where he found his wife sitting by a table reading La Revue by the light of a shaded lamp. At the sight of her pretty, fresh young face extended to greet him, with her blue eyes and smiling air, at the sound of her clear, sweet, but rather timid voice asking a little anxiously: "Well?" Sulpice took the fair face in both his hands and his burning lips imprinted a long kiss on the white forehead, over which a few curls of golden hair strayed.

"Well, my dear Adrienne, I have been greatly interested. All the kindness with which I was received, the evident delight with which the new cabinet has been welcomed by the people, even the grimaces of Pichereau whom I met,—if you only knew where—all gave me pleasure, delighted me, and yet made me fear. Minister! Do you know what I have been thinking of since I was made a minister?"

"Of what have you been thinking?" asked the young wife, who, with her hands folded, gazed trustingly and sweetly into Sulpice's feverish eyes.

"I?—I have been telling myself that it is not enough to be a minister. One must be a great minister! You understand, Adrienne, a great minister!"

As he spoke he took Adrienne's hands in his, and the young wife glanced up admiringly at this young man burning with hope, who stood there before her, declaring: "I will be great!"

She had never dreamed of his reaching such heights as these on that day when she felt the fingers of her fiance trembling in her hand, the day that Sulpice had whispered the words in her ear which made her heart leap with joy: "I love you, Adrienne, I shall always love you—Always!"



III

Sulpice Vaudrey had married Adrienne for love. She brought to him from the convent at Grenoble where she had been educated, the charming innocence of a young girl and the innate devotion of a woman. She was an orphan with a considerable fortune, but although Sulpice had only moderate resources, he had scarcely thought of her wealth, not even inquiring of her guardian, Doctor Reboux, on the occasion of his formal demand for her hand, about the dowry of Mademoiselle Gerard.

He had met her at more than one soiree at Grenoble, where she appeared timid, dazzled and retiring, and quietly interrogating everything by her sweet glance. Some few words exchanged carelessly, music which they had listened to side by side, the ordinary everyday intercourse in society, had made Sulpice acquainted with his wife; but the sight of the pretty blonde—so sweet and gentle—the childlike timidity of this young girl, something rather pensive in the confiding smile of this blooming creature of eighteen summers, had won him completely. He was free, and alone, for he had lost, but a short time before, the only creature he loved in the world, his mother, of whom he was the son in the double sense of flesh and spirit, by the nourishment of her breast and by the patient teaching that she had implanted in his mind.

He remembered only his father's dreamy and refined face in the portrait of a young, sad-looking man in a lawyer's black gown, before which he had stood when quite small, and spelled out as he might have lisped a prayer, the four letters: papa. Alone in this little town of Grenoble, for which he had left his native village of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, he had, just before meeting Adrienne, fallen a victim to a profound melancholy and realized the necessity of deciding upon his career.

He was then thirty-four. Except the years spent in the study of law at Paris amid the turmoil of the left bank of the Seine, he had always lived in the province—his own province of Dauphine. He had grown up in the old house at Saint-Laurent, where every nook and corner kept for him its own sweet memory of his childhood and youth. The great white drawing-room with its wainscotings of the time of Louis XVI., which opened out upon a flight of steps leading down into a terraced garden; the portraits of obscure ancestors: lawyers in powdered wigs and wearing the robes of the members of the Third estate, fat and rosy with double chins resting upon their broad cravats, amiable old ladies with oddly arranged hair and flowered gowns, coquettish still as they smiled in their oval, wooden frames, and then the old books in their old-fashioned bindings slumbering in a great bookcase with glass doors, or piled up on shelves below the fowling-pieces, the game-bags and the powder-horns.

With this dwelling of which he thought so often now, his whole past was linked, about it still clung something of its past poetry, and it was sacred through the memories it preserved, and as the scene of the unforgotten joys of childhood. He could see again, the great stone-flagged kitchen, where they sat up at nights telling stories, the chamber above it, the bed with its heavy serge curtains, where he lay—sometimes shaking with terror—all alone, adjoining the room once occupied by his father, and the moonlight shining through the tall old trees in the courtyard outside, that entering by the half-open blinds cast shadows like trembling lace on the wall opposite to him. It seemed to Sulpice then that he could hear the sounds of the weird demon's chase as told by old Catherine, the cook, in bated tones during their vigils.

It was there that he went every year to pass his holidays with his mother, who had had the courage to send him away,—just as during winter she had plunged him into cold water—to the Lyceum at Grenoble, whence he would return to Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, "so thin, poor child!" as his mother said.

And how fat she would send him back again to school,—to make the masters ashamed of their stinginess.

How pleasant were the reminiscences of those sunny days amongst the mountains, the excursions to Grande Chartreuse, where the murmuring brook trickled among the rocks, the halts at Guiers-Mort or under the trees in the stillness of a drowsy day in summer; how delightful to stretch one's self out at the foot of the cliffs or on a grassy slope with a book, pausing now and then to indulge in day-dreams or glance up at the fleecy clouds floating in the blue sky above his head and watch them gathering, then vanishing and melting away like smoke wreaths! Ah! how sweet were those long, idle days full of dreams, when the noise of the waterfall dashing over the rocks lulled the senses like some merry song, or a nurse's tender, crooning lullaby.

In those days Sulpice made no plans for his future, where he would go, what he would do, or what would become of him; but he felt within himself unbounded hope, a hope as limitless and bright as the azure sky above him, the inspiration of devotion, love and poetry. He asked himself whether he should be a missionary or a representative of the people. It seemed to him that his heart was large enough to contain a world, and as he grew up he began to ask himself the terrible question: "Will a woman ever love me?"

To be loved! What a dream! One day he put this question to one of his comrades at college, Guy de Lissac, the son of a country gentleman in the neighborhood, who answered:

"Booby! every one is loved some day or other, and there are some who are loved even too much!"

Sulpice had received a patriarchal and half-puritanical training, but softened materially by his mother's almost excessive care, it had left, as it were, a kind of poetic perfume that clung about him and never left him.

Even during the days of his struggle in crowded Paris, in the heat of political strife, his thoughts would fly back to the old home at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, recalling to mind the old armchair where his father used to sit, the father whose kiss he had never known, hearing again his mother's voice from the great oak staircase with its heavy balusters, and he recalled at the same moment, the landscape with its living figures, the spotted, steel-colored guinea-fowl screaming from the branches of the elms, the vineyard hands returning from work, to trample with bare feet the great clusters of grapes piled up in the wine-vat in the cellar whose odor intoxicated! Even as a representative or minister, musing over his past that seemed but yesterday, Sulpice wandered again in thought to this quiet country spot, so loved by him, so sweet, so still, reposing in the silence of provincial calm—far away, removed from all the noise and bustle of Paris.

The farmers of Dauphine generally think of making their sons tillers of the soil, sending them to school and to college, perhaps to begin later the study of law or medicine, but welcoming them joyfully back again to their native fields, to their farms, where the youths soon forget all they may have learned of the Code or the Codex and lead the healthy, hardy life of the country. Good, well-built fellows, their chests enlarged by their daily exercise, their thighs strengthened by mountain-climbing, gay young men, liking to hunt and drink on the banks of the Isere and caring more for good harvests than for the songs of the wind amongst the branches of the poplars upon the river-banks.

Sulpice had an old uncle on his father's side who proposed to his sister-in-law to give up his broad acres—a fortune in themselves—to Sulpice, if his nephew would consent to marry his daughter. Sulpice refused. He would not marry for money.

"Fiddle-faddle!" cried his uncle. "Sickly sentimentality! If he cultivates that grain, my brother's son will not make much headway."

"There is where you are mistaken, brother-in-law. What my poor Raymond had not time to become, his child will be: a lawyer at once eloquent and honest."

"Well, well," replied the uncle, "but he shall not have my girl."

Sulpice, after finishing his studies at Paris, returned to his mother at Grenoble, took her away from the old house at Saint-Laurent and installed her in the town with himself, where he began the practice of law and attracted everybody's attention from the first. He made pleading a sacred office and not a trade. Everyone was astonished that he had not remained in Paris.

