"And that is no sinecure!—Well, the imbecile in question?"

"Left furious, no doubt, because of the reception accorded him—and to me, me, the Under-Secretary of State, this is the letter that he writes, that he dares to write! Here, Monsieur le Ministre, listen! Was ever such stupidity seen? 'Monsieur le Secretaire d'Etat, you have under your orders a very badly trained Undersecretary of State, who will make you many enemies, I warn you. As you are his direct superior, I permit myself to notify you of his conduct,' etc., etc. You laugh?" said Warcolier, seeing that a smile was spreading over Vaudrey's blond-bearded face.

"Yes, it is so odd!—Your correspondent is evidently ignorant that there are only Under-Secretaries of State in the administration!—unless this innocent is but simply an insolent fellow."

"If I thought that!" said Warcolier, enraged. "No, but it is true," he said with astonishing candor, a complete overflowing of his satisfied egotism, "there are a lot of people who ask for everything and are good for nothing!—Malcontents!—I should like to know why they are malcontents!—What are they dreaming about, then? What do they want? I am asking myself ever since I came into office: What is it they want? Doesn't the present government carry out the will of the majority?—It is just like those journalists with their nagging articles!—They squall and mock! What they print is disgusting! Granted that we have demanded liberty, but that does not mean license!"

While Warcolier, entirely concerned about himself, with erect head and oratorical gesture, spoke as if in the presence of two thousand hearers, Sulpice Vaudrey again recalled, still sad and sick, the dark and sunken cheeks and the colorless ears, the poor projecting ears of the consumptive Garnier with whom he had come in contact at Ramel's.

He was anxious to be with Adrienne again, and above all, with Marianne. What would his mistress say to him when she knew of his reaching the presidency of the Council?

Adrienne had certainly received the news with little pleasure.

"If you are happy!"—was all she said, with a sigh.

It was the very expression she had used at the moment when, on the formation of the "Collard Cabinet," he had gone to her and cried out: "I am a minister!"

Adrienne was impassive.

In truth, Sulpice was beginning to think that she was too indifferent to the serious affairs of life. The delightful joys of intimacy, now, moreover, discounted, ought not to make a woman forget the public successes of her husband. Instinctively comparing this gentle, slender blonde, resigned and pensive, with Marianne, with her tawny locks and passionate nature, whom he adored more intensely each day, Vaudrey thought that a man in his position, with his ambition and merit, would have been more powerfully aided, aye, even doubled in power and success by a creature as strongly intelligent, as energetic and as fertile in resource as Mademoiselle Kayser.

He still had before him a peculiar smile of indefinable superiority expressed by his mistress when Adrienne and Marianne chanced to meet one evening at the theatre, which made him feel that his mistress was watching and analyzing his wife. The next day, Marianne with exquisite grace, but keen as a poisoned dart, said to him:

"Do you know, my dear, Madame Vaudrey is charming?"

He felt himself blush at these words hurled at him point-blank, then his cheeks grew cold. Never, till that moment, had Mademoiselle Kayser mentioned Adrienne's name.

"You like blondes, I see!" said Marianne. "I am almost inclined to be jealous!"

"Will you do me a great favor?" then interrupted Sulpice. "Never let us speak of her. Let us speak of ourselves."

"Yes," continued the perfidious Marianne in a patronizing tone, as if she had not heard him, "she is certainly charming! A trifle—just a trifle—bourgeoise—But charming! Decidedly charming!"

Knowing Vaudrey well, she understood what a keen weapon she was plunging straight into him. A little bourgeoise! This conclusion rendered by the Parisienne with a smile now haunted Sulpice, who was annoyed at himself and he sought to discover in his wife, the dear creature whom he had so tenderly loved, whom he still loved, some self-satisfying excuse for his passion and adultery.

"Bah!" he thought. "Is it adultery? There is no adultery save for the wife. The husband's faithlessness is called a caprice, an adventure, a craving or madness of the senses. Only the wife is adulterous."

In all candor, what sin had he committed? Was Adrienne less loved? He would have sacrificed his life for her. He overwhelmed her with presents, created surprises for her that she received without emotion, and simply said in a doleful tone:

"How good you are, my dear!"

He was ruining neither her nor his children! Ah! if he but had children! Why had not Adrienne had children? A woman should be a mother. It is maternity that in the marriage estate justifies a man in abandoning his freedom and a woman her shame.

A mother! And was Marianne a mother?

No, but Marianne was Marianne. Marianne was not created for the domestic fireside and the cradle. Her statuesque and seductively lovely limbs only craved for the writhings of pleasure, not the pangs of maternity. Adrienne, on the contrary, was the wife, and the childless wife soon took another name: the friend. No, he robbed her of nothing, Adrienne lost none of his affection, none of his fortune. The money squandered at Rue Prony, Vaudrey had acquired; it was the savings of the honest people of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, the parents, the old folks, that he threw—as in smelting—into the crucible of the girl's mansion.

Adrienne expressed no desire that was not fulfilled, and Sulpice who was, moreover, confident and lulled by her quietude, felt no remorse. He did not enquire if his passion for Marianne would endure. He flung himself upon this love as upon some prey; nor was desire the only influence that now attached him to this woman, he was drawn to her also by the admiration that he felt for her boldness of thought, her singular opinions, her careless expressions, her devilish spirit; her appetizing and voluptuous attractions surprised and ensnared him—

What a counselor and ally such a woman would be!

Well and good! When Vaudrey informed her that he was about to become first minister, to preside over the Council, to show his power—this was his eternal watchword—Marianne immediately comprehended the new situation and what increase of influence in the country such a fortunate event would give him.

He observed with pleasure that something like a joyful beam gleamed in Mademoiselle Kayser's gray eyes.

She also doubtless thought that it was desirable to take advantage of the occasion, to seize and cling to the opportunity.

"Then it is official?" she asked.

"Not yet. But it is certain."

What could Marianne hope for? Again, she had no well-defined object; but she watched her opportunity, and since Vaudrey's power was enlarged, well, she was to profit by it. Claire Dujarrier, who had already served her so well, could be useful to her again and advise her advantageously. That will be seen.

"Are you desirous of attending Collard's funeral?" Vaudrey asked Marianne.

She laughed as she asked:

"Why! what do you think that would be to me?"

"It will be very fine. All the authorities, the magistrates, the Institute, the garrison of Paris will be present."

"Then you think it is amusing to see soldiers file past? I am not at all curious! You will describe it all to me and that will be quite sufficient for me."

Vaudrey walked at the head of the cortege that accompanied through Place Vendome and Rue de la Paix, black with the crowd, the funeral procession of Collard—of Nantes—to the Madeleine. Troops of the line in parade uniforms lined the route. From time to time was heard the muffled roll of drums shrouded in crepe. The funeral car was immense and was crowded with wreaths. As with bowed head he accompanied the funeral procession of his colleague, almost his friend,—but, bah! friendship of committees and sub-committees!—Sulpice was sufficiently an artist to be somewhat impressed with the contrast afforded by the display of official pomp crowning the rather obscure life of the Nantes advocate. He had ever obtrusively before him, as if haunted by the spectre of the Poor Man before Don Juan, the lean face of Garnier and the white moustache of Ramel. Which of the two had better served his cause, Ramel vanquished or Collard—of Nantes—dying in the full blaze of success?

He pondered over this during the whole of the ceremony. He thought of it while the notes of the organ swelled forth, while the blue flames of the burning incense danced, and while the butts of the soldiers' muskets sounded from time to time on the flagstones, as the men stood around the bier and followed the orders of the officer who commanded them.

On leaving the ceremony, Granet approached Sulpice while gently stroking his waxed moustache, and said in an ironical tone:

"Do you know that it is suggested that a statue be raised in Collard's honor?"

"Really?"

"Yes, because he is considered to have shown a great example."

"What?"

"He is one of those rare cases of ministers dying in office. Imitate him, my dear minister,—to the latest possible moment."

Sulpice made an effort to smile at Granet's pleasantry. This cunning fellow decidedly displeased him; but there was nothing to take offence at, it was mere diplomatic pleasantry expressed politely.

Before returning to the ministry, Vaudrey had himself driven to Rue Prony. Jean, the domestic, told him that Madame had gone out; she had been under the necessity of going to her uncle's. After all, Sulpice thought this was a very simple matter; but he was determined to see Marianne, so he ordered his carriage to be driven to the artist's studio. Uncle Kayser opened the door, bewildered at receiving a call from the minister and, at the same time, showing that he was somewhat uneasy, coughing very violently, as if choked with emotion, or perhaps as a signal to some one.

"Is Mademoiselle Kayser here?" asked Sulpice.

"Yes—Ah! how odd it is—Chance wills that just now one of our friends—a connoisseur of pictures—"

Vaudrey had already thrust open the door of the studio and he perceived, sitting near Marianne and holding his hat in his hand, a young man with pale complexion and reddish beard, whom Mademoiselle Kayser, rising quickly and without any appearance of surprise, eagerly presented to him:

"Monsieur Jose de Rosas!"

