He no longer thought of anything but what he saw: salutations, bowed heads, inclinations that succeeded each other with the regularity of a clock, that succession of homages to the little Grenoble advocate, now become Prime Minister.

Oblivious of everything else, he had lost the recollection of his mistress, and he suddenly grew pale and looked instinctively with terror at Adrienne, who was as pale as a corpse.—A visitor had just been announced by the usher, in his metallic voice, and the name that he cried mechanically, as he had uttered all the others, echoed there like an insult.

Guy de Lissac shook through his entire frame, as he too heard it.

"Monsieur Simon Kayser and Mademoiselle Kayser!"—cried the usher.

Still another name rang out from that clarion voice:

"Monsieur le Duc de Rosas!"

Neither Vaudrey nor Adrienne heard this name. Sulpice felt urged to rush toward Marianne to entreat her to leave. It is true, he had invited her. In spite of Jouvenet who knew all, and in spite of so many others who suspected the truth, she desired to be present at that fete at the ministry and to show herself to all. Vaudrey had warned her, however. He had written to her a few hours before, entreating her, nay, almost commanding, her, not to come, and she was there. She entered, advancing with head erect, leaning on the arm of her uncle, his white cravat hidden by his artist's beard and on his lips a disdainful smile.

Adrienne asked herself whether she was really dreaming now. Approaching her, she saw, crossing the salon with a queenly step, that lovely, insolent creature, trailing a long black satin skirt, her superb bosom imprisoned in a corsage trimmed with jet, and crossed, as it were, with a blood-red stripe formed by a cordon of roses. Marianne's fawn-colored head seemed to imperiously defy from afar the pale woman who stood with her two hands falling at her side as if overwhelmed.

The vision, for vision it was, approached like one of the nightmares that haunt people's dreams. Adrienne's first glance encountered the direct gaze of Marianne's gray eyes. Behind Mademoiselle Kayser came De Rosas, his ruddy Castilian face that was ordinarily pensive beamed to-day, but Madame Vaudrey did not perceive him. She saw only this woman, the woman who was approaching her, in her own house, insolently, impudently, to defy her after having outraged her, to insult her after having deceived her!

Adrienne felt a violent wrath rising within her and suddenly her entire being seemed longing to bound toward Marianne, to drive her out after casting her name in her teeth.

Instinctively she looked around her with the wild glance of a wretched woman who no longer knows what to do, as if seeking for some assistance or advice.

Vaudrey's wan pallor and Lissac's supplicating gesture appealed to her and at once restored her to herself. It was true! she had no right to cause a scandal. She was within the walls of the ministry, in a common salon into which this girl had almost a right to enter, just like so many others lost in the crowd of guests. For Adrienne, it was not merely a question of personal vanity or honor that was at stake, but also Vaudrey's reputation. She felt herself in view, ah! what a word:—in view, that it to say, she was like an actress to whom neither a false step nor a false note is permitted; compelled to smile while death was at her heart, to parade while her entrails were torn with grief, forced to feign and to wear a mask in the presence of all who were there, and to lie to all the invited guests, indifferent and inimical, as Ramel said, and who were looking about ready at any moment to sneer and to hiss.

She recovered, by an effort that swelled her heart, strength to show nothing of the feeling of indignant rebellion that was stifling her.

She closed her eyes.

Marianne Kayser passed onward, losing herself with Simon and De Rosas in the human furrow that opened before her and immediately closed upon her, and followed by a murmur of admiration.

Adrienne had not however seen the pale, insolent countenance of the young woman so closely approach her suffering and disconsolate face. Above all, she had not seen the jealous, rapid glance that flashed unconsciously in Vaudrey's eyes when he saw Jose de Rosas triumphantly following the imperious Marianne. Ah! that look of sorrowful anger would have penetrated like a red-hot iron into Adrienne's soul. That glance that Guy caught a glimpse of told eloquently of wounded love and bruised vanity on the part of that man who, placed here between these two women, his mistress and the other, suffered less from the sorrow caused to Adrienne than from Marianne's treason in deserting him for this Spaniard.