Why? He loved his native province, the banks of the Isere, the healthy, poetic atmosphere hanging over the desert of the Chartreuse and the snows of the Grand-Som. A talented man could make his way anywhere,—moreover, it was his pleasure to consider it a duty not to leave this secluded corner of the earth where he would cause freedom of speech to be known. Sulpice, whose heart was open to every ardent and generous manifestation of human thought, had imbibed from his mother, as well as from his father's writings and books, and from the Encyclopaedia that Raymond Vaudrey had interlined with notes and reflections, not merely traditional information, but also, so to speak, the baptism of liberty. He had lived in the feverish days of the past eighty years, through his reading of the Gazette Nationale of those stormy days. The speeches that he found in those pages—speeches that still burned like uncooled lava—of Mirabeau, Barnave, and Condorcet, a son of Grenoble, seemed to impart a glow to his fingers and fire to his glance. Then, too, the magnificent dreams of freedom proclaimed from the tribune inflamed his mind and made his heart beat fast. He saw as in a vision applauding crowds, tricolors gleaming in the clear and golden sunlight, processions moving, files marching past, and heard eternal truths proclaimed and acclaimed.

His mother smiled at all this enthusiasm. She did not however try to repress it. It would vanish at the touch of years, just as the leaves of the trees fly before the winds of October. And besides, the dear woman herself was in sympathy with his hopes, his dreams and visions, remembering that her lost Raymond had loved what his son in his turn so much adored.

The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a popular man at Grenoble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how generous he was, and by the middle-class who regarded him as a prudent man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of the National Assembly. He had just passed his thirty-fourth year.

His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by this brilliant launch on his career.

With what deep emotion, even to-day, Vaudrey recalled that Sunday in February, a foul, wet day, when he returned home in a closed carriage with a friend, from an electioneering tour. The day before he had made a speech in a wineshop to an audience of peasants, who listened, open-mouthed, but withal suspicious, examining their candidate as they would have handled a beast offered at the market, and who, step by step, applauded his remarks, stretching out their rasp-like hands as he left them, and crying out: "You are our man!"

That very morning he returned to Grenoble in the rain, passing through villages where the posters bearing his name and those of his friends, half-demolished by the rain, flapped dismally in the wind. Before the mayor's office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare. But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France, and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in the struggle.

Moreover, at night, with what feverish transport he watched the returns of the election as they reached the Palais de Justice, black with the crowd, and filled with uproar! With what a fearfully fast-beating heart he saw the rapidly swelling number of ballots cast for him! Dispatches came, and pedestrians hurried in from the country, waving their bulletins above their heads, and Sulpice heard on every lip the same cry: "Vaudrey leads!"

Some cried bravo, while others clapped their hands. A crowd quickly gathered about Vaudrey. It already seemed to him that he was lifted up by a great wave and carried to a new world.

A friend seized him by the arm and drew him into a corner of the hall, away from the others, and hurriedly said: "You know I am not one to ask much of you, to ask anything of you, in fact. I merely reckon on a receivership. That is easily done, eh? A mere nothing?"

Sulpice, whose feelings were overcome by this great popular consecration, felt a kind of anger stir his heart against this solicitor, who, in the triumph of a great popular cause, saw only a means of self-advancement, of securing an appointment. The deputy—for he was a deputy now, each commune adding its total to the Vaudrey vote—was moved by a feeling of disgust.

The crowd followed him home that evening, shouting in triumph.

Amid the joy of victory, Sulpice felt the burden of the anxiety caused by duties to be done: a treaty of peace to be signed, and what a peace! Must he, alas! append his signature to a document devoted to the dismemberment of his country? Far into the night he stood in reverie in his chamber, his brow resting against the cold window-pane.

He retired to rest very late, and arose with the gray dawn of February, but without having slept.

He looked across the street to a convent garden, with its square and lozenge-shaped beds regularly arranged, its bare trees and box-wood borders, that he had often gazed upon. Some nuns in their black robes passed slowly across this cold and calm horizon that for many years had also been the range of his vision.

Henceforth this familiar spot, this sad garden, whose cloistral associations charmed him, would be lost to his view. It was Paris now that awaited him, feverish Paris, burning with anger and odorous of saltpetre. Its very pavements must burn. Sulpice was in haste, however, to see it once more, to pass with head aloft beneath the garrets where he had once dreamed as a student, fagging and striving to get knowledge. How often he would regret that convent garden, those familiar flower-beds, the deep silence that enveloped him as he sat working by the open window, the passage of a bird near him, as if to fan him with its wing, and the vague murmur of the canticles of the sisters ascending to his window like the echo of a prayer!

In the recess during one of the years following his election to the Assembly, he married Mademoiselle Gerard. Doctor Reboux, her guardian, charmed to give his ward to a man with a future like Vaudrey's, had not hesitated long about consenting to the marriage. Adrienne delighted Sulpice, and the young girl herself was quite happy to be chosen by this good-natured, distinguished young man whom everybody at Grenoble, not excepting his political adversaries, admired and spoke well of. With large, brilliant, black eyes lighting up a thin, fair face, a full beard, a high forehead with a deep furrow between the eyebrows, giving to his usually wandering, keen and restless glance a somewhat contemplative expression, Sulpice was a decidedly attractive man. He was not a handsome or a charming fellow, but a good-natured, agreeable, refined man, a fine conversationalist, persuasive, enthusiastic and alert; learned without being pedantic, a man who could inspire in a young girl a perfect passion. Adrienne joyfully married him, as he had sought her from love.

And now all the poetry and romance of his youth blossomed again in his heart, in the thick of the political struggle in which he was engaged; he forgot, amid the idyllic scenes of domestic life, the storms of Versailles, the political troubles, forebodings as to the future, all anxieties of the present, the routine life of the Assembly into which he plunged with all his mind, and the excitement of his labors, his debates and his duties.

Sulpice thought again and again of the summer morning when he led his wife to the altar, and compared it to a day's halt in the course of a journey under the blaze of the sun; he recalled the old house full of noisy stir, the crowd of relatives and friends in festive attire, the stamping of the horses' feet before the great open gate, the neighbors standing at the windows, and the little street-boys scuffling upon the pavement, all the joyous bustle of that happy day. It seemed to Sulpice that the sunlight came streaming in with Adrienne's entrance into the vast salon, from the walls of which her pictured ancestresses in their huge leg-of-mutton sleeves seemed to smile at her.

Beneath the orange wreath sent from Paris, her face expressed the happy, surprised, and sweetly anxious look of a young communicant wrapped in her veil.

Sulpice had never seen her look more beautiful. How prettily she came towards him, blushing vividly, and holding out her two little white gloved hands! He, somewhat bored by the company that surrounded them, cast an involuntary glance at a mirror hanging opposite and decided that he looked awkward and formal with his hair too carefully arranged. How they had laughed since then and always with new pleasure at these recollections, so sweet even now.

His happiness on that joyous day would have been complete had his mother been present, when in the presence of the old priest who had instructed Adrienne in her catechism, Sulpice stood forward and took by its velvet shield the taper that seemed so light to him, and awkwardly held the wafer that the priest extended to him. It was a great event in Grenoble when the leader of the Liberal Party, who headed the list at the last election, was seen being married like a believing bourgeois. The organ pealed forth its tender vibrations, some Christmas anthem, mysterious and tremulous, like an alleluia sounding through the aisles of centuries; the light streamed through the windows in floods and rested upon Adrienne, who was kneeling with her childlike head leaning on her gloved hands, kissing her fair locks with sunlight and illumining the gleaming satin of her dress with its long train spreading out over the carpet.

Sulpice took away from this ceremony in the presence of a crowded congregation an impression at once perfumed and dazzling: the perfumes of flowers, the play of light, the greetings of the organ, and within and about him, all the intoxication of love, singing a song of happiness.

All that was now far away! nearly six years had elapsed since that day, six years of bitter struggle, during which Vaudrey fought the harder, defended his ideas of liberty with fervid eloquence, disputed step by step, and through intense work came to the front, living at Paris just as he did in the province, having his books brought from there to his apartment in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, close to the railroad that he took every morning when he regretfully left Adrienne, Adrienne to whom he returned every evening that political meetings and protracted sittings did not rob him of those happy evenings, which were in truth the only evenings that he really lived.

Adrienne seldom went out, not caring to display herself and shunning the bustle, living at Paris, as at Grenoble, in peaceful seclusion, caring only for the existence of her husband, his work, and his speeches that he prepared with so much courageous labor. She sat up with him until very late, glancing over the books, the summaries of the laws and the old parliamentary reports.