In the simple manner in which she had pronounced this name, she had infused so triumphant an expression, such manifest ostentation, that Vaudrey felt himself suddenly wounded, struck to the heart.

He recalled everything that Marianne had said to him about this man.

He greeted Rosas with somewhat frigid politeness and from the tone in which Marianne began to speak to him, he at once realized that she had some interest in allowing the Spaniard to surmise nothing. She unduly emphasized the title by which she addressed him, repeating a little too frequently: "Monsieur le Ministre."—Whenever Vaudrey sought to catch her glance she looked away in a strange fashion and managed to avoid carrying on any formal conversation with Sulpice. On the contrary, she addressed Rosas affably, asking what he had done in London, what he had become and what he brought back new.

"Nothing," Jose answered with a peculiar expression that displeased Vaudrey. "Nothing but the conviction that one lives only in Paris surrounded by persons whom one vainly seeks to avoid and toward whom one always returns—in spite of one's self, at times."

Vaudrey observed the almost proud, triumphant expression that flashed in Marianne's eyes. He vaguely realized an indirect confession expressed in that trite remark made by Rosas. The Spaniard's voice trembled slightly as he spoke.

Marianne smiled as she listened.

"You have taken a new journey, monsieur?" asked Sulpice, uncertain what bearing to assume.

"Oh! just a temporary absence! A trip to London—"

"Have you returned long?"

"Only this morning."

His first call was at Simon Kayser's house, where perhaps, he expected to see Marianne. And the proof—

Vaudrey instinctively thought that it was a very hasty matter to call so soon on Uncle Kayser. This man's first visit was not to the painter's studio, but in reality to the woman who—Sulpice still heard Marianne declare that—who would not become his mistress. There was something strange in that. Eh! parbleu! it was perhaps Monsieur de Rosas who had sent for Marianne.

She endeavored to make it clear that only chance was responsible for bringing them together here, but Sulpice doubted, he was uneasy and angry.

He felt almost determined to declare, if it were only by a word, the prize of possession, the conquest of this woman, whom he felt that Rosas was about to contend with him for.

She surmised everything and interrupted Sulpice even before he could have spoken and, with a sort of false respect, displayed before Rosas the friendship which Monsieur le Ministre desired to show her and of which she was proud.

"By the way, my dear minister, as to your appointment as President of the Council?"

Vaudrey knit his brows.

"That is so! I ask your pardon. I am betraying a state secret. Monsieur de Rosas will not abuse it. Isn't that so, Monsieur le Duc?"

Rosas bowed; Vaudrey was growing impatient.

"Madame Vaudrey will, of course, be delighted at this appointment, Monsieur le Ministre?" continued Marianne.

She smiled at Sulpice who was greatly astonished to hear Adrienne's name mentioned there; then, turning to Rosas, she charmingly depicted a quasi-idyllic sketch of the affection of Monsieur le Ministre for Madame Vaudrey. A model household. There was nothing surprising in that, moreover. "Monsieur le Ministre" was so amiable—yes, truly amiable, without any flattery,—and Madame Vaudrey so charming!

Sulpice, who was very nervous and had become slightly pale, endeavored to discover the meaning of this riddle. He asked himself what Marianne was thinking about, what she meant to say or dissimulate.

Monsieur de Rosas sat motionless on his chair, very cool, looking calmly on without speaking a word.

He seemed to await an opportunity to leave the studio, and since Vaudrey had arrived he had only spoken a few brief phrases in strict propriety.

Marianne, all smiles and happy, with beaming eyes, interrogated Vaudrey and sought to provide a subject of conversation for the unexpected interview of these two men. Was there a great crowd at Collard's funeral? Who had sung at the ceremony? Vaudrey answered these questions rapidly, like a man absorbed in other thoughts.

After a moment's interval, Monsieur de Rosas arose and bowed to Marianne with gentlemanly formality.

"Are you going, my dear duke?"

"Yes, I have seen you again. You are getting along well. I am satisfied."

"You will come again, at any rate? My uncle has some new compositions to show you."

"Oh! great ideas," began Kayser. "Things that will make famous frescoes!—For a palace—or the Pantheon!—either one!"

He had looked alternately at the duke and Vaudrey.

Rosas bowed to the minister and withdrew without replying, followed by Kayser and Marianne who, on reaching the threshold of the salon, seized his hand and pressed it nervously within her own soft one and said quickly:

"You will return, oh! I beg you! Ah! it is too bad to have run away! You will come back!"

She was at once entreating and commanding him. Rosas did not reply, but she felt in the trembling of his hand, as he pressed her own, in his brilliant glance, that she would see him again. And since he had returned to Paris alone, weary of being absent from her, perhaps, seeing that he had hastened back after having desired to free himself from her, did it not seem this time that he was wholly captivated?

All this was expressed by a pressure of the fingers, a glance, a sigh.

Rosas went rapidly away, like one distracted. Marianne, who motioned to Uncle Kayser to disappear, reappeared in the studio, entirely self-possessed.

Vaudrey had risen from the divan on which he had been sitting and he was standing, waiting.

"I believed that I understood that you had dismissed Monsieur de Rosas?"

"I might have told you that I did so, since it is true."

"You smiled at him, nevertheless, just now."

"Yes."

"A man who begged you to be his mistress!"

"And whom I rejected, yes!"

She looked at Sulpice with her winsome, sidelong glance, curling her lovely pink lips that he had kissed so many times.

"Then you love that man?"

"I! not at all, only it is flattering to me to have him return like that, just like some penitent little boy."

"I do not understand—"

"Parbleu! you are not a woman, that is all that that proves!—It is irritating to our self-love to see people too promptly accept the dismissal one gives them. What! Don't they suffer? Don't they say anything? Don't they complain? Monsieur de Rosas comes back to me, that proves that he was hurt, and I triumph. Now, do you understand?"

"And—that joy that I observed is—?"

"It is because Monsieur de Rosas is in Paris."

"And you don't love him? You don't love him?" asked Vaudrey, clasping Marianne's hands in his.

She laughed and said:

"I do not love him in the least."

"And you love me?"

"Yes, you, I love you!"

"Marianne, you know that it would be very wicked and wrong to lie! It is not necessary to love me at all if you must cease to love me!"

"In other words, one should never lend money unless one is obliged to lend one's whole fortune."

He felt extremely dissatisfied with Marianne's ironical remark. She looked at him with an odd expression which was all the more disquieting and intoxicating.

"Let us speak no more about that, shall we?" she said. "I repeat to you that I am satisfied at having seen Monsieur de Rosas again, because it affords my self-love its revenge. Now, whether he comes back or not, it matters little to me. He has made the amende honorable. That is the principal thing, and you, my dear, must not be jealous; I find Othello's role tiresome; oh! yes, tiresome!—The more so, because you have no right to treat me as a Desdemona. The Code does not permit it."

"You want to remind me again, then, that I am married? A moment ago, you stabbed me by pin-thrusts."

"In speaking of your household? Say then with knife-thrusts."

"Why did you mention my wife before Monsieur de Rosas?"

"Why," said Marianne, "you do not understand anything. It was for your sake, for you alone, in order to explain the presence in Marianne's house, of a minister who is considered to lead a puritan life. Nothing could be more simple!—Would you have me tell him that you neglect your wife and that you are my lover? Perhaps you would have liked that better!"

"Yes, perhaps," said Vaudrey passionately.

"Vain fellow!" the pretty girl said as she placed upon his mouth her little hand which he kept upon his lips. "Then you would like me to parade our secrets everywhere and to publicly announce our happiness?"

"I should like," he said, as he removed his lips from the soft palm of her hand, "that all the world should know that you are mine, mine only—only mine, are you not?—That man?"

His eyes entreated her and lost their fire.

Marianne shrugged her shoulders.

"Let Monsieur de Rosas alone in tranquillity and let us return to my house, our house," she said, with a tender expression in her eyes.

"You do not love him?"

"No."

"And you love me?"

"I have told you so."

"You love me? You love me?"

"I love you!—Ah!" she said, "how unhappy you would be, nevertheless, if I told you aloud some day in one of the lobbies of the Assembly what you ask me to repeat here in a whisper."

"I should prefer that to losing you and to knowing that you did not love me."

"He is telling the truth, however, the great fool!" cried Marianne, laughing.

"The real, sincere, profound truth!"

He drew her to him, seated on the vulgar divan where Simon Kayser was wont to display his paradoxes, and encircling her waist with both arms he felt her yielding form beneath her satin gown, and wished her to bend her fair face to his lips that were craving a kiss.

Marianne took his face between her soft hands, and looking at him with an odd smile, tender and ironical at once, at this big simpleton who was completely dominated by her mocking tenderness, she said:

"You are just the same Sulpice!"—as she spoke, she bent over him engagingly, and laughed merrily while he kissed her.



IV

Jose de Rosas thought himself much more the master of himself than he actually was.