Lissac was exasperated. He felt prompted to rush between Marianne and Rosas and say to him:

"You are mad to accompany this woman! Mad and ridiculous! She is deceiving you as she has deceived Vaudrey, as she has deceived me, and as she will deceive everybody."

He purposely placed himself in Mademoiselle Kayser's way. She had appeared scarcely to recognize him and had brushed against him without apparent emotion, but with a disdainful pout. Her arm had sought that of Rosas, as if she now were sure of her duke.

Guy too, felt that he could not cause a scene at the ball, for this would have brought a scandal on Vaudrey. He had just before repeated to Adrienne: "Courage." This was now his own watchword, and yet he sought out Jouvenet to whisper to the Prefect of Police what he thought of his conduct. Jouvenet had come and gone. Granet, as if he had divined Lissac's preoccupation, looked at him sneeringly as he whispered to the fat Molina who was seated near him:

"Alkibiades!"

The soiree, moreover, was terribly wearisome to Lissac. He wandered from group to group to find some one with whom to exchange ideas but he hardly found anyone besides Denis Ramel. The same political commonplaces retailed everywhere, at Madame Gerson's or at Madame Marsy's, as in the corridors of the Chamber, were re-decocted and reproduced in the corners of the salon of the Ministry, and around the besieged buffet attacked by the most ferocious gluttony. Interpellation, Majority, New Cabinet, Homogeneous, Ministry of the Elections, Ballot, One Man Ballot. Guy went, weary of the conflict, to the room in which the concert was given and listened to some operatic piece, or watched between the heads, the hidden profile of some female singer or an actor and heard the bursts of laughter that greeted the new monologue The Telephone, rendered in a clear voice with the coolness of an English clown, by a gentleman in a dress coat: See! I am Monsieur Durand—you know, Durand—of Meaux?—Exactly—A woman deceives me—How did I learn it?—By the telephone. My friend Durand—Durand—of Etampes—We are not related—Emile Durand said to me: Durand, why haven't you a telephone?—It is true, I hadn't one—Durand—the other Durand—Durand—of Etampes—has one—Then—And Lissac, somewhat listless, left this corner of the salon and stumbled against a group of men who surrounded an old gentleman much decorated, wearing the grand cordon rouge crosswise, a yellow ribbon at his neck, who, with the gravity of an English statesman, said, thrusting his tongue slightly forward to secure his false teeth from falling:

"I like monologues less than chansonnettes!—I, who address you, have taken lessons from Levassor."

"Levassor, Your Excellency?" answered in chorus a lot of little bald-headed young men—diplomats.

"Levassor," replied the old gentleman who was the very celebrated ambassador of a great foreign power. "Oh! I was famous in the song: The Englishman Who Was Seasick!"

While the little young men smiled, approved and loudly applauded, the old ambassador to whom the interests of a people were entrusted, hummed in a low tone, amid the noise of the reception:

"Aoh! aoh! Je suis melede, Bien melede! Tres melede!"

Guy de Lissac shrugged his shoulders. He had heard a great deal of this man. This diplomat of the chansonnette evoked his pity. Where was he then? At Paris or at Brives-la-Gaillarde? At a ball at the Hotel Beauvau or in some provincial sub-prefecture?

Just before, he had heard Warcolier utter this epic expression:

"If I were minister, I would give fireworks. They are warlike and inoffensive at the same time!"

The voice of a young man with a Russian accent who talked politics in a corner, pleased him:

"I am," he said aloud, "from a singular country: the Baltic provinces, where society is governed by deputies who, by birth, have the right to make laws, and I consider politics so tiresome, fatiguing and full of disgust and weariness as an occupation, that one ought to consider one's self most fortunate that there are people condemned to take hold of this rancid pie, while others pass their lives in thinking, reading, talking and loving."

"That is good," thought Lissac. "There is one, at least, who is not so stupid. It is true, perhaps because I think just the same."