At times she was terrified at the ardor with which Sulpice devoted himself to these occupations. She greatly desired to take her part and was grieved at being unable to assist him by writing from his dictation, or by examining these old books. She felt terribly anxious when Vaudrey had to make a speech from the tribune. She dared not go to hear him, but knowing that he was to speak, she had not the courage to remain at home. Anxiously she ascended to the public gallery. She shuddered and was almost ready to faint, when she heard the voice of the president break what seemed to her an icy silence, with the words: Monsieur Vaudrey has the ear of the Assembly.

The sound of Sulpice's voice seemed changed to her. Fearfully she asked herself if fright was strangling him. She dared not look at him. It seemed to her that the people were laughing, making a disturbance and coughing, but not listening to him. Why had she come? She would never do so again. An icy chill took possession of her. Then suddenly she heard a storm of applause that seemed like an outburst of sympathy. Hands were clapped, voices applauded. She half raised herself, and leaning upon the rail of the gallery, saw Sulpice between the crowded heads, towering above the immense audience, radiant and calm, standing with his arms folded or his hands resting on the tribune, below the chair occupied by a motionless, white-cravatted man, and throwing back his fair head, hurling, as from a full heart, his words, his wishes and his faith. All this she saw with supreme happiness and felt proud of the man whose name she bore.

At that moment, she would fain have cried out to every one that she was his, that she adored him, that he was her pride, even as she was his joy! She would like to have folded him to her, to cling to his neck and to repeat before all that crowd: I love you!

But she reserved all her tender effusions for the intimacy of their home, in order to calm the enthusiasm, oftentimes desperate, of this nervous man whom everything threw into a feverish excitement, this grand man, as they called him at Grenoble, who was for her only a great child whom she adored and kept in check by her girlish devotion combined with her motherly, delicate attentions.

Vaudrey, however, more ambitious to do good than to obtain power, and spending his life in the conflicts of the Chamber, saw the years slipping away without realizing that he was making any progress, not a single step forward in the direction of his goal. Since the war, the years had passed for him as well as for those of his generation, with confusing rapidity, and suddenly, all at once, after having been in some sense slumbering, flattering himself that a man of thirty has a future before him, he was rudely awakened to the astonishing truth that he was forty.

Forty! Sulpice had experienced a certain melancholy in advancing the figure by ten, and whatever position he had acquired within his party, within the circle of his friends, his dream was to reach still higher, he was tired of playing second-rate parts, and eager to stand before the footlights in full blaze, in the first role.

In the snug interior that Adrienne furnished, he enjoyed all material happiness. She soothed him, brought his dreams back to the region of the real, terrified at times by his discouragements, his anger, and still more by his illusions concerning men and things.

Sulpice often reproached her for having clipped the wings of his ambition.

"I!" she would say, "it is rather the fans of your windmills that I break, you Don Quixote!"

He would then smile at her, and look earnestly into the depths of the timid creature's lovely blue eyes, causing her to blush as if ashamed of having seemed to be witty.

Her chief aim was to be the devoted, loving friend of this man whom she thought so superior to herself, and although she was totally ignorant of political intrigues, she was by virtue of the mere instinct of love, his best and most perspicacious adviser and felt delighted only when Vaudrey, by chance, listened to her counsel.

"I love you so dearly!" she confessed with the unlimited candor of a poor creature who has but a single affection, a single pretext for loving.

He saw in the life he led, only the penumbra: his neglected youth, his hopes fled, his fears, the disgust which at times filled him as he thought of the never-ending recommencements and trickeries of political life. So dearly cherished, so beloved, it seemed to him, nevertheless, that his life lacked something. He would have liked a child, a son to bring up, a domestic tie, since political conditions prevented him from accomplishing a civic duty. Ah! yes, a son, a being to mould, a brow to kiss, a soul to fashion after the image of his own, a child who would not know all the sorrows of life that his own generation had laid on him! Perhaps it was only a child that he needed. Something, however, he evidently lacked.

Still he smiled, always in love with that young woman of twenty-four years, delicate, slender, and full of the fears and artlessness of a child. Accustomed to the quiet solitude of the house of her guardian, she, when at Paris, in her husband's study, arranging his books, his papers, his legislative plans and reports, sought to surround her dear Sulpice with the comforting felicity of bourgeois happiness that was enjoyed calmly, like a cordial sipped at the fireside.

Then suddenly one day, the news of a startling political change broke in on this household.

Sulpice reached home one evening at one and the same time nervous, anxious, and happy.

His name was on almost every lip, in connection with a ministerial combination. His last speech on domestic policy had more than ever brought him into prominence and he was considered to have boldly contributed to the development of a fearful crisis.

A minister! he might, before the morning, be a minister! His policy was triumphant.

The advocate Collard—of Nantes,—who was pointed out as the future head of the Cabinet, was one of his intimate friends. It was suggested—positively—that Sulpice should be intrusted with one of the most important portfolios, that of the Interior or of Foreign Affairs, the lesser portfolios being considered those of Public Instruction and of Agriculture and Commerce, the former of which concerns itself with the spiritual welfare of the people, and the latter with their food supply.

Sulpice told all this to Adrienne while eating his dinner mechanically and without appetite.

There was to be a meeting of his coterie at eight o'clock. It was already seven. He hurried.

Adrienne saw that he was very pale. She experienced a strange sensation, evidently a joyful one although mingled with anxiety. Politics drew him away from his wife so frequently, and for so long a time, that she was already compelled to live in such solitude that the secluded creature wondered if in future she would not be condemned to still greater isolation. But all anxiety disappeared under the influence of Sulpice's manifest joy. He was feverishly impatient. It seemed to him that never had he known so decisive a moment in his life.

The sound of the bell, suddenly ringing out its clear note in the silence, caused him to start.

The dining-room door was opened by a servant, who handed a letter to Vaudrey, bearing on one corner of the envelope the word: Urgent.

Sulpice recognized the writing.

It was from Collard of Nantes.

Adrienne saw her husband's cheek flush as he read this letter, which Sulpice promptly handed her, while his eyes sparkled with delight.

"It is done! Read!"

Adrienne turned pale.

Collard notified his "colleague" that the ministerial combination of which he was the head had succeeded. The President awaited at the Elysee the arrival of the new ministers. He tendered Vaudrey the portfolio of the Interior.

"A minister!" said Adrienne, now overcome with delight.

Vaudrey had risen and, a little uneasy, was mechanically searching for something, still holding his napkin in his hand.

"My hat," he said. "My overcoat. A carriage."

Adrienne, with her hands clasped in a sort of childish admiration, looked at him as if he had become suddenly transformed. All his being, in fact, expressed complete satisfaction. He embraced Adrienne almost frantically, kissed her again and again, and left her, then descended the staircase with the speed of a lover hastening to a rendezvous.

This political honeymoon was still at its height at the moment when the delighted Vaudrey, seeing everything rosy-hued, was satisfying his astonished curiosity in the greenroom of the ballet. He entered office, animated by all the good purposes inspired by absolute faith. It seemed to him that he was about to save the world, to regenerate the government, and to destroy abuses.

"It is very difficult to become a minister," he said, smiling, "but nothing is easier than to be a great minister. It only demands a determination to do good!"

"And the power to do it," replied his friend Granet, somewhat ironically.

What! power? Nothing was more simple, since Vaudrey held the reins of power!—If others wrecked the hopes of their friends, it was because they had not dared, because they had not the will!

They would now see what he would do himself! Not to-morrow either, nor in a month—but at once.

He entered the ministry boldly, like a good-natured despot, determined to reform, study and rearrange everything; and a victim to the feverish and glorious zeal of a neophyte, he was a little surprised to encounter, at the very outset, the obstinate resistance of routine, ignorance, and the unyielding mechanism of that vast machine, more eternal than empires: Ad-min-is-tra-tion.

Bah! he would have satisfaction! Patience would overcome all. After all, time is on one's side.

"Time? Already!" replied Granet, who was a perpetual scoffer.

Adrienne, overwhelmed with surprise, enjoyed the reflections from the golden aurora of power that so sweetly tinted Sulpice's life. She shared her husband's triumphs without haughtiness, and now, however she might love her domestic life, it was incumbent upon her to pass more of her time in society than formerly, to show herself, as Sulpice said, and, surrounded by the success and flattery she enjoyed, she felt that that obligation was only an added joy, whose contentment she reflected on her husband.

When she entered a salon, she was greeted with a flattering murmur of admiration and good-natured curiosity. The women looked at her and the men surrounded her.

"Madame Vaudrey?"

"The minister's wife!"

"Charming!"

"Quite young!"

"Somewhat provincial!"

"So much the more attractive!"