This energetic man, firm as a very fine steel blade, had hoped to find that in living at a distance from Marianne, he might forget her or at least strengthen himself against her influence. He found on his return that he was, however, more seduced by her than before, his heart was wholly filled and gnawed by the distracting image of the pretty girl. He had borne away with him to London, as everywhere in fact, the puzzling smile, the sparkling glance of this woman's gray eyes that ceaselessly appeared to him at his bedside, and beside him, like some phantom.

The phantom of a living creature whose kiss still burned his lips like a live coal. A phantom that he could clasp in his arms, carry away and possess. All the virgin sentiments of this man whose life had been the half-savage one of a trapper, a savant or a wanderer, turned toward Marianne as to an incarnated hope, a living, palpitating chimera.

Jose felt certain that if he returned to Paris it was all over with him, and that he was giving his life to that woman. But he returned. His fight against himself over, the first visit he made, once again, was to the den where he knew well that he could discover Marianne's whereabouts. He went to her as he might walk to a gulf. Under his cold demeanor of a Castilian of former days, he was intensely passionate and would neither reflect nor resist. He had experienced that delightful sensation of impulse when, upon the rapids at the other end of the globe, the river carried into a whirlpool his almost engulfed boat. He would doubtless have been stupefied had he found Marianne installed in a fashionable little mansion. She promised herself to explain that to him when she next saw him while informing him, there and then, that she had taken up her abode there. A mere whim: Mademoiselle Vanda having gone away, the idea had attracted her of sleeping within a courtesan's curtains. "I will tell him that this transient luxury recalls my former follies when I made him believe that I was spending an inheritance from my grandmother."

She had, indeed, already lied to him, for the money she had formerly squandered had been provided by De Lissac, but even then it was necessary—for the duke was in expectancy—to conceal its source from Rosas, hence the story of the inheritance that never existed. But she at once thoroughly realized that the surroundings which were favorable to the progress of the duke's love were not the bedroom and the dressing-room of Mademoiselle Vanda. What difference would Rosas have found between her and the fashionable courtesans whom he had loved, or rather, enriched, in passing? He would not believe this new lie this time.

All that luxury might seduce Sulpice Vaudrey; it would have disgusted Jose. What satisfied the appetite of the little, successful bourgeois would nauseate the gentleman.

As soon as Rosas returned to her, happy and stupefied at the same time, extravagantly happy in his joy, her plan of campaign was at once arranged. She did not wish to receive him in the vulgar hotel, where the clubmen had wiped their feet upon the carpets. She entreated him, since he wished to see her again, to see her at her "own house," yes, really, at her own house, in that little, unknown room, in Rue Cuvier, far from the noise of Paris and near the Botanical Garden, a kind of hidden cell into which no one entered.

"No one but me," she said.

The order had been given to Uncle Kayser in advance: in case Rosas should reappear, Simon was to at once inform his niece and prevent the duke from discovering Marianne's new address. And this had been done.

The duke was then going to see Mademoiselle Kayser only at Rue Cuvier, after having rediscovered her at Uncle Simon's.

He felt in advance a kind of gratitude to this woman who thus abandoned the secret of her soul to him; giving him to understand that it was there that she passed her days, buried in her recollections, dreaming of her departed years, of that which had been, of that which might be, a living death.

Marianne had shrewdly divined the case. For this great soul, mystery added a new sentiment to the feelings that Rosas experienced. The first time that he found himself in that little abode where Simon Kayser's niece awaited him, he was deeply moved, as if he had penetrated into the pure chamber of a young girl. There, yonder, in that distant quarter, he found a peaceful retreat for one wounded by life, thirsting for solitude and passing there secret hours in the midst of loved books; in fact, the discreet dwelling of a poor teacher who had collected some choice bibelots that she had found by chance. Rosas there felt himself surrounded by perfect virtue, amid the salvage of a happier past. Marianne thus became what he imagined her to be, superior to her lot, living an intellectual life, consoling herself for the mortification of existence and the hideous experiences of life by poet's dreams, in building for herself in Paris itself a sort of Thebais, where she was finally free and mistress of herself and where, when she was sad, she was not compelled to wear a mask or a false smile, and was free from all pretended gaiety. And she was so often sad!

She had occasionally mentioned to Rosas the assumed name under which she lived at that place.

"Mademoiselle Robert!"

He had manifested surprise thereat.

"Yes, I do not wish them to know anything of me, not even my name. You should understand the necessity that certain minds have for repose and forgetfulness. Did not one of your sovereigns take his repose lying in his coffin? Well! I envy him and when I have pushed the bolt of my little room in Rue Cuvier, I tremble with delight, just as if I felt my heart beating in a coffin. Do not tell any one. They would desire to know and see. People are so curious and so stupid!"

Marianne now seemed to be still more strange and seductive to Rosas. All this romantic conduct, commonplace as it was, with which she surrounded herself, exalted her in the estimation of the duke. She became in that little chamber where she was simply Mademoiselle Robert, a hundred times more charming and attractive to him than any problem: a veritable Parisian sphinx.

She was not his mistress. He loved her too deeply, with a holy, respectful passion, to take her hastily, as by chance, and Marianne was too skilful to risk any imprudent act, well-knowing that if she yielded too quickly, it would not be a woman who would fall into the duke's arms, but an idol that descended from its pedestal.

In the silence of the old house in the deserted quarter, they held conversations in the course of which Rosas freely abandoned himself, and through which she gained every day a more intimate knowledge of the character of that man who was so different from those who hitherto had sought her for pleasure.

Thus, the very respect that he instinctively felt for her, impelled her to love him.

She had not been accustomed to such treatment. Every masculine look that since her puberty she had felt riveted upon her, clearly expressed even before the lips spoke: "You are beautiful. You please me. Will you?" Rosas, at least, said: "I love you," before: "I desire you."

Tainted in the body which she had given, offered, abandoned, sold, she felt that she was respected by him even in that body, and although she considered him silly, she thought him superior to all others, or at least different, and that was a sufficient motive for loving him.

One day she said to him in a peculiar tone and with her distracting smile:

"Do you know, my dear Jose, there is one thing I should not have believed? You are bashful!"

He turned slightly pale.

"Sincere love is always bashful and clumsy. By that it may be known."

"Perhaps!" said Marianne.

Their conversations, however, only concerned love, so that Rosas might speak of his passion or of his reminiscences.

She once asked him if he would despise a woman if she became his mistress.

"No!" he said, with a smile, "it is only a Frenchman who would despise the woman who surrendered herself. Other nations treat love more seriously. They do not consider the gift of one's self in the light of a fall."

Marianne looked at him full in the face with a strange expression.

"What, then, if I love you well enough to become your mistress?"

"I should still esteem you enough to become your husband!"

She felt her color change.

Was it a sport on the part of Monsieur de Rosas? Why had he spoken to her thus? Had he reflected upon what he had just said?

Jose added in a very gentle tone:

"Will you permit me to ask you a question, Marianne?"

"You may ask me anything. I will frankly answer all your questions."

"What was Monsieur Sulpice Vaudrey doing at your uncle's the other day? Was he there to see you?"

Marianne smiled.

"Why, the minister simply came to talk of business matters. I hardly see him except for Uncle Kayser, who is soliciting an official commission,—you heard him—"

"Does Monsieur Vaudrey pay his addresses to you?"

"Necessarily. Oh! but only out of pure French gallantry. Mere politeness. He loves his wife and he knows very well that I don't love any one."

"No one?" asked Rosas.

"I do not love any one yet," repeated Marianne, opening her gray eyes with a wide stare under the Spaniard's anxious glance.

From that day, her mind was possessed of a new idea that imperiously directed it. When Rosas had returned to her, she had only regarded him as a possible lover, rich and agreeable. The mistress of a minister, she would become the mistress of a duke. A millionaire duke. The change would be profitable, assuming that she could not retain both. Her calculations were speedily made. She would only make Rosas pay more dearly for the resistance he had offered before surrendering himself.

But now, abruptly and without her having thought of it, he had, with the incautiousness of a soldier who discloses his attack and lays himself open to a bully who tries to provoke him, the duke showed her the extent of his violent passion by a single phrase that feverishly agitated her.

His mistress! Why his mistress, since he had shown her that perhaps?—

"Idiot that I am!" thought Marianne. "Suppose I play my cards for marriage?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It will cost no more!"

Married! Duchess! and Duchesse de Rosas! At first she laughed. Duchess! I am asking a little from you! The mistress of Pierre Meran, the artist's drudge, the wretch who abducted her and debauched her, adding his depravity to hers, and who died of consumption while quite young, after having plunged this girl into vice, this Marianne Kayser, born and moulded for vice: she a duchess!

"It would be too funny, my dear!" she thought.

Never had Vaudrey, whom she saw that evening at Rue Prony, seemed so provincial, or, as she said, so Sulpice. Besides, he was gloomy and unable to express himself clearly at first, but finally he brought himself to acknowledge that he was embarrassed about providing for the bill of exchange—she understood—

"No, I do not know!"

"The bill of exchange in favor of Monsieur Gochard!"