Nevertheless, he went and listened, mixing with the crowd, haphazard. His preoccupation was not there. In reality, he thought only of Adrienne. How the poor woman must suffer!

With a feeling of physical and moral overthrow, she had left the threshold of the salon, where she had been standing since the commencement of the soiree. She was mixing with the crowd in her desire to forget her sorrows amid the deafening of the music, the songs, the laughter, and the murmur of the human billows that filled her salons. She had taken her place in front of the little improvised theatre, beside all those ladies who dissected her toilette, scanned her pallid face, analyzed and examined her piece by piece, body and soul. But there, seated near the stage, exactly in front of her, exposing, as in a stall, her blonde beauty, and radiant as a Titian, was that Marianne whose gleaming white shoulders appeared above her black satin corsage. Again she saw her, as but a little while before, unavoidable, haughty and bold, smiling with insolence.

At every minute she was attracted by a movement of a head, or fan, or a laugh from this pretty creature, who leaned toward Sabine Marsy, then raised her brow and showed, in all the brilliancy of fatal beauty, her black corsage, striped with those fine red roses. And now Adrienne's anger, the grief that she had trampled under for some hours, increased from moment to moment, heightened and stung by the sight of this creature, by all kinds of bitter thoughts and by visions of treason and baffled love. She felt that she was becoming literally mad at the thought that, upon those red and painted lips, Sulpice had rested his, that his hands had stroked those shoulders, unwound that hair, that this woman's body had been folded in his arms. Ah! it was enough to make her rise and cry out to that creature: "You are a wretch. Get you gone! Get you gone, I say!"

And if she did so?

Why not? Had they the right to scorn her thus in public because she owned an official title and position? Was not this vulgar salon of a furnished mansion her salon then?

Now it seemed to her that they were whispering about her; that they were sneering behind their fans, and that all these women knew her secret and her history.

Why should they not know them? All Paris must have read that mocking, offensive and singular article: The Mistress of an Archon! All these people had, perhaps, learned it by heart. There were people here who frequented the salons and who probably kept the article in their pockets.

Yes, that would be to commit a folly, to brave everything and to destroy all!

Sulpice, then, did not know her; he believed her to be insignificant because she was gentle, resigned to everything because she was devoted to his love and his glory?—Ah! devoted even to the point of killing herself, devoted to the extent of dying, or living poor, working with her own hands, if only he loved her, if only he never lied to her!

"And here was his mistress!"

His mistress! His mistress!

She repeated this name with increasing rage, reiterating it, inwardly digesting it, as if it were something terribly bitter. His mistress, that lovely, insolent creature! Yes, very lovely, but manifestly terrible and capable of driving a feeble being like Vaudrey to commit every folly, nay, worse, infamy.

"And it is such women that are loved! Ah! Idiots! idiots that we are!"

The first part of the concert was terminating. Happily, too, for Adrienne was choking. The minister must, as a matter of politeness, express his thanks to the cantatrices from the Opera, and to the actresses from the Comedie Francaise, the artistes whose names appeared on the programme. Vaudrey was obliged to pass the rows of chairs in order to reach the little salon behind the stage, which served as a foyer. Adrienne saw him coming to her side, and looking very pale, though he made an effort to smile. He was uncomfortable and anxious. In passing before Marianne, he tried to look aside, but Mademoiselle Kayser stopped him in spite of himself, by slightly extending her foot and smiling at him, when he turned toward her, with a prolonged, interested and strange expression.

Adrienne felt that she was about to faint. She took a few tottering steps out of the salon, then she stopped as if her head were swimming. Some one was on hand to support her. She felt that a hand was holding her arm, she heard some one whisper in her ear:

"It is too much, is it not?"

She recognized Lissac's voice.

Guy looked at her for a moment, quite prepared for this great increase of suffering.

"Take me away," she murmured. "I can bear no more!—I can bear no more!"