"That is true, as fresh as a peach!"

She endeavored to atone by a gracious, very sincere modesty, for the enviable position in which chance had suddenly placed her. It was said of her that she accepted a compliment as timidly as a boarding-school miss receives a prize. They forgave her for retaining her rosy cheeks because of her white and exquisitely shaped hands. She was not considered to be "trop de Grenoble." Witty people called her the pretty Dauphinoise, and the flatterers the little Dauphine.

In short, her success was great! So said the chroniclers; the entrance of a fashionable woman into a salon being daily compared with that of an actress on the stage.

It was especially because Vaudrey appeared to be so happy, that his young wife was so contented. She felt none of the vainglory of power. Generally alone in the vast, deserted apartments of the ministry, with all their commonplace, luxurious appointments, she more than once regretted the home in the Chaussee-d'Antin, where they enjoyed—but too rarely—a renewal of the cherished solitude of the first months of their union, the familiar chats of the Grenoble days, the prolonged conversations, exchanges of thoughts, hopes and reminiscences—already! only recollections,—and she sometimes said to Sulpice, who was feverishly excited and glowed with delight at having reached the summit of power:

"Do you know what this place suggests to me? Why, living in a hotel!"

"And you are right," Vaudrey gaily answered; "we are at a hotel, but it is the hotel in which the will of France lodges!"

"You understand, my dear, that if you are happy—"

"Very happy! it is only now that I can show what I am made of. You shall see, Adrienne, you shall see what I will do and become within a year."

Within a year!



IV

Guy de Lissac occupied a small summer-house forming a residence situated at the end of a court on Rue D'Aumale. He had given carte-blanche for the arrangement of this bachelor's nest,—a nest in which sitting-hens without eggs succeeded each other rapidly,—to one of those upholsterers who installed, in regulation style, the knickknacks so much in vogue, and who sell at very high prices to Bourse operators and courtesans the spurious Clodions and imitation Boulles that they pick up by chance at auction sales.

Lissac, who had sufficient taste to discover artistic nuggets in the gutters of Paris, had found it very convenient to wake up one fine morning in a little mansion crowded with Japanese bric-a-brac, Chinese satin draperies, tapestries, Renaissance chests and terra-cotta figures writhing upon their sculptured bases. The upholsterer had taste, Lissac had money. The knickknacks were genuine. There was a coquettish attractiveness about the abode that made itself evident in every detail.

This bachelor's suite lacked, however, something personal, something living, some cherished object, the mark of some particular taste, some passion for a period, for a thing, or pictures or books. In this jumble of ill-matched curiosities, where ivory netzkes on tables surrounded Barye bronzes and Dresden figures, there lacked some evidence of an individual character that would give a dominant tone, an original key, to the collection. This worldly dwelling, with its white lacquered bed and Louis XV. canopy and its heads of birds carved in wood like the queen's bed at Trianon, vaguely resembled the apartments of a fashionable woman.

But Guy had hung around here and there a Samourai sabre, Malay krises, Oriental daggers in purple velvet sheaths, and upon the green tapestry background of the antechamber a panoply on which keen-bladed swords with steel guards were mingled with Scotch claymores with silver hilts, thus giving a masculine character to this hotel of a fashionable lounger, steeped with the odor of ylang-ylang like the little house of a pretty courtesan.

This Guy enjoyed in Paris a free and easy life, leaving to Vaudrey, his old college-comrade at Grenoble, the pursuit of the pleasures of political life, and, as Lissac said in that bantering tone which is peculiar to Parisian gossip, the relish of the "sweets of power"; for himself, what kept him in Paris was Paris itself, just that and nothing more:—its pleasures, its first nights, its surprises, its women, that flavor of scandal and perfume of refined immorality that seemed peculiar to his time and surroundings.

He had squandered two fortunes, one after the other, without feeling any regret; he had made a brush at journalism, tried finance, won at the Bourse, lost at the clubs, knew everybody and was known by all, had a smiling lip, was sound of tooth, loved the girls, was dreaded by the men, was of fine appearance, and was unquestionably noble, which permitted him to enjoy all the frolics of Bohemian life without sullying himself, having always discovered a forgotten uncle or met some considerate friend to pay his gambling debts and adjust his differences on the Bourse speculations at the very nick of time; just now he was well in the saddle and decidedly attractive, with a sound heart and a well-lined pocket, enjoying, not disliking life, which seemed to him a term of imprisonment to be passed merrily—a Parisian to the finger-tips and to the bottom of his soul, worse than a Parisian in fact, a Parisianized provincial inoculated with Parisine, just as certain sick persons are with morphine, judging men by their wit, actions by their results, women by the size of their gloves; as sceptical as the devil, wicked in speech and considerate in thought, still agile at forty, claiming even that this is man's best time—the period of fortune and gallantry—sliding along in life and taking things as he found them, wisely considering that a day's snow or rain lasts no longer than a day's sunshine, and that, after all, a wretched night is soon over.

On leaving Vaudrey the previous night, Lissac had passed part of the night at his club on Place Vendome. He had played and won. He had gone to sleep over a fashionable novel, very faithfully written, but wearisome in the extreme, and he had awakened late and somewhat heavy-headed. There were fringes of snow upon the window-sills and upon the house facing his little mansion. The roofs were hidden under a large white sheet and half lost in the grayish-white background of the sky.

"Detestable weather! So much the better," thought Lissac, "I shall have no visitors."

"I will see no one," he said to his servant. "In such weather no one but borrowers will come."

He had just finished his dejeuner, plunging a Russian enamelled silver spoon into his egg, his tea smoking at his side in a burnished silver teapot with Japanese designs, when, notwithstanding his orders, the servant handed him a card written in pencil on a scrap of paper torn from a note-book.

"It is not a borrower, monsieur!"

Guy seized the paper disdainfully, thinking, in spite of the servant's opinion, that he would find the name of a beggar who had not even had his name printed on a piece of Bristol-board, and, adjusting his glass, he deciphered the fine writing on the paper; then after involuntarily exclaiming: Ah! bah! and well! well! greatly astonished, he said as he rose:

"Show her in!"

He had thrown on a chair his damask napkin of Muscovite pattern, and instinctively glanced at himself in the mirror, just as a coquette might do before a rendezvous, smoothing out his flannel vest and spreading out his cravat that only half-fastened the blue foulard collar of his dressing-gown.

At the moment that he was examining the folds made on his red leather slippers by his ample flannel trousers, a woman half-raised the satin portiere, and, standing within a frame formed by the folds of yellow satin, looked at the young man, displaying her brilliant teeth as she smilingly said:

"Good-morning, Guy!"

Lissac went straight toward her with outstretched hands.

She allowed the large satin portiere to fall behind her, and after having permitted her little suede gloved hands to be raised for a moment, she boldly abandoned them to Guy, laughing the while, as they looked at each other face to face. He betrayed some little astonishment, gazing at her as a person examines one whom one has not seen for a long time, and the young woman raised her head unabashed, displaying her features in full light, as if submitting to an inspection with confidence.

"You did not expect me, eh?"

"I confess—"

"Doubtless it is a considerable time since you thought of me."

Guy was inclined to bow and, as his only reply, to kiss the tips of her fingers; but he reflected that, since they last met, the parting of his brown locks had been devilishly widened, and he remained standing, answering with the conceit of a handsome man:

"You are mistaken, I often think of you."

She had, with, a sweeping glance around the room, examined the furniture of the apartment, the framed pictures, the designs and the gilding, and, on sitting down near the fire with her little feet crossed, she expressed her opinion:

"Very stylishly ensconced! You always had good taste, I know, my dear Guy."

"I have less now than formerly, my dear Marianne," he said, giving to this airy remark the turn of a compliment.

Marianne shrugged her shoulders and smiled.

"Do you find me very much altered?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes, rejuvenated."

"I don't believe a word of it."

"Upon my honor. You look like a communicant."

"Good heavens! what kind?" said Marianne, laughing in a clear, ringing, but slightly convulsive tone.

He was still looking at her curiously, seated thus near the fireplace.

The bright and sparkling fire cast its reflections on the gold frames in waving and rosy tints that brightened the somewhat pale complexion of this young woman and imparted a warm tone to her small and brilliant gray eyes. She half turned her fair face toward him, her retrousse nose was tiny, spirituelle and mobile, her large sensuous mouth was provoking and seductive, and suggested by its upturned corners, encouragement or a challenge.