"Ah! that is so. Well! if you cannot pay it, my dear, I will advise—I will seek—"

There was nothing to seek. Vaudrey would evidently get himself out of the affair—but the document matured at an unfortunate time. He did not dare to mortgage La Sauliere, his farm at Saint-Laurent-du-Pont. He had reflected that Adrienne might learn all about it. And then—

Marianne broke in upon his confidences.

"Don't speak to me about these money matters, my friend, you know that sort of thing disgusts me!—"

"I understand you and ask your pardon."

They were to see each other again the next day, as parliament was to take a rest.

"What joy! Not to be away from you for the whole of the day!" remarked Vaudrey.

"Well then, till to-morrow!"

She felt intense pleasure in being alone again, wrapped in her sheets, with the light of the lamp that ordinarily shone upon her hours of love with Sulpice, still burning, and to be free to dream of her Spanish grandee who had said, plainly, with the trembling of passion on his lips: "I should esteem you enough to become your husband!"

She passed the night in reverie.

Vaudrey, in spite of the joy of the morrow,—a long tete-a-tete with his mistress,—thought with increasing vexation of the approaching maturity of his bill of exchange; within two months he would have to pay the hundred thousand francs which he had undertaken to pay Marianne's creditor.

"It is astonishing how quickly time passes!"

At breakfast the following day, Adrienne saw that her husband was more than usually preoccupied.

"Are political affairs going badly?"

"No—on the contrary—"

"Then why are you melancholy?"

"I am a little fatigued."

"Then," said Madame Vaudrey, "you will scold me."

"Why?"

"I have led Madame Gerson to hope—You know whom I mean, Madame Marsy's friend,—I have almost promised her that you would accept an invitation to dine at her house."

For a moment Vaudrey was put out.

Another evening taken! Hours of delight stolen from Marianne!

"I have done wrong?" asked Adrienne, as she rested her pretty but somewhat sad face on her husband's bosom. "I did it because it is so great a pleasure to me to spend an entire evening with you, even at another's house. Remember you have so many official dinners, banquets and invitations that you attend alone. When the minister's wife is invited with him, it is a fete-day for the poor, little forsaken thing. I do not have much of you, it is true, but I see you, I hear you talking and I am happy. Do not chide me for having said that we would go to Madame Gerson's. The more so, because she is a charming woman. Ah! when she speaks of you! 'So great a minister!' Don't you know what she calls you?—'A Colbert!'"

Vaudrey could not restrain a smile.

"Come, after that, one cannot refuse her invitation. It is the Monseigneur of the beggar," said he, kissing Adrienne's brow. "And when do we dine at Madame Gerson's?"

"On Monday next; I shall have at least one delightful evening to see you," said the young wife sweetly.

The minister entered his cabinet. Almost immediately after, a messenger handed him a card: Molina, Banker.

"How strange it is!" thought Sulpice. "I had him in mind."

In the course of his troublesome reflections concerning the Gochard paper, Vaudrey persistently thought of that fat, powerful man who laughed and harangued in a loud voice in the greenroom of the ballet, as he patted with his fat fingers the delicate chin of Marie Launay.

Why! if he were willing, this Molina—Molina the Tumbler!—for him it is a mere bagatelle, a hundred thousand francs!

Salomon Molina entered the minister's cabinet just as he made his way into the foyer of the Opera, with swelling chest, tilted chin and stomach thrust forward.

"Monsieur le Ministre," he said in a clear voice, as he spread himself out in the armchair that Vaudrey pointed out to him, "I notify you that you have my maiden visit!—I am still in a state of innocency! On my honor, this is the first time I have set my foot within a minister's office!"

He manifested his independence—born of his colossal influence—by his satisfied and successful air. The former Marseillaise clothes-dealer, in his youth pouncing upon the sailors of the port and Maltese and Levantine seamen, to palm off on them a second-hand coat or trousers, as the wardrobe dealers of the Temple hook the passer-by, Salomon Molina, who had paraded his rags and his hopes on the Canebiere, dreaming at the back of his dark shop of the triumphs, the pleasures, the revels and the indigestions that money affords, had, moreover, always preserved the bitterness of those wretched days and his red, Jewish lip expressed the gall of his painful experiences.

His first word as he entered Vaudrey's cabinet, asserting the virginity of his efforts at solicitation, betrayed his bitterness.

Now, triumphant, powerful, delighted, feasted and fat, his massive form, his gross flesh and his money were in evidence all over Paris. His huge paunch, shaking with laughter, filled the stage-boxes at the theatres. He expanded his broad shoulders as he reclined in the caleche that deposited him on race-days at the entrance of the weighing-enclosure. He held by the neck, as it were, everything of the Parisian quarry that yelps and bounds about money, issues of stock, and the food of public fortune: bankers, stock-brokers, and jobbers, financial, political and exchange editors, wretches running after a hundred sous, statesmen in a fair way to fortune; and he distributed to this little crowd, just as he would throw food into a kennel, the discounts and clippings of his ventures, taking malicious pleasure, the insolent delight of a fortunate upstart, in feigning at the moment when loans were issued, sickness that had no existence, in order to have the right of keeping his chamber, of hearing persons of exalted names ringing at his door and dancing attendance upon him,—powerful, influential and illustrious persons,—him, the second-hand dealer and chafferer from Marseilles.

It was then that he tasted the joy of supreme power, that delight which titillated even his marrow, and after having rested all day, the prey of a convenient neuralgia, he experienced the unlimited pleasure of force overcoming mind, the blow of a fist crushing a weakling, as with a white cravat he appeared in some salon, in the greenroom of the ballet, or in the dressing-room of a premiere, saying with the mocking smile of triumph and the assurance attending a gorged appetite:

"I was sick to-day, I suffered from neuralgia! The Minister of Finance called on me!—Baron Nathan came to get information from me!"

Among all the pleasures experienced by this man, he valued feminine virtue occasionally purchased with gold as little in comparison with the virgin souls, honor and virtue that he often succeeded in humiliating, in bending before him like a reed, and snuffing out with his irony, whenever necessity placed at his mercy any of those puritanical beings who had passed sometimes with haughty brow before the millions of this man of money. It was then that the clothes-dealer took his revenge in all its hideousness. There was no pity to be expected from this fat, smiling and easy-going man. His fat fingers strangled more certainly than the lean hands of a usurer. Molina never pardoned.

Ah! if this fellow went to see the minister, most assuredly he wanted a favor from him.

But what?

It was extraordinary, but before Vaudrey, Molina who could hold his own among rascals, found himself ill at ease. There was in the frank look of this ninny, as Molina the Tumbler had one evening called him while talking politics, such direct honesty that the banker, accustomed as he was to dealings with sharks and intriguers, did not quite know how to open the question, nevertheless a very important matter was in hand.

"A rich plum," thought Molina.

A matter of railways, a concession to be gained. A matter of private interest, disguised under the swelling terms of the public welfare, the national needs. Millions were to be gained. Molina was charged with the duty of sounding the President of the Council and the Minister of Public Works. Two honest men. The dodge, as the Tumbler said, was to make them swallow the affair under the guise of patriotism. A strategical railroad. The means of rapid locomotion in case of mobilization. With such high-sounding words, strategy, frontier, safety, they could carry a good many points.

Unfortunately, Vaudrey was rather skittish on these particular questions, besides he was informed on the matter. He felt his flesh creep while Molina was speaking. Just before, on seeing the banker's card, the idea of the money of which the fat man was one of the incarnations, had suddenly dawned upon him as a hope. Who knows? By Molina's aid, he might, perhaps, free himself from anxiety about the Gochard bill of exchange!—But from the minister's first words, although the banker could not get to the point, intimidated as he was by Sulpice's honest look, it was clear that Vaudrey surmised some repugnant suggestions in the hesitating words of this man.

What! Molina hesitating? He did not go straight to the point, squarely, according to his custom, Molina the illustrious Tumbler? Eh! no! the intentionally cold bearing of the minister decidedly discomposed him. Vaudrey's glance never wandered from his for a moment. When the promoter pronounced the word Bourse, a disdainful curl played upon Sulpice's lips, but not a word escaped him. Molina heard his own voice break the silence of the ministerial cabinet and he felt himself entangled. He came to propose a combination, a bonus, and he did not suspect that Vaudrey would refuse to have a hand in it. And here, this devilish minister appeared not to understand, did not understand, perhaps, or else he understood too well. Molina was not accustomed to such hard-of-hearing people. With his fat hand, he had dropped into the hands of senators and ministers of the former regime, a sum for which the only receipt given was a smile. He was accustomed to the style of conversation carried on by hints and ended between intelligent people by a shake of the hand, that in which some bits of paper rested: bank-notes or paid-up shares. And this Vaudrey knew nothing! So he felt himself obliged to explain himself clearly, to stoop to dotting every i, at the risk of being shown out of doors.

Molina was too shrewd to run this risk. He would return at another time, seeing that the minister turned a deaf ear, but pecaire! he sweat huge drops in seeking roundabout phrases, this man who never minced his words and habitually called things by their proper names. Was the like ever seen! A pettifogger from Grenoble to floor Salomon Molina!