She was longing to escape from all that noise, that atmosphere that lacked air, and from Marianne's look and smile that pierced her. She went, as if by chance, instinctively guiding Lissac, led by him to a little, salon far from the reception rooms, and which was reserved for her and protected by a door guarded by an usher. It might have been thought that she expected this solitude would be necessary to her as an escape from the fright of that reception, to which her overstrained and sick nerves made her a prey.

In passing, Lissac had whispered to Ramel, who was at his elbow:

"Tell Sulpice that Madame Vaudrey is ill!"

"Ill?"

"You see that she is!"

When Adrienne was within the little salon hung with garnet silk draperies, in which the candelabras and sconces were lighted, she sank into an armchair, entirely exhausted and overwhelmed by the fearful resistance she had made to her feelings. She remained there motionless, her eye fixed, her face pale, and both hands resting on the arms of her chair, abstractedly looking at the pattern of the carpet.

Guy stood near, biting his lips as he thought of the madman Vaudrey and that wretched Marianne.

"She at least obeys her instincts! But he!"

"Ah! it is too much; yes, it is too much!" repeated Adrienne, as if Lissac were again repeating that phrase.

It seemed to her that she had been thrust into some cowardly situation; that she had been subjected to a shower of filth! It was hideous, repugnant. She now saw, in the depths of her life, events that she had never before seen; her vision had suddenly become clear. Dark details she could now explain. Vaudrey's falsehoods were suddenly manifested.

"He lied! Ah! how he had lied!"

She recalled his anxiety to hide the journals from her, his oft-repeated suggestions, his precautions, the increasing number of his night-sessions that made him pale. Pale from debauchery! And she pitied him! She begged him not to kill himself for the politics that was eating his life. Again she saw on the lips of her Wednesday's guests the furtive smiles that were hidden behind muffs when she spoke of those nocturnal sessions of the Chamber, which were only nights passed in Marianne's bed! How those Parisians must have laughed at her and ridiculed the credulity of the woman who believes herself loved, but who is deceived and mocked at! Madame Gerson, Sabine! How overjoyed they must have been when, in their salons, they referred to the little, stupid Provincial who was ignorant of these tricks!

She felt ridiculed and tortured, more tortured than baffled, for her vanity was nothing in comparison with her love, her poor, artless and trusting love!

"Sulpice, I should never have believed—Never!—"

Why had they left Grenoble, their little house on the banks of the Isere? They loved each other there, it was Paris that had snatched him away! Paris! She hated it now. She hated that reputation that had carried Vaudrey into office, the politics that had robbed her of a kind and loving husband,—for he had loved her, she was sure of that,—and which had made him the lover of a courtesan, the liar and coward that he was!

"Do you see?" she said to Lissac suddenly. "I detest these walls!"

She pointed to the gilded ceilings with an angry gesture.

"Since I entered here, my life has come to a close!—It is that, that which has taken him from me!—Ah! this society, this politics, these meannesses, this life exposed to every one and everything, to temptation and to fall, I am entirely sick of, I am disgusted with. Let me be snatched from it, let me be taken away! Everywhere here, one might say, there is an atmosphere of lying!"

"Do you hear? She laughs, she is happy! She! And I, ah! I!"

She had risen to her feet, suddenly recovering all her energy, as if stirred by the air of a Hungarian dance, whose strains dimly reached them from the distant, warm salons, where Marianne was disporting her beauty—

"Ah! I hate this hotel, the noise and the women!" said Adrienne. "This horde ranged about the buffet, this salon turned into a restaurant, the false salutations, the commonplace protestations,—this society, all this society, I detest it!—I will have no more of it!—It seems to me that it all is mocking me, and that its smiles are only for that courtesan!—But if I had driven her out?—Who brought her?"

"Her uncle and Monsieur de Rosas!"

"Monsieur de Rosas?"

"Who marries her!"

Adrienne nervously uttered a loud, harsh laugh, as painful as if it were caused by a spasm.