She had allowed her cloak, whose fur trimming was well-worn, to slip from her shoulders, exposing her form to the waist; she trembled slightly in her tight-fitting dress, and golden tints played on her bare neck, which was almost hidden under the waves of her copper-colored hair.

She had just taken off her suede gloves with a jerky movement and was abstractedly twisting them between her fingers.

In spite of the somewhat depressing effect of her worn garments, she displayed a natural elegance, a perfect form and graceful movements, and Guy, accustomed as he was to estimate at a glance the material condition of people, divined that this woman felt some embarrassment. She whom he had known four or five years previously so charming amid the din of a life of folly, and the coruscation of an ephemeral luxury, was now burned out like an exploded rocket.

Marianne Kayser!

Of all the women whom he had met, he had certainly loved her the most sincerely, with an absolute love, unreflecting, passionate and half-mad. She was not dissolute but merely turbulent, independent and impatient of restraint. Too poor to be married, too proud to be a courtesan, too rebellious to accept the humiliations of destiny.

She was an orphan, and had been brought up by her uncle, Simon Kayser, a serious painter, indifferent to all that did not concern his art,—its morality, its dignity, its superiority—who had, under cover of his own ignorance, allowed the ardent dreams of his niece and her wayward fits to develop freely like poisonous plants; near this man, in the vicious atmosphere of an old bachelor's disorderly household, Marianne had lived the bitter life of a young woman out of her element, poor, but with every instinct unswervingly leaning towards the enjoyments of luxury.

She had grown up amid the incongruous society of models and artists and, as it were, in the fumes of paradoxes and pipes. A little creature, she served as a plaything for this painter without talent, and he allowed her to romp, bound and leap on the divans like a kitten. Moreover, the child lighted his stove and filled his pipe.

The studio was littered with books. As chance offered, she read them all eagerly and examined with curiosity the pictures drawn by an Eisen or a Moreau, depicting passionate kisses exchanged under arbors, where behind curtains, short silk skirts appeared in a rumpled state. She had rapidly reached womanhood without Kayser's perceiving that she could comprehend and judge for herself.

This falsely inspired man, entirely devoted to mystical compositions, vaguely painted—philosophical and critical, as he said—this thinker, whose brush painted obscure subjects as it might have produced signs, did not dream that the girl growing up beside him was also in love with chimeras, and drawn toward the abyss, not however to learn the mysteries hidden by the clouds, but the mystery of life, the secret of the visions that haunted her, of the disquieting temptations that filled her with such feverish excitement.

If Uncle Kayser could for one moment have descended from the nebulous regions, and touched the earth, he would have found an impatient ardor in the depth of Marianne's glance, and something feverish and restless in her movements. But this huge, ruddy, rotund man, speaking above his rounded stomach, cared only for the morality of art, aesthetic dignity, and the necessity of raising the standard of art, of creating a mission for it, an end, an idea—art the educator, art the moralizer,—and allowed this feverish, wearied, impulsive creature, moulded by vice, who bore his name, to wander around his studio like a stray dog.

Isolated, forgotten, the young girl sometimes passed whole days bending over a book, her lips dry, her face pale, but with a burning light in her gray eyes, while her fingers were thrust through her hair, or she rested upon a window-sill, following afar off, some imaginary picture in the depths of the clouds.

The studio overlooked a silent, gloomy street in which no sound was heard save the slow footfalls of weary and exhausted pedestrians. It was stifling behind this window and Marianne's gloomy horizon was this frame of stones against which her wandering thoughts bruised themselves as a bird might break its wings.

Ah! to fly away, to escape from the solemn egotism and the theories of Simon Kayser, and to live the passionate life of those who are free, loved, rich and happy! Such was the dream upon which Marianne nourished herself.

She had perpetually before her eyes, as well as before her life, the gray wall of that high house opposite the painter's studio, pierced with its many eyes, and whether on summer's stifling evenings, the shutters closed—the whole street being deserted, the neighbors having gone into the country—or in winter, with its gray sky, the roofs covered with the snow that was stained all too soon, when the brilliant lights behind the curtains looked like red spots on the varnished paper, Marianne ever felt in her inmost being the bitter void of Parisian melancholy, the overwhelming sadness of black loneliness, of hollow dreams, gnawing like incurable sorrows.

She grew up thus, her mind and body poisoned by this dwelling which she never left except to drag her feet wearily through the galleries of the Louvre, leaning on the arm of her uncle, who invariably repeated before the same pictures, in the loud and bombastic tone of a comediante, the same opinions, and grew enthusiastic and excited according as the pictures of the masters agreed with his style, his system, his creed. One should hear him run the gamut of all his great phrases: My sys-tem! Marianne knew when the expression was coming. All these Flemish painters! Painters of snuff-boxes, without any ideal, without grasp! "And the Titian, look at this Titian! Where is thought expressed in this Titian? And mo-ral-i-ty? Titian! A vendor of pink flesh! Art should have a majesty, a dignity, a purity, an ideality very different."

Ah! these words in ty, solemn, bombastic, pedantic, with a false ring, they entered Marianne's ears like burning injections.

These visits to the museum impressed her with a gloom such as a ramble in a cemetery would create, she returned to the house with depressing headaches and muttering wrathful imprecations against destiny. She even preferred that studio with its worn-out divans and its worm-eaten tapestries that were slowly shredding away.

There, at least, she was all alone, face to face with herself, consumed by a cowardly fear—the fear of the future—this young girl who had read everything, learned everything, understood everything, knew everything, sullied by all the jokes of the Kayser studio, which, in spite of the exalted, sacrosanct, aesthetic discussions which took place therein, sometimes shockingly resembled a smoking-room—this physical virgin without any virginity of mind, could there take refuge in herself, and there in the solitude to which she was condemned, she questioned herself as to the end to which her present life would lead her.

Of dowry she had none. Her father had left her nothing. Kayser was poor and in debt. She had no occupation. To run about giving private lessons on the piano, seemed to Marianne to degrade her almost to the level of domestic service. Those who wished to pose for the Montyon prize might do so! She never would!

Ah! what sufferings! what would be the end of such a life? Marriage? But who desired her? One of those talentless painters, who ventilated at Kayser's house, not merely their contemptuous theories, but also their down-at-the-heel shoes? To fall from one Bohemian condition to another, from exigency to want, to be the wife of one of these greasy-haired dreamers? Her whole nature shuddered in revolt at this idea. Through the open window, the tepid breath of nature wafted toward her the odor of the rising sap in gentle, warm whiffs that filled her with a feverish astonishment. Stretched on the patched divan, her eyes closed and her lovely form kissed by the tepid breeze, she dreamed, dreamed, dreamed—

The awakening was folly, a rash act, an elopement.

In the house on Rue de Navarin there happened to be one fellow more daring than the rest, he was an artist who, in the jostling daily life, kindled his love at the strange flame that burned in the lustful virgin's eyes. A glance revealed all.

The meeting with a rake determined the life of this girl. She fell, not through ignorance or curiosity, but moved by anger and, as it were, out of bravado. Since she was without social position, motherless and isolated, having no family, without a prop and unloved, well, she threw off the yoke absolutely. She broke through her shackles at one bound. She rebelled!—

She eloped with this man.

He was a handsome fellow, who thirsted for pleasure, and took his prize boldly about, plunging Marianne into the ranks of vulgar mistresses, and had not the mad woman's superior intelligence, will, and even her disgust, ruled at once over this first lover and the equivocal surroundings into which he had thrust her, she would have become a mere courtesan.

Kayser had experienced only astonishment at the flight of his niece. How was it that he had never suspected the cause that disturbed her thoughts? "These diabolical women, nobody knows them, not even those who made them. A father even would not have detected anything. The more excuse therefore for an uncle!" So he resumed his musing on elevated art, quieting his displeasure—for his comrades jeered him—by the fumes of his pipe.

Moreover, all things considered, the painter added, Marianne had followed the natural law. Full liberty for everybody, was still one of Simon Kayser's pet theories. Marianne was of age and could dispose of her lot without the necessity of submitting to a strict endorsement of her conduct. When she had "sounded all the depths of the abyss,"—and Kayser pronounced these words while puffing his tobacco—she would return. Uncle Kayser would always keep a place for her at what he called his fireside.

"The fireside of your pipe," Marianne once remarked to him.