"It made me warm," said the money-maker, on leaving the cabinet, "but, deuce take it! I'll have my revenge. One is not a minister always. You shall pay me dearly, my little fellow, for that uncomfortable little time."

Vaudrey had thoroughly understood the matter, but he did not intend to allow it to be seen that he did. That was a simpler way. He had not had to dismiss the buyer of consciences; he had enjoyed his embarrassment and that was sufficient.

"What, however, if I had spoken to him of money before he had shown his hand! If I had accepted from him—!" he said to himself.

He shuddered at the thought as he had previously done while Molina was talking to him. A single imprudence, a single confidence might easily have placed him under the hand of this fat man. He must, however, find some solution. The days were rolling away and the bills signed for Marianne would in a very short time reach maturity.

"When I think that this Molina could in one day enable me to gain three times this sum."

Salomon had just told him: "To forestall the news on the Bourse is sometimes worth gold ingots!" A forestaller! As well say the revelation of a State secret, base speculation, almost treachery! And yet on hearing these words that covered up an insult, he had not even rung for the messenger to show Molina out, but had striven to comprehend nothing!

As the result of this conversation, he felt uncomfortable. The man had left an odor of pollution, as it were, behind him.

Vaudrey must needs be soon reassured respecting the Gochard paper. In visiting Marianne, he observed that his mistress was a shrewd woman. She informed him immediately that Claire Dujarrier whom she had seen, would secure a renewal from Gochard, who was unknown to Vaudrey, from three months to three months until the expiration of six months in consideration of an additional twenty thousand francs for each period of ninety days.

"I did not understand that at first," Marianne began by remarking.

"Oh!" said Sulpice, "I understand perfectly, it is absolute usury. But time is ready money, and in six months it will be easier for me to pay one hundred and forty thousand francs than a hundred thousand to-day. I have plans."

"What?"

"Very difficult to explain, but quite clear in my mind! The important part is not to have the date of maturity on the first of June, but on the first of December."

"Then nothing is more simple. Madame Dujarrier will arrange it."

"Is Madame Dujarrier a providence then?"

"Almost," said Marianne coldly.

Sulpice was intoxicated with joy, realizing that he had before him all the necessary time in which to free himself from his embarrassment, when Marianne should have returned him his first acceptance for one hundred thousand francs against a new one for one hundred and forty thousand. He breathed again. From the twenty-sixth of April to the first of December, he had nearly seven months in which to free himself. He repeated the calculation that he had formerly made when he said: "I have ample time!"

He reentered the Hotel Beauvau in a cheerful mood, Adrienne was delighted. She feared to see him return nervous and dejected.

"Then you will be brilliant presently at Madame Gerson's."

"Stop! that's so. It is this evening in fact!—"

He had forgotten it.

Marianne, too, was not free. She was going, she said, to Auteuil for that bill of exchange. Vaudrey did not therefore, regret the soiree. His going to Madame Gerson's was now a matter of indifference to him.

"As for me, I am so happy, oh! so happy!" said Adrienne, clapping her little hands like a child.

In undressing, Vaudrey fortunately found this document which he had folded in four and left in his waistcoat pocket:

"On the first of June next, I will pay to the order of Monsieur Adolphe Gochard of No. 9, Rue Albouy, the sum of One Hundred Thousand Francs, value received in cash.

"SULPICE VAUDREY, "Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin, 37."

He turned pale on reading it. If Adrienne had seen it!—

He burned the paper at a candle.

"I am imprudent," he said to himself. "Poor Adrienne! I should not like to cause her any distress."

She was overjoyed as she made the journey in the ministerial carriage from Place Beauvau to the Gersons' mansion. At last she had a rapid, stolen moment in which she could recover the old-time joy of happy solitude, full of the exquisite agitation of former days.

"Do you recall the time when you took me away like this, on the evening of our marriage?" she whispered to him, as the carriage was driven off at a gallop.

He took her hands and pressed them.

"You still love me, don't you, Sulpice?—You believe too, that I love you more than all the world?"

"Yes, I believe it!"

"You would kill me if I deceived you?—I, ah, if you deceived me, I do not know what I should do.—Although I think that you are here, that I hold you, that I love you, you may still belong to another woman—"

"Again! you have already said that. Are you mad?" said Sulpice. "See! we have reached our destination."

Madame Gerson had brilliantly illuminated her house in Rue de Boulogne with lights, filled it with flowers, and spread carpets everywhere to receive the President of the Council. The house was too small to accommodate the guests, who were about to be stifled therein. She packed them into her dining-room. For the soiree which was to follow, she had sounded the roll-call of her friends. She was bent on founding a new salon, on showing Madame Marsy that she was not alone to be the rival of Madame Evan.

Madame Gerson was not on friendly terms with Sabine Marsy. People were ignorant as to the cause. Adrienne, who was not familiar with the history of such little broils, was very much surprised to learn of this fact.

"She claims that we take away all her personnel," said Madame Gerson. "It is not my fault if people enjoy themselves at our house. I hope that you will find pleasure here, Monsieur le President."

Vaudrey bowed. "Madame Gerson could not doubt it."

The guests sat down to dinner. Madame Gerson beamed with joy beside the minister. Guy de Lissac, Warcolier, some senators and some deputies were of the dinner party. Monsieur and Madame Gerson never spoke of them by their names but: Monsieur le Senateur, Monsieur le Depute! They lubricated their throats with these titles, just as bourgeois who come in contact with highnesses swell out in addressing a prince as Monseigneur, absolutely as if they were addressing themselves.

Sulpice felt in the midst of this circle in which everything was sacrificed to chic, as he invariably did, the painful sensation of a man who is continually on show. He never dined out without running against the same menu, the same fanfare, and the same conversation.

Monsieur Gerson endeavored to draw the President of the Council into political conversation. He wished to know Vaudrey's opinion as to the one-man ballet. Sulpice smiled.

"Thanks!" he said. "We have just been dealing with that. I prefer truffles, they are more savory."

Through the flowers, Adrienne could see her husband who was seated opposite to her beside Madame Gerson. She conversed but little with Guy de Lissac, who was sitting on her right, although the formalities of the occasion would have suggested that Monsieur le Senator Crepeau and Monsieur de Prangins, the deputy, should have been so placed. Madame Gerson, however, had remarked with a smile, that Madame Vaudrey would not feel annoyed at having Monsieur de Lissac for her neighbor. "I have often met Monsieur de Lissac at the ministry; he is received noticeably well there."

Not knowing any one among the guests, Adrienne was, in fact, charmed to have Guy next to her. He was decidedly pleasing to her with his sallies, his skepticism which, as she thought, covered more belief than he wished to disclose. For a long time, he had felt himself entirely captivated by her cheerful modesty and the grace of her exquisite purity. She was so vastly different from all the other women whom he had known. How the devil could Vaudrey bring himself to neglect so perfect a creature, who was more attractive in her fascinating virtue than all the damsels to be met with in society, among the demi-monde, or those of a still lower grade? For Vaudrey remained indifferent to Adrienne; and this was a further and manifest blow. A specialist in matters of observation like Guy was not to be deceived therein. Madame Vaudrey had not yet complained, but she was already suffering. Was it merely politics, or was it some woman who was taking her husband from Adrienne? Guy did not know, but he would know. The pretty Madame Vaudrey interested him.

"If that idiot Sulpice were not my friend, I would make love to her. Besides," he said to himself, as he looked at Adrienne's lovely, limpid eyes, "I should fail; there are some lakes whose tranquillity cannot be disturbed."

Adrienne, pleased to have him beside her, enquired of him the names of the guests. On the left of Madame Gerson sat a little, broad-backed man, with black hair pasted over his temples, long leg-of-mutton whiskers decorating his bright-colored cheeks, and a keen eye: he was Monsieur Jouvenet, formerly an advocate; to-day Prefect of Police.

Senator Crepeau sat further away. He was a fat manufacturer, who talked about alimentary products and politics. In the Analytical Table of the Accounts of the Sittings of the Senate, his name shone brilliantly, with the following as his record: "CREPEAU, of L'Ain, Life Senator—Apologizes for his absence—8 January—. Apologizes for his absence—20 February—. Member of a commission—Journal Officiel, p. 1441. Apologizes for not being able to take part in the labors of the commission—4 March—. Apologizes for his absence—20 March—. Asks for leave of absence—5 April—." Such were his services during the ordinary work of that year. Monsieur Crepeau—of L'Ain—had earned the right to take a rest.

"He eats very heartily," said Lissac. "His appetite is better than his eloquence."

Next to Crepeau was another legislator, Henri de Prangins, a publicist, an old, wrinkled, stooping, dissatisfied grumbler.

"Ah! that is Monsieur de Prangins," said Adrienne, "I have heard much about him."