"Who marries her! Then these creatures are married?—Ah! they are married—They are honored, too, are they not? And because they are more easy of approach, they are thought more beautiful and more agreeable than those who are merely honest wives? Ah! it is too silly!—Rosas! I took him for a man of sense!—If I were to tell him myself that she is my husband's mistress, what would the duke answer?"

"He would not believe you, and you would not do that, madame!" said Lissac.

"Why?"

"Because it would be an act of cowardice, and because you are the best, the noblest of women!"

Instinctively he drew near her, lowering his voice, embracing with his glance that fine, charming beauty, that grief heightened by a burning brilliancy.

She raised her fine, clear eyes to Lissac, whose look troubled her, and said:

"And how have these served me?—Kindness, trickery!—Trickery, chastity!—Ask all these men! All of them will go to Mademoiselle Kayser and not to me!"

"To you, madame," murmured Guy, "all that there is of devotion and earnestness, yes, all of the tenderest and the truest will go to you as respectful homage."

"Respect?—Yes, respect to us!—And with it goes the home! But to her! Ah! to her, love! And what if I wish to be loved myself?"

"Loved by him!" said Lissac in a low tone, as if he did not know what he said; and his hands instinctively sought Adrienne's. They trembled.

A woman's perfume and something like the keen odor of flowers assailed his nostrils. He had never felt the impulse of burning compassion which at a sign from this saint, would have driven him to attempt the impossible, to affront the noisy throng yonder.

"Loved by him, yes, by him!" answered Adrienne, with the mournful shake of the head of one who sees her joy vanish in the distance like a sinking bark.

She had been so happy! She had thought herself so dearly loved! Ah! those many cowardly lies uttered by Sulpice!

"Do not speak to me of him!" she suddenly said. "I hate him, too!—I do more than that! I despise him! I never wish to see him again!—never. You hear! never!"

"What will you do?" Lissac asked.

"I know nothing about it!—I wish to leave! Now, I have no more parading to make in this ball, I think, I have no longer to receive the guests whose insulting smiles were like blows! I will go, go!"

"Adrienne!"

"Will go at once!"

She felt no astonishment at hearing the name Adrienne spoken suddenly and unreflectingly by Guy de Lissac.

She looked at him with a glance that reached his soul, not knowing what she said:

"Leave now! While the ball is in progress. To leave solitude to him, suddenly—here! And that woman, if he wishes her, and if the other who is marrying her will yield her to him!"

She was carried away, her mind wandered, as if unbalanced by her grief, all her efforts at self-control ending in a relaxation of her strained nerves.

"I will leave!—I do not wish to see him again!"

"Leave to-night?"

"For Grenoble—I don't know where!—But to fly from him; ah! yes; to escape from him! Take me away, Monsieur de Lissac!" she said distractedly, as she seized his hand. "I should go mad here!"

She had unconsciously taken refuge, as it were, in the arms of the man who loved her, and Lissac felt the exquisite grace of the body abandoned to him, without the woman's reflecting upon it, without loving him, lost—

It is quite certain that in her nervous, heart-broken condition, Adrienne was not considering whether his affection for her sprung from friendship or from love.

For a moment this master skeptic, Guy, felt that he was committing the greatest folly of his life.

The young woman did not understand; nevertheless, even without love, he clearly felt that this chasteness and grace, all that there was exquisitely seductive about her, belonged to him—if he dared—

"You are feverish, Adrienne," he said, as he took her hands as he would a child's.

"I am choking here!—I wish to leave!—take me away!"

"Nonsense," said Lissac. "What are you thinking about? They are calling for you, yonder."

"It is because they call for me that I wish to escape. Don't you see that I abhor all those people; that I detest them as much as I despise them? Take me away!"

Lissac had become very pale. He tried to smile at Adrienne—the heroic smile of a wounded man undergoing amputation—and he whispered:

"Don't you know very well, madame, that you would not have taken two steps in the street, on my arm, before you would become a lost woman?"