So Kayser consoled himself for this escapade by the sacredness of art, the only sacredness he recognized. On that indeed he yielded nothing. What mattered it to the world, if a girl went astray, even if that girl were his niece? Public morality was not hurt thereby. Ah! if he, Kayser, had exhibited to the world a lewd picture, it would have been "a horse of a different color"! The dignity, seriousness, purity of art, that was right enough!—But a woman! Pshaw! a woman!—Nor was he heard once to express any uneasiness as to what might become of Marianne.

In the course of her perilous career, which, however, was not that of a courtesan, but that of a freed woman avenging herself, Marianne had met Guy de Lissac and loved him as completely as her nature allowed her to love. Guy entertained her. With him she talked over everything, she gave herself up to him, and made plans for the future. Why should they ever separate? They adored each other. Guy was rich, or at any rate he lived sumptuously. Marianne was a lovely mistress, clever, in fact, ten women in one. Guy became madly attached to her and he felt himself drawn closer to her day by day. She often repeated with perfect sincerity that she had never loved any one before.

The first lover, then? She did not even know his name now!

There was no reason why they should not live together for ever, a life of mutual joy and happiness, led by the same fancies, stirred by the same desires. Why ever leave each other, even once? But it was just this that induced Guy to abandon this pretty girl. He was afraid. He saw no end to such a union as theirs. The little love-affair that enticed him assumed another name: The Chain. He sometimes debated with himself seriously about marrying this Marianne, whose adventures he knew, but who so intoxicated him that he forgot all the past.

Uncle Kayser, entirely engrossed in the "dignity of art," and occupied with the composition of an allegorical production entitled The Modern Family,—a page of pure, mystic, social, regenerative art,—had certainly forgotten his niece; nevertheless, Lissac at times felt somewhat tempted to restore her to him. He was grieved at the thought of abandoning Marianne to another. His dread of marriage triumphed over his jealousy. One fine day, Guy suddenly brought about a separation. Feeling ill, he took to his bed, when one morning Marianne came to him and said in passionate tones:

"Now I will never leave you again! You are in danger, and I am here to save you!"

Guy now felt himself lost. His rapid perception, whose operation was as sudden as a blow of the fist, warned him that if he allowed this woman to install herself in his house, he might say good-by to liberty, and probably also to his life. This Parisian had laid down as a principle, that a man should always be unfettered. He held in horror this shameful half-marriage that the language of slang had baptized, as with a stain: Collage. He therefore decided to play his life against his liberty, and during the temporary absence of this nurse established at his bedside, he packed his clothes in his trunk at random, shivering as he was with fever, threw himself into a hack, and, with chattering teeth and a morbid shudder creeping over his entire body, had himself driven to the railroad station and departed for Italy.

Marianne was heartbroken anew at this unexpected departure. A hope had vanished. She loved Guy very sincerely, and she vainly hoped that she would hold him. He fled from her! Whither had he gone? For a moment, she was tempted to rejoin him when she received his letters. She surmised, however, that Guy, desiring to avoid her, caused his brief notes to be sent by some friend from towns that he had left. To play there the absurd part of a woman chasing her lover would have been ridiculous. She remained, therefore, disgusted, heartbroken for a moment like a widow in despair, then she retraced her steps to the Rue de Navarin, and returned to the fold, where she found Uncle Kayser still quite unruffled, with the almost finished picture of The Modern Family.

"That is, I verily believe, the best I have done, the most moral," said Kayser to her. "In art, morality before everything, my girl! Come, sit down and tell me your little adventures."

It was five years—five whole years—since Lissac had seen Marianne. Their passion had subsided little by little into friendship,—expressed though by letters. Marianne wrote, Guy replied. All the bitter reproofs had been exchanged through the post, yet, in spite of this correspondence, neither had sought the opportunity nor felt the desire to meet. The fancy was dead! Nevertheless, they had loved each other well!

Suddenly, without overtures, on this bitingly cold morning, Marianne arrived, half shivering, in the new apartment, warmed her tiny feet at the fire and raised to him the rosy tip of her cold nose.

Guy was somewhat surprised.

He looked with a curiosity not unmixed with pain at that woman whom he had loved truly enough to suffer love's pangs,—the innocents say to die of it. He tried to find again in the depths of those gray eyes, sparkling and malicious, the old burning passion, extinguished without leaving even a fragment of its embers. To think that he had risked his life for that woman; that he should have sacrificed his name; that he should have torn himself from her with such harsh bravado; that he should have cut deep into his own being in order to leave her; that he had fled, leaving for Italy with a craving desire for solitude and forgetfulness! Eh! yes, Marianne had been his true love, the true love of this blase Parisian sceptic and braggart, and he sought, while again looking at the lovely girl, to recover some of the sensations that had flown, to recall some of those reminiscences which more than once had agreeably affected him.

Marianne evidently understood what was passing in Guy's mind. She smiled strangely. Buried in the armchair, whose back supported her own, and half-bending her fair neck that reclined on the lace-covered head-rest, she looked at Lissac fixedly with an odd expression, the sidelong glance of a woman, that seems to be her keenest scrutiny.

Through her half-closed lashes he seemed to feel that a malicious glance embraced him. The mobile nostrils of her delicate nose dilated with a nervous trembling that intensified the mocking smile betrayed by her curling lips. Her hands were resting upon her plump arms, and with a trembling motion of the fingers beat a feverish little march as if she were playing a scale on a keyboard.

Guy sought to evoke from the well-set, gracefully reclining form, from the half-sly and half-concealed glance, from the palpitating nostrils, something that reminded him of his former ecstasies. Again he saw, shadowed by the chin, that part of her neck where he loved to bury his brow and to rest his lips, greedily, lingeringly, as when one sips a liqueur. A strange emotion seized him. All that had not yet been gratified of his shattered, but not wholly destroyed love, surged within him.

Were it fancy or reminiscence, beside this woman he still felt as of old, a feeling that oppressed his heart and caused him that delightful sensation of uneasiness to which he had been a stranger in connection with his many later easy love adventures. A light, penetrating and sweet odor floated around Marianne, reminding Lissac of the intoxicating perfume of vanished days, an irritating odor as of new-mown hay.

He said nothing, while she awaited his remarks with curiosity. Guy's mute interrogation possibly embarrassed her, for she suddenly shook her head and rose to her feet.

"May one smoke here?" she said, as she opened a Russia leather cigarette-case bearing her monogram.

"What next?" said Guy, lighting a sponge steeped in alcohol that stood in a silver holder and offering it to Marianne.

She quickly closed her fine teeth on the end of the paper cigarette that she had rolled between her fingers and lighted it at the flame. The gleam of the alcohol brightened her eyes and slightly flushed her pale cheeks, which Guy regarded with strange feelings.

"Your invention is an odd one!" she said, as she returned him the little sponge upon which a tongue of blue flame played.

He extinguished it, and abandoning himself to the disturbing charm of reminiscences, watched Marianne who was already half-enveloped in a light cloud of smoke.

"There is one thing you do not know," he said. "More than once—on my honor—at the corner of the street, at some chance meeting, my old Parisian heart has beaten wildly on seeing in some coquettish outline, or in some fair hair falling loosely over an otter-skin cloak, or in some fair, vanishing profile with a pearl set in the lobe of the ear, something that resembled you. Those fur toques with little feathers that everybody wears now, you wore before any one else, on your fair head. Whenever I see one, I follow it. On my word, though, not for her. The fair unknown trotted before me, making the sidewalks echo to the touch of the high heels of her little shoes, while I continued to follow her under the sweet illusion that she would lead me at the end of the journey to a spot where it seemed to me a little of paradise had been scattered. It is thus that phantoms of loved ones course through the streets of Paris in broad daylight, and I am not the only one, Marianne, who has felt the anguish and heart-fluttering that I have experienced. Often have I found my eyes moist after such an experience; but if it were winter, I attributed my tears simply to a cold. Tell me, Marianne, was it really the cold that moistened my eyes?"

Marianne laughed.

"Come, but you are idyllic, my dear Guy," said she, looking at Lissac.

"Melancholy, nothing more."

"Let us say elegiac. Those little fits have come upon you rather late in the day, have they not? A little valerian and quinine, made up into silver-coated pills, is a sovereign remedy."

"You are making fun of me."

"No," she said. "But it was so easy then, seeing that the recollection of me could inspire you with so many poetic ideas and cause you to trot along for such a distance behind plumed toques—it was so easy not to take the train for Milan and not to fly away from me as one skips from a creditor."

Guy could not refrain from smiling.

"Ah! it is because—I loved you too dearly!"