"He is a typical character," Lissac said, with a smile. "You know Granet, the gentleman who will become a minister; well, Prangins is the gentleman who would be a minister, but who never will be! Moreover, he is five hundred times more remarkable than a hundred others who have been in office ten times, for what reason cannot be said."

For nearly half a century Prangins, the old political wheel-horse, had plotted and jockeyed in politics, set up and overthrown ministries, piled up review articles on newspaper articles, contradiction on contradiction, page on page, spoiled cartloads of paper in his vocation of daily or fortnightly howler, and withal he was applauded, rich and popular, famous and surrounded by flatterers, knife-and-fork companions, without friends but not wanting clients, as he had made and spoiled reputations, ministers, governments, and although he well knew the vanity and nothingness of power, he aspired to secure that vain booty, oft alleging, with bitter enviousness of authority and impatient of tyranny, that to enjoy popularity uninterruptedly was not worth a quarter of an hour of power, approaching with greedy eagerness the desired lot, yet seeing it inevitably, eternally, relentlessly escape and recede from him, plucked from his grasp as it were, like a shred of flesh from the jaw of a Molossian. And now, in his unquenchable lust of power, amid the monuments of combination and deception he had created, this man was weary, disgusted and irritated,—believing himself vanquished and smothering the anger of defeat in the luxurious isolation of his wealth. He was neither officially influential nor liked. Feared he was, probably, and envied because of his good fortune, recognized, too, as a force, but only as acting in the whirlwind of his ideas and struggling in the emptiness of his dreams. After having immolated everything, youth, family, friendship, love, to this chimera: power, he found himself old, worn-out, broken by his combats, face to face with the folly of his hopes and the worthlessness of his will. Never had his nervous hand been able to grasp in its transition, the fragment of morocco of a portfolio and now that his parchment-like fingers were old and feeble, they would never cling to that shred of power! And now this Prangins avenged himself for the contempt or the injustice of his colleagues and the folly of circumstances, by criticism, defiance, mockery, denial and by loudly expressing his opinion:

"The defect of every government is that it will try to play new airs on an old violin! Your violin is cracked, Monsieur Vaudrey! I do not reproach you for that, you did not make it!"

Vaudrey laughed at the sally, but Warcolier felt that he was choking. How could the minister allow his policy to be thus attacked at table? Ah! how Warcolier would have clinched the argument of this Prangins.

Madame Gerson was delighted. The dinner was served sumptuously and went off without a hitch. The maitre d'hotel directed the service admirably. The soiree that was to follow it would be magnificent. The journals would most certainly report it. Gerson had invited one reporter in spite of his dislike of journalists. Ah! those gossipers and foolish fellows, they never forgot to describe the toilettes worn by "the pretty Madame Gerson" at first nights, at the Elysee or at Charity Bazaars. Occasionally, her husband pretended to be angered by the successes of his wife:

"Those journalists! Just imagine, those journalists! They speak about my wife just as they would about an actress! 'The lovely Madame Gerson wore a gown of crepe de Chine!' The lovely Madame Gerson! What has my wife's beauty or her toilette to do with them?"

In truth, however, he felt flattered. He was only sincerely annoyed when people respected the devilish wall of private life, the cement of which he would have stripped off himself, in order to show his wife's beauty. To be quoted in the paper, why! that is chic.

Adrienne felt a little stunned by the noise of the conversation which increased in proportion as the dinner advanced. She was also very much astonished and not a little grieved when Madame Gerson abruptly spoke in a loud voice before all the guests concerning Madame Marsy, at whose house it was, in fact, that she made the acquaintance of Vaudrey. Madame Gerson showed her pretty teeth in a very charming manner as she tore her old friend Sabine to pieces, as it were. In a tenderly indulgent tone which was the more terrible, she repeated the tales that were formerly current: the affecting death of Philippe Marsy, the painter of Charity, and a particular escapade in which Sabine was involved with Emile Cordier, one of the leaders of the intransigeante school of painters.

"What! you did not know that?" said the pretty Madame Gerson in astonishment.

Adrienne knew nothing. She was delighted moreover to know nothing. She heard this former friend relate how Sabine had, at one time, exhibited at the Salon. Oh! mere students' daubs, horrid things! Still-life subjects that might have passed for buried ones, and yet, perhaps, Cordier retouched them.

"I thought that Madame Gerson was on the best of terms with Madame Marsy," whispered Adrienne to Lissac, who replied:

"They have been on better! They perhaps will be so again. That is of very little importance. Women revile each other and associate at the same time."

Adrienne decided that she would not listen. She knew Sabine Marsy only slightly; she was not interested as a friend; but this little execution, gracefully carried out here by a woman who recently did the honors at the Salon of Boulevard Malesherbes seemed to her as cowardly as treachery. This, then, was society! And how right was her choice in preferring solitude!

Then, in order that she might not hear the slander that was greeted with applause by those very persons who but yesterday besieged Madame Marsy's buffet, and who would run to-morrow to pay court to that woman, she conversed with Lissac. She frankly told him what she suffered at Place Beauvau. She spoke of Sulpice, as Sulpice was loved by her beyond all else in the world.

"Fancy! I do not see him, hardly ever! The other week he passed two days at Laon, where an exposition was held at which he was present."

"An exposition at Laon?" asked Lissac, astonished. "What exposition?"

"I do not know. I know nothing myself. Perhaps it is wrong of me not to keep myself informed of passing events, but all that wearies me. I detest politics and journals—I am told quite enough about them. Politics! that which takes my husband from me! My uncle, Doctor Reboux, often said to me: 'Never marry a doctor; he is only half a husband.' Vaudrey is like a doctor. Always absent, with his everlasting night-sessions."

"Night-sessions?" asked Lissac.

"Yes, at the Chamber—continually—"

Guy determined to betray nothing of his astonishment; but he knew now as surely as if he had learned everything, why Sulpice neglected Adrienne. The fool! some girl from the Opera! some office-seeker who was skilfully entangling His Excellency! That appertained to his functions then? He was exasperated at Vaudrey and alternately looked at him and at Adrienne. So perfect a woman! Ravishing. What an exquisite profile, so delicate and with such a straight nose and a delightful mouth! Was Vaudrey mad then?

The guests rose from the table, and, as usual, the men went into the smoking-room, leaving the salon half-empty. Madame Gerson profited thereby to continue distilling her little slanders about Sabine, which she did while laughing heartily. In the smoking-room the men chatted away beneath the cloud that rose from their londres. The clarion tones of Warcolier rung out above all the other voices.

Guy, seated in a corner on a divan, was still thinking of Adrienne, of those night-sessions, of those expositions, of those agricultural competitions invented by Sulpice, and caught but snatches of the conversation, jests, and nonsensical stories which were made at the cost of the colleagues of the Chamber and political friends:

"You know how Badiche learned at the last election that he was not elected?"

"No, how?"

"He returned to his house, anxious as to the result of the ballot. And he heard, what do you think? His children, a little boy and a little girl, who on receipt of the telegram that papa was waiting for and that mamma in her feverish expectation had opened, had already composed a song to the air of The Young Man Poisoned:

Resultat tres negatif, Ballottage positif! Badiche est ballo— Bate, Est ballotte! Oui, Badiche est ballotte; C'est papa qu'est ballotte!

Happy precocity! genuine frightful gamins!"

"Du Gavarni!"

"Apropos, on what majority do you count, Monsieur le President?"

"One hundred and thirty-nine."

"That is a large one."

"I! my dear fellow,"—it was old Prangins speaking to Senator Crepeau,—"I do not count myself as likely to be included in the next ministry, no! I do not delude myself, but I shall be in the second—or rather in the third—no, in the fourth—yes, in the fourth ministry—Assuredly!"

An asthmatic cough, the cough of an old man, interrupted his remarks.

Guy heard Warcolier, as he held a small glass of kirsch in his hand, say with a laugh:

"I have a way of holding my electors in leash. Not only when I visit them do I address them as my friend, my brave, which flatters them, but from time to time, I write them autograph letters. They look upon that like ready money. Some of them, the good fellows, are flattered: 'He has written to me, he is not proud!' Others, the suspicious fellows, are reassured: 'Now—I have his signature, I have him!' And there you are!"

They laughed heartily.

"How they laugh afterward," thought Lissac, "at the electors whose shoes they would blacken beforehand."

"The course that I have followed is very simple," said another. "I desired to become sub-prefect so as to become a prefect and a prefect to become a deputy, and a deputy so as to reach a receiver-generalship. The salaries assured, why, there's the crowning of a career."

"Why, that fellow plays the whole gamut," again thought Guy, "but he is frank!"

"I read very little," now replied Crepeau to Warcolier—"I do not much care for pure literature—we politicians, we need substantial reading that will teach us to think."

"I believe you!—" murmured this Parisian Guy, still smoking and listening. "Go to school, my good man!"

The conversation thus intermingled and confused, horrified and irritated this blase by its gravity and selfishness. He summed up an entire character in a single phrase and shook his head as he very shrewdly remarked: "Suppose Universal Suffrage were listening?"

Lissac did not take any part in these conversations. It was his delight to observe. He drew amusement from all these wearisome commonplaces, according to his custom as a curious spectator.

He was about, however, to rise and approach Vaudrey, who was instinctively coming toward him, when the Prefect of Police, Monsieur Jouvenet, without noticing it, placed himself between the minister and his friend.

Jouvenet spoke in a low tone to Vaudrey, smiling at the same time very peculiarly and passing his fingers through his whiskers. Whatever discretion the prefect employed, Guy was near enough to him to hear the name of Marianne Kayser, which surprised him.

Marianne! what question of Marianne could there be between these two men?

Lissac observed that Vaudrey suddenly became very pale.

He drew still nearer, pretending to finish a cup of coffee while standing. Then he heard these words very distinctly:

"A reporter saw you leave her house the other evening!"

Guy moved away very quickly. He felt a sort of sudden bewilderment, as if the few words spoken by the Prefect of Police were the natural result of his conversation with Adrienne, an immediate response thereto.

"It would be astonishing if Marianne—" thought Lissac.

Besides, he would know soon. He would merely question Vaudrey.

As soon as Jouvenet, always polite, grave and impassive, had left "Monsieur le Ministre" in a state of visible nervousness, almost of anxiety, he entered upon his plan.

"You know Mademoiselle Kayser intimately then?" he asked Vaudrey, who, taken aback, looked at him for a moment without replying and endeavored to grasp Lissac's purpose.

"Am I imprudent?" further asked Guy.

"No, but who has told you—?"

"Nothing, your Prefect of Police only spoke a little too loud. He seemed to me to understand."

Vaudrey's hand rapidly seized Lissac's wrist.

"Hush! be silent!"

"Very well! Good!" said Lissac to himself. "Poor little Adrienne."

"I will tell you all about that later. Oh! nothing is more simple! It isn't what you think!"

"I am sure of that!" answered Lissac, with a smile.

In a mechanical way, and as if to evade his friend, Sulpice left the smoking-room for the salon, tritely observing:

"We must rejoin the ladies—the cigar kills conversation—"

He felt uncomfortable. It was the first time that Jouvenet had informed him that there are agents for learning the movements of ministers. The Prefect of Police, in a chance conversation at the Opera with the editor-in-chief of a very Parisian journal, had suppressed a rumor which stated that a minister hailing from Grenoble set propriety at defiance in his visits to Rue Prony. It would have been as well to print Vaudrey's name.

Hitherto he had been able to enjoy his passion for Marianne without scandal and secretly. His mysterious intrigue was now known to the police, to everybody, to a reporter who had stumbled against him on leaving a supper-party at the house of a courtesan in the neighborhood.

The minister was bitterly annoyed. The very flattering applause that the women bestowed upon him when he returned to the salon could not dissipate his ill-humor. He tried to chat and respond to the affected remarks of Madame Gerson and to the smiles of the women; but he was embarrassed and nervous. Adrienne thought he looked ill.

Everything was spoken of in the light but pretentious, easy tone of the conversation of those second-rate salons where neither ideas nor men are made, where, on the contrary, they are accepted, ready-made and en bloc. On every question, the picture in vogue, the favorite book, the man of the hour, they expressed themselves by the same stereotyped, expected word, borrowed from the ceaseless repetition of current polemics. Nothing was new. The conversation was as well worn as an old farthing. Adrienne was pained to see a man of Vaudrey's intelligence compelled to listen to these truisms and wondered if he would presently reproach her for having brought him into the suffocating void of this Parisian establishment where all was superficial, glittering and chic.

She was in a hurry to get away. She saw that Sulpice was growing weary, and took advantage of the first opportunity to whisper to him:

"Would you like to go?"

"Yes, let us go!" he said.

He sought Lissac and repeated to him that he would have something to say to him, and Guy bowed to the Minister and Madame Vaudrey, who left too early to please the Gersons.

Adrienne, out of heart and discouraged by commonplace gossip and slander, was eager to be again with her husband, to tell him that nothing could compensate her for the deep joy of the tete-a-tete, their evenings passed together as of old—he remembered them well,—when he read to her from the works of much-loved poets.

"Poetry!" said Vaudrey. "Will you be quiet! The Gersons would find me as antiquated as Ramel. It is old-fashioned."

"I am no longer surprised," added the young wife, "at being so little fashionable. Morally speaking, those hot-houses of platitudes stifle one. Never fear, Sulpice, I shall not be the one to ever again drag you into salons. Are you tired? Are you weary?"

"No, I was thinking of something else," replied Vaudrey, who really was thinking of Marianne.

Madame Vaudrey had not left Madame Gerson's salon before that pretty little Parisian whispered imprudently enough in the ear of a female friend:

"Our ministers' wives are always from Carpentras, Pont-a-Mousson, or Moulins; don't you think so?"

"And what would you have!" said Lissac, who on this evening heard everything that he ought not to hear, "it is as good as being from the Moulin-Rouge!"

Madame Gerson smiled, thought the expression charming, very apt, very happy, but again reflected that Lissac was exceedingly considerate toward Adrienne and that Madame Vaudrey was a little too indulgent toward Monsieur de Lissac.



V

Since the moment when it had entered her mind that she might find something more than a lover in Monsieur de Rosas, Marianne had been sorely puzzled. She was playing a strong hand. Between the minister and the duke she must make a choice.

She did not care seriously for Vaudrey. In fact she found that he was ridiculously unreserved. "He is a simple fellow!" she said to Claire Dujarrier. But she had sufficient amour-propre to retain him, and she felt assured that Sulpice was weak enough to obey her in everything: such an individual was not to be disdained. As to Rosas, she felt a sentiment which certainly was not love, but rather a feeling of astonishment, a peculiar affection. Rosas held her in respect, and she was flattered by his timid bearing, as he had in his veins the blood of heroes. He spoke almost entirely of his love, which, however, he never proposed to her to test, and this platonic course, which in Vaudrey's case she would have considered simple, appeared to her to be "good form" in the great nobleman's case. The duke raised her in her own eyes.

He had never repeated that word, doubtless spoken by him at random: marriage, and Marianne was too discreet and shrewd to appear to have specially noticed it. She did not even allude to it. She waited patiently. With the lapse of time, she thought, Rosas would be the more surely in her grasp. Meantime it was necessary to live and as she was bent on maintaining her household, she kept Vaudrey, whom she might need at any moment.

Her part was to carry on these two intrigues simultaneously, leading Rosas to believe that the minister was her friend only, nothing more, the patron of Uncle Kayser, and making Vaudrey think that since she had dismissed the duke he had become resigned and would "suppress his sighs." She could have sworn, in all sincerity, that Jose was not her lover.

To mislead Vaudrey was not a very difficult task. Sulpice was literally blinded by this love.—For a moment, he had been aroused by Jouvenet's intimation that his secret was known to others. For a while he seemed to have kept himself away from Marianne; but after taking new precautions, he returned trembling with ardent passion to Mademoiselle Vanda's hotel, where his mistress's kiss, a little languid, awaited him.

Months passed thus, the entire summer, the vacation of the Chamber, the dull season in Paris. Adrienne set out for Dauphiny, where Vaudrey was to preside over the Conseil-General, and she felt a childish delight on finding herself once more in the old house at Grenoble, where she had formerly been so happy! Yet even beneath this roof, within these walls, the mute witnesses of his virtuous love, especially when alone, Vaudrey thought of Marianne, he had but one idea, that of seeing her again, of clasping her in his arms, and he wrote her passionate letters each day, which she hardly glanced over and with a shrug of her shoulders burned as of no importance.

In the depths of his province he grew weary of the continual bustle of fetes, receptions held in his honor, addresses delivered by him, ceremonies over which he had to preside, deputations received, statues inaugurated. Statues! always statues! In the lesser towns, at Allevard or Marestel, he was dragged from the mairie to the Grande Place, between rows of firemen, in noisy processions, whose accompanying brass instruments split his ears, under pink-striped tents, draped with tricolor flags, before interminable files of gymnastic societies, glee clubs, corporate bodies, associations, Friends of Peace, or Friends of War societies! Then wandering harangues; commonplace remarks, spun out; addresses, sprinkled with Latin by professors of rhetoric; declarations of political faith by eloquent municipal councillors, all delighted to grab at a minister when the opportunity offered. How many such harangues Vaudrey heard! More than in the Chamber. More thickly they came, more compressed, more severe than in the Chamber. What advice, political considerations and remonstrances winding up with demands for offices! What cantatas that begged for subsidies! Everywhere demands: demands for subsidies, demands for grants, demands for help, demands for decorations! Nothing but harass, enervation, lassitude, deafening clamor. They wished to kill him with their shouts: Vive Vaudrey!