"I know that!" exclaimed Marianne with a tone, in contrast with her elegance, of an artist's model giving a pupil a retort. "A madrigal that has not answered, no; does it rain?"

"I have perhaps been stupid, how can it be helped?" said Lissac.

"Do not doubt it, my dear friend. It is always stupid to deprive one's self of the woman who adores one. Such rarities are not common."

"You remember, dear Marianne," said Guy, "the day when you boldly wrote upon the photographs to some one who loved you dearly: 'To him I love more than every one else in the world?'"

"Yes," said Marianne, blowing a cloud of smoke upward. "Such things as that are never forgotten when one writes them with the least sincerity."

"And you were sincere?"

"On the faith of an honest man," she answered laughingly.

"And yet I have been assured since that time, that you adored another before that one."

"It is possible," said Marianne with sudden bitterness; "but, in the life that I have led, I have been so often purchased that I have been more than once able to mistake for love the pleasure that I have derived."

In those words, uttered sharply, and in a hissing tone like the stroke of a whip-lash in the air, she had expressed so much suffering and hidden anger that Lissac was strangely affected.

Guy, the Parisian, experienced a sentiment altogether curious and unexpected, and this woman whose bare neck was resting on the back of the armchair, allowing the smoke that issued from her lips in puffs to enter her quivering nostrils, seemed to him a new creature, a stranger who had come there to tempt him. In her languishing and, as it were, abandoned pose, he followed the outline of her graceful body, blooming in its youth, the fulness of her bust, the lines of her skirt closely clinging to her exquisite hips, and the unlooked-for return of the lost mistress, the forgotten one, assumed in his eyes the relish of a caprice and an adventure. And then, that bitter remark, spoken in the course of their light Parisian gossip, whetted his curiosity still further and awoke, perhaps, all the latent force of a passion formerly suddenly severed.

He was seated on an ottoman beside Marianne, gazing into the young woman's clear eyes, his hand endeavoring to seize a white hand that nimbly eluded his grasp. The movement of his hands suggested the embrace that his feelings prompted.

Marianne suddenly looked him full in the face and curtly said, in a tone of raillery, that suggested a past that refused to reopen an account for the future:

"Oh! oh! but is that making love, my friend?"

Lissac smiled.

"Come," she said, "nonsense! That is a romance whose pages you have already often turned over."

"The romance of my life," whispered Lissac in Marianne's ear.

"The more reason that it should not be read again. It is true there are books one never reads but once. And for that reason, probably, one never forgets them."

She rose abruptly, threw the stump of her cigarette into the fire and looked with a bright, penetrating glance, into Lissac's surprised eyes.

"Ah! it is a long while, you see, since you spoke laughingly—we have both heartily laughed at it—of the 'caprices of Marianne.' Do you know what I am, my dear Guy? Yes, where is the mad creature who was formerly your mistress? Abandoned to dark, profound and incurable ennui, I yawn my life away, as some one said, I yawn it away even to the point of dislocating my jaw. The days seem dull to me, people stupid, books insipid, while fools seem idiots and witty people fools. It is to have the blues, if you will, or rather to have the grays, to hate colorless objects, to be weary of the commonplace, to thirst for the impossible. A thirst that cannot be allayed, let me add. The pure, fresh spring that should slake my thirst has not yet gushed."

She talked in a dry, bitter tone, with a smile that frequently gave way to slight outbreaks of convulsive laughter almost as if she were attacked with a fit of coughing. From time to time, she blew away a cloud of smoke that escaped from her lips, for she had resumed her cigarette, or with the tip of her nail struck her papelito, knocking the ashes on the carpet.

Moved and greatly puzzled, but no longer thinking of the temptation of a moment before, Guy looked at her and nodded his head gravely, like a physician who finds a patient's illness more serious than the latter is willing to acknowledge.

"You are very unhappy, Marianne!" he remarked.

"I? Nonsense! Weary, disgusted, bored, yes; but not unhappy. There is still something great in misery. That can be battled against. It is like thunder. But the rain, the eternal rain, incessantly falling, with its liquid mud, that—ah! that, ugh! that is crushing. And in my life it rains, it rains with terrible constancy."

As she uttered these words, she stretched her arms out with a movement that expressed boundless weariness and disclosed to Guy the dull dejection that followed a great deception and a hopeless fall.

"Life? My life? A mere millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I abandon to others—whom I have abandoned, thank God! for I am satiated at length and have now no lover, nor do I desire one. I desire to be my own mistress, in short, and not the mistress of any person. I have but one desire, hear—"

"What?" asked Guy, who was deeply moved by this outburst of anger and suffering, this cry of pain that declared itself involuntarily, his feelings vacillating between doubt and pity.

"My pleasure," Marianne replied, "is to shut myself up alone in a little room that I have rented at the end of an unfrequented lane near the Jardin des Plantes, whither I have had transported all the wreckage saved from my past life: books, knickknacks, portraits, and I know not what. My intention is that I shall remain there unknown to all, my name, whence I come, where I go, my thoughts, my hatred, my past loves, everything, in fact, a secret. I shall cloister myself. I shall stretch myself out on a reclining-chair and think that if, by chance,—as happens sometimes—an aneurism, a congestion, or I don't know what, should strike me down in that solitude, no one would know who I am, nobody, nobody, and my body would be taken to the Morgue, or to the grave, it matters little to me, that body of which the little otter-trimmed toques recall to you the graceful, serpentine line. Ah! those plans are not very lively, are they? Well, my dear, such are my good moments. Judge of the others, then."

Lissac was profoundly stirred and very greatly puzzled. To call on him: that implied a need of him. But there was no attempt to find the marker at the place where the romance had been interrupted: therefore the visit was not to renew the relations that had been severed, yet not broken.

What, then, brought this creature, still charming and giddy, whose heart was gnawed and wrung with grief? And was she the woman—Guy knew her so well!—to return thus, only to conjure up the vanished recollections, to communicate the secret of her present sorrows and to permit Lissac to inhale the odor of a departed perfume, more airy than the blue smoke-wreaths that escaped from her cigarette?

After entrusting Guy with the secret of her yearning for solitude, she again indulged in her sickly smile, and still looking at Guy:

"You are, I am told, a constant guest at Sabine Marsy's receptions?" she said abruptly.

"Yes," replied Lissac. "But I have no great liking for political salons."

"It is a political centre, and yet not, seemingly. It is about to become a scientific one, if one may believe the reporters—Monsieur de Rosas is announced.—By the way, my dear Guy, you still see Monsieur de Rosas!"

While Marianne uttered this name with an indifferent tone, she slightly bent her head in order to scrutinize Guy.

He did not reply at once, seeking first to discover what object Marianne had in speaking to him about De Rosas. In a vague way he surmised that the great Castilian noble counted for something in Marianne's visit.

"I always see him when he is in Paris," he said after a moment's pause.

"Then you will see him very soon, for he will arrive to-morrow."

"Who told you that?"

"The newspapers. You don't read the newspapers, then?—He is returning from the East. Madame Marsy is bent on his narrating his travels, on the occasion of a special soiree. A lecture! Our Rosas must have altered immensely. He was wild enough of old."

"A shy fellow, which is quite different. But," asked Lissac after a moment, "what about Rosas?"

"Tell me, in the first place, that you know perfectly well that he will arrive to-morrow."

"I know it through the reporters, as you say. To-day, it is through the reporters that one learns news of one's friends."

"The important fact is that you know him, and it is because I am particularly anxious to hear Monsieur de Rosas that I come to ask you to present me at Madame Marsy's."

"Oh! that is it?" Guy began.

"Yes, that is it. I am weary. I am crazy over the Orient. You remember Felicien David's Desert that I used to play for you on the piano? I would like to hear this story of travel. It would make me forget Paris."

"You shall hear it, my dear Marianne. Madame Marsy asked me to introduce Vaudrey to her the other evening. You ask me to present you to Madame Marsy. I am both crimp and introducer; but I am delighted to introduce you to a salon that you will, I trust, find less gloomy than your little room of the Jardin des Plantes. In fact, I thought you were one of Sabine Marsy's friends. Did I dream so?"

"I have occasionally met her, and have found her very agreeable. She invited me to call on her, but I have not dared—my hunger for solitude—my den yonder—"

"Is the little room forbidden ground, is one absolutely prohibited from seeing it?" said Guy with a smile.