The Prefect and the Commandant General of the division were constantly on guard about Vaudrey, who was dragged about in torture between these two coat-embroidered officers. From the lips of the prefect, Vaudrey heard the same commonplace utterances: progress, the future, the fusion of parties and interests, the greatness of the department, the cotton trade and the tanneries, the glory of the minister who—of the minister whom—of the glorious child of the country—of the eagle of Dauphiny. Vive Vaudrey! Vive Vaudrey! The general, at least, varied his effects. He grumbled and wrung his hands, and on the day of the inauguration of the statue of a certain Monsieur Valbonnans, a former deputy and celebrated glove manufacturer,—also the glory of the country,—Vaudrey heard the soldier murmur from morning till night, with a movement of his jaw that made his imperial jerk: "I love bronze! I love bronze!" with a persistency that stupefied the minister.

This was, perhaps, the only recollection of a cheerful nature that Vaudrey retained of his trips in Isere. This eternal murmuring of the general: I love bronze! I love bronze! had awakened him, and he gayly asked himself what devilish sort of appetite that soldier had who continually repeated his phrase in a ravenous tone. Seated beside him on the platform, while the glee-club sung an elegy in honor of the late Monsieur Valbonnans, which was composed for the occasion by an amateur of the town:

Monsieur Valbonnans' praise let's chant, yes, chant! His gloves the best, as all must grant, The best extant!

while the flourish of trumpets took up the refrain and the firemen unveiled, amid loud acclamations, the statue of Monsieur Valbonnans, which bore these words on the pedestal: To the Inventor, the Patriot, the Merchant; while, too, the prefect still poured in Vaudrey's left ear his inexhaustible observations: the glove trade, the glory of Isere; the progress, the interest, the greatness of the department, the minister who—the minister whom—(Vive Vaudrey!) Sulpice still heard, even amid the acclamations, the mechanical rumbling of the general's voice, repeating, reasserting, rehearsing: "I love bronze! I love bronze!"

On the evening of the banquet, the minister at length obtained an explanation of this extraordinary affection. The general rose, grasping his glass as if he would shiver it, and while the parfait overflowed on to the plates, he cried in a hoarse voice, as if he were at the head of his division:

"I love bronze—I love bronze—because it serves for the erection of statues and the casting of cannon. I love bronze because its voice wins battles, the artillery being to-day the superior branch, although the cavalry is the most chivalrous! I love bronze because it is the image of the heart of the soldier, and I should like to see in our country an army of men of bronze who—whom—"

He became confused and muddled, and rolled his white eyes about in his purpled face and to close his observations brandished his glass as if it had been his sword, and amid a frenzy of applause from the guests, he valiantly howled: "I love bronze! I love bronze!"

Vaudrey could scarcely prevent himself from laughing hysterically, in spite of his ministerial dignity, and when he returned to Grenoble, his carriage full of the flowers that they had showered on him, he could only answer to Adrienne, who asked him if he had spoken well, if it had been a fine affair, by throwing his bouquets on the floor and saying:

"I have laughed heartily, but I am crushed, stupefied! What a headache!"

And Sulpice wrote all that to Marianne, and innocent that he was, told her: "Ah! all those applauding voices are not worth a single word from you! When shall I see you, Marianne, dear heart?"

"At the latest possible date!" the dear heart said.

She regarded the close of summer and the beginning of autumn with extreme vexation, for it would bring with it the parliamentary session and Vaudrey, and inflict on her the presence of her lover.

Sulpice provided her liberally with all that her luxurious appetites demanded, and it was for good reasons that she decided not to break with him, although for a long time she had sacrificed this man in her inclinations. "Ah! when I shall be able to bounce him!" she said, expressing herself like a courtesan. She could not, she would not accept anything from Rosas. On that side, the game was too fine to be compromised. She could with impunity accept the position of mistress of Vaudrey, but with Jose she must appear to preserve, as it were, an aureole of modesty, of virginal charms, that she did not possess.

In fact, the Spaniard's mind became singularly crystallized, and she turned this result to good account: in proportion as he associated himself with the real Marianne, he created a fictitious Marianne, ideal, kind, spirituelle, perhaps ignorant, but subtile and corrupted in mind, who amused and disconcerted him at one and the same time. He had left the Continental Hotel, and rented a house on Avenue Montaigne, Champs-Elysees, where he sometimes entertained Marianne as he might have done a princess. At such times she gossiped while smoking Turkish tobacco. Her Parisian grace, her champagne-like effervescent manner, seduced and charmed this serious, pale traveller, whose very smile was tinged with melancholy.

He completely adored this woman and no longer made an effort to resist. He entirely forgot that it was through Guy that he had known her. It seemed to him that he had himself discovered her, and besides, she had never loved Guy. No, certainly not. She was frank enough to acknowledge everything. Then she denied that Lissac ever—Then what! If it should be true? But no! no! Marianne denied it. He blindly believed in Marianne.

All the conflicting, frantic arguments that men make when they are about to commit some foolish action were at war in Jose's brain. The more so as he did not attempt to analyze his feelings. He passed, near this pretty woman whose finger-tips he hardly dared kiss, the most delicious summer of his life. Once, however, on going out with Marianne in the Champs-Elysees, he had met the old Dujarrier with the swollen eyelids and the yellow hair that he had known formerly. One of his friends, the Marquis Vergano, had committed suicide at twenty for this woman who was old enough to be his mother. The Dujarrier had stopped and greeted Marianne, but as she remarked herself, a thousand bows and scrapes were thrown away, for Rosas had hardly noticed her with a glacial look.

"Why do you return that woman's salutation?" he at once asked Marianne.

"I need her. She has done me services."

"That is surprising! I thought her incapable of doing anything but harm."

He did not dream of Mademoiselle Kayser's coming in contact with courtesans. In the tiny, virtuous room in Rue Cuvier, Rosas thought that Marianne was in her true surroundings. She would frequently sit at the piano—one of the few pieces of furniture contained in this apartment,—and play for Rosas Oriental melodies that would transport him far away in thought, to the open desert, by the slow lulling of David's Caravane, then abruptly change to that familiar air, that rondeau of the Varietes that he hummed yonder, on his dunghill, forsaken—

"Voyez-vous, la-bas, Cette maison blanche—"

"I love that music-hall air!" she said.

He now no longer meditated resuming travel, or quitting Paris. Mademoiselle Kayser's hold on him grew more certain every day. The suspicion of odd mystery that enveloped this girl intensified his passion.

He sometimes asked her what her uncle was doing.

"He? Why, he has obtained, thanks to Monsieur Vaudrey, the decoration of a hydropathic establishment, Les Thermes des Batignolles. He has commenced the cartoon for a fresco: Massage Moralizing the People. We shall see that in his studio."

"Do you know," Marianne continued, "what I would like to see?"

"What, then?"

"Spain, your own country. Where were you born, Rosas?"

"At Toledo. I own the family chateau there."

"With portraits and armor?"

"Yes, with portraits and armor."

"Well, I would like to go to Toledo, to see that chateau. It must be magnificent."

"It is gloomy, simply gloomy. A fortress on a rock. Gray stone, a red rock, scorched by the sun. Huge halls half Moorish in style. Walls as thick as those of a prison. Steel knights, standing with lance in hand as in Eviradnus! Old portraits of stern ancestors cramped in their doublets, or Duchesses de Rosas, with pale faces, sad countenances, buried in their collars whose guipures have been limned by Velasquez or Claude Coello. Immense cold rooms where the visitors' footfalls echo as over empty tombs. A splendor that savors of the vault. You would die of ennui at the end of two hours and of cold at the end of eight days."

"Die of cold in Spain?"

"There is a cold of the soul," the duke replied with a significant smile. "That I have travelled so much, is probably due to my desire to escape from that place! But you at Toledo, at Fuentecarral,—that is the name of my castle,—a Parisian like you! It would be cruel. As well shut up a humming-bird in a bear-pit. No! thank God, I have other nooks in Spain that will shelter us, my dear sparrow of the boulevards! Under the Andalusian jasmines, beneath the oleanders of Cordova or Seville, under the fountains whose basins are decorated with azulejos, and in which sultanas bathe, my jasmins could never sufficiently exhale their perfume, my fountains could never murmur harmoniously enough to furnish you a joyous welcome—when you go—if you go—But Toledo! My terrible castle Fuentecarral! It is in vain that I am impenitently romantic, I would not take you there for anything in the world. It would be as if ice fell on your shoulders. Fuentecarral? Ugh!—that smacks of death."

While he spoke, Marianne looked at him with kindling eyes and in thought roamed through those sweet-scented gardens, and she craved to see herself in that tomblike fortress Fuentecarral, passing in front of the pale female ancestors of Rosas, aghast at the froufrou of the Parisian woman.

Jose thought Marianne's burning glance was an expression of her love. Ah! how completely the last six months in Paris had riveted him to this woman, who was the mistress of another! One day,—Vaudrey had just left Marianne at the rond-point of the Champs-Elysees,—the duke seeing her enter his house, said abruptly to her:

"I was about to write you, Marianne."

"Why, my dear duke?"

"To ask an appointment."

"You are always welcome, my friend, at our little retreat."

He made her sit down, seized both her hands, and looked at her earnestly as he said:

"Swear to me that you have never been Lissac's mistress!"