"It is not forbidden, but it is difficult. Moreover, I have nothing hidden from my friends," said Marianne, "on one condition, which is, that they are my friends—"

She emphasized the words: "Nothing but my friends."

"Friendship," said Guy, "is all very well, it is very good, very agreeable, but—"

"But—?"

"Love—"

"Do not mention that to me! That takes wings, b-r-r! Like swallows. It flits. It leaves for Italy. But friendship—"

She extended her small firm hand as rigid as steel.

"When you desire to visit me over there, I shall be at home. I will give you the address. But it is not Guy who will come, but Monsieur de Lissac, remember. Is that understood?"

"I should be very silly if I answered yes."

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

"Compliments! How foolish you are! Keep that sort of talk for others. It is a long time since they were addressed to me."

She took that man's face between her hands and kissed his cheeks in a frank, friendly way. Guy became somewhat pale.

"I have loved you, and truly, that is enough. Do not complain or ask aught besides."

Ah! what an eager desire now prompted him to possess her again, to find in her his mistress once more, to restrain her from leaving until she had become his, as of old.

She had already thrown her cloak over her shoulders, and said, as she gently pushed open the door:

"So it is agreed? I am to go to Madame Marsy's?"

"To Madame Marsy's. I will have an invitation sent you."

"And I will call for you and take you. Yes, I, here, like a jolly companion. Or I'll go with my uncle. You will present me to Rosas. We shall see if he recognizes me."

She burst out laughing. "You will also introduce me—since that is your occupation—" and here her smile disclosed her pretty, almost mischievous-looking teeth—"to Monsieur Vaudrey, your comrade. A minister! Such people are always useful for something. Addio, caro!"

Guy de Lissac had hardly taken two steps toward Marianne before she had vanished behind the heavy folds of the Japanese portiere that fell in its place behind her. He opened the door. Mademoiselle Kayser was already in the hall, with her hand on the handle of the door.

"At nine o'clock I shall be with you," she said to Lissac as she disappeared.

She waved a salutation, the valet de chambre hastened to open the door, and her outline, that for a moment stood out in the light of the staircase, vanished. Guy was almost angry, and returned to his room.

Now that she had left, he opened his window quickly. It seemed to him that a little blue smoke escaped from the room, the cloud emitted by Marianne's cigarette. And with this bluish vapor also disappeared the odor of new-mown hay, bearing with it the passing intoxication that for a moment threatened to ensnare this disabused man.

The cold outside air, the bright sunshine, entered in quivering rays. Without, the snow-covered roofs stood out clearly against a soft blue sky, limpid and springlike. Light wreaths of smoke floated upward in the bracing atmosphere.

Guy freely inhaled this buoyant atmosphere that chased away the blended odor of tobacco and that exhaled from the woman. It seemed to him that a sort of band had been torn from his brow which, but a moment ago, felt compressed. The fresh breeze bore away all trace of Marianne's kisses.

"Must I always be a child?" he thought. "It is not on my account that she came here, but on Rosas's. Our friends' friends are our lovers. Egad! on my word, I was almost taken in again, nevertheless! Compelled, in order to cut adrift again, to make another journey to Italy,—at my age."

Then, feeling chilly, he closed the window, laughing as he did so.



V

On the pavement of the Boulevard Malesherbes, two policemen, wrapped in their hooded coats, restrained the crowd that gathered in front of the huge double-door of the house occupied by Madame Marsy. A double row of curious idlers stood motionless, braving benumbed fingers while watching the carriages that rolled under the archway, which, after quickly depositing at the foot of the brilliantly lighted perron women enveloped in burnooses and men in white gloves, their faces half-hidden by fur collars, turned and crossed the row of approaching coupes.

For an hour past there had been a double file of carriages, and a continuous stream of guests arriving on foot, who threw their cigars at the foot of the perron, chatting as they ascended the steps, which were protected by a covering of glass. The curious pointed out the faces of well-known persons. It was said in the neighborhood that the greater part of the ministers had accepted invitations.

Madame Marsy's salons were brilliant under the blazing lights. Guests jostled each other in the lobbies. Overcoats and mantles were thrown in heaps or strung up in haste, the gloved hands reaching out as in the lobby of a theatre to receive the piece of numbered pasteboard.

"You have No. 113," said Monsieur de Lissac to Marianne, who had just entered, wearing a pale blue cloak, and leaning on his arm.

She smiled as she slipped the tiny card into her pocket.

"Oh! I am not superstitious!"

She beamed with satisfaction.

People in the hall stood aside in order to allow this pretty creature to pass by; her fair hair fell over her plump, though slender, white shoulders, and the folds of her satin skirt, falling over her magnificent hips, rustled as she walked.

Lissac, with his eyeglass fixed, and ceremoniously carrying his flattened opera-hat, advanced toward the salon, amid the greedy curiosity of the guests who contemplated the exquisite grace of the lovely girl as if they were inhaling its charm.

Madame Marsy stood at the entrance of the salon, looking attractive in a toilet of black silk which heightened her fair beauty, and, with extended hands, smilingly greeted all her guests, while the charming Madame Gerson, refined and tactful, aided her in receiving.

Sabine appeared perfectly charmed on perceiving Marianne. She had felt the influence formerly of this ready, keen and daring intelligence. She troubled herself but little about Marianne's past. Kayser's niece was received everywhere, and had not Kayser decided to accompany her? He followed in the rear of the young girl. People had not observed him. He chatted with a man about sixty years old, with a white beard and very gentle eyes who listened to him good-naturedly while thinking perhaps of something else.

"Ah! my old Ramel, how glad I am to see you!" he said with theatrical effusion.

"It is a fact that we rarely see each other. What has become of you, Kayser?"

"I? I work. I protest, you know, I have never compromised—Never—The dignity of art—"

Their voices were drowned by the hubbub of the first salon, already filled with guests; Sabine meanwhile took Marianne, whom Lissac surrendered, and led her toward a larger salon with red decorations, wherein the chairs were drawn up in lines before an empty space, forming, thanks to the voluminous folds of the curtains, a sort of stage on which, doubtless, some looked-for actor was about to appear.

Nearly all these chairs were already occupied. The lovely faces of the women were illuminated by the dazzling light. Everybody turned toward Marianne as she entered the room, under the guidance of Sabine, who led her quickly toward one of the unoccupied seats, close to the improvised stage on which, evidently, Monsieur de Rosas was going to speak.

Madame Gerson had taken her seat near Marianne, who searched her black, bright eyes with a penetrating glance in order to interrogate the thoughts of this friend of the family. Madame Gerson was delighted. Sabine, dear Sabine, had achieved a success, yes, a success! Monsieur Vaudrey was there! And Madame Vaudrey, too! And Monsieur Collard—of Nantes—the President of the Council! And Monsieur Pichereau, who, after all, had been a minister!

"That makes almost three ministers, one of whom is President of the Council! Sabine is overcome with joy, yes, absolutely crazy! Think of it: Madame Hertzfield, Sabine's rival, never had more than two ministers at a time in her salon."

She added, prattling in soft, linnet-like tones, that Madame Hertzfield's salon was losing its prestige. Only sub-prefects were created there. But Sabine's salon was the antechamber to the prefectures!

"And if you knew how charming Monsieur Vaudrey is—a delightful conversationalist—he has dined excellently—he was twice served with an entree!"

Marianne listened, but her mind was wandering far away. She was debating with herself as to when Monsieur de Rosas would appear on that narrow strip of waxed floor before her.

Guy had correctly surmised: it was Rosas and Rosas only whom this woman was seeking in Sabine's salon. She wished to see him again, to talk to him, to tempt destiny. A fancy.—A final caprice. Why not?

Marianne thought that she played a leading part there. She remembered this Jose very well, having met him more than once in former days with Guy. A Parisian Castilian, more Parisian than Spanish, he spoke with exquisite finish the classic tongue, and with the free-and-easy manner of a frequenter of the boulevards, chatted in the slang of the pavement or of the greenroom; he was an eminent virtuoso and collector, an author when the desire seized him, but only in his own interest, liberal in his opinions, lavish in his disposition, attractive in his manners; an eager traveller, he had, at thirty years of age, seen all that was to be seen, he had visited India and Japan, drunk camel's milk under the tents of the Kirgheez, and eaten dates with the Kabyles, and narrated with a sort of appetizing irony, love adventures which might have seemed romantic brag, if it were not that he lessened their improbability by his raillery. He was a kind of belated Byron, who might have been cured of his romantic tastes by the wounds and contact of reality.