"Well," she said, "what of that, since it is they who are loved!—"

"No, madame," Guy replied, "I love you. I may say so, because you are a virtuous woman, and I have no right to take you away, do you understand? because I love you."

He, too, had summoned all his strength to impart to his confession, which he would have expressed with ardor, the cold tone of a phrase.

But that was enough. Adrienne recoiled before this avowal.

He loved her. He told her so!

It is true, she could not leave the mansion on his arm.

She rested her glance on Lissac and extended her hand to him, saying, as she felt suddenly recalled to herself:

"You are an honest man!"

"According to my moods," said Guy, with a sad smile.

The door of the little salon opened, and Ramel entered.

"I have called in a doctor," he said.

"For me?" asked Adrienne. "Thanks! I am quite strong!"

Then boldly going to Ramel:

"Will you have the goodness to take me to Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin, Monsieur Ramel?"

"Why?"

"Because I will not remain one hour longer in a house where my husband has the right to receive his mistress!—Monsieur de Lissac refuses to accompany me. Your arm, Ramel!"

"Madame," Ramel answered gently, "I knew that Monsieur de Lissac was a man of intelligence. It seems to me that he is a man of heart. You should remain here for your own sake, for your name's sake, for your husband's. It is your duty. As to Mademoiselle Kayser, you can return to the salons, for she has just left with Monsieur de Rosas."

Adrienne remained for a moment with her sad eyes fixed on Ramel; then shaking her head:

"You knew it also? Everybody knew it then, except me?"

"Well!" said Ramel, a good-natured smile playing in his white mustache, "now it is necessary to forget."

"Never!" replied Adrienne.

Then proudly drawing herself up, she took Denis's arm and without even glancing in her mirror, she went off toward the salons.

"Your bouquet, madame," said Lissac, who was still pale and his voice trembled.

"True!" said Adrienne.

She fastened her bouquet of drooping roses to her corsage and without daring to look at Lissac again, she re-entered, leaning on Ramel's arm.

Left alone in the salon, Guy remained a moment to shake his head.

"Poor, dear creature!" he said. "If I had been young enough not to understand the position in which her madness placed me, or base enough to profit by it, what a pretty little preface to a great folly she was about to commit this evening! Well! this attack of morality will perhaps count in my favor some day."

He stooped down and picked up a rose that had fallen from Adrienne's bouquet to the carpet.

He smiled as he took up the flower and looked at it.

"One learns at any age!" he thought, as he put the flower in his coat. "That, at least, is a love souvenir that they will not send the police to rob me of."



VII

On rising the following morning, after a feverish night, Sulpice realized a feeling of absolute moral destruction. It seemed to him that he had lost a dear being. In that huge, silent hotel one would have thought that a corpse was lying. He did not dare to present himself to Adrienne. He could not tell what to say to her. He went downstairs slowly, crossing the salons that were still decorated with the now fading flowers, to reach his cabinet. The carpet was littered with the broken leaves of dracaenas and petals that had fallen from the azaleas, and presented the gloomy, forsaken aspect peculiar to the morrow of a fete. The furniture, stripped of its coverings, offered the faded tint of old maids at their rising. With heavy head, he sat at his desk and looked at the piled-up documents with a vague expression. Always the eternal pile of despatches, optimistic reports, and banal summaries of the daily press. Nothing new, nothing interesting, all was going well. This tired world had no history.

The minister still remained there, absorbed as after an unhealthy insomnia, when Warcolier entered, ever serious, with his splendid, redundant phrases and his usual attitude of a pedantic rhetor. He came to inform the minister that a matter of importance, perhaps of a troublesome nature, loomed on the horizon. Granet was preparing an interpellation. Oh! upon a matter without any real importance. An affair of a procession that had taken place at Tarbes, accompanied by some little disturbance. It was only a pretext, but it was sufficient, perhaps, to rally a majority around the minister of to-morrow. Old Henri de Prangins, with his eye on a portfolio, and always thirsting for power, was keeping Granet company: the man who would never be a minister with the man who was sure to be.

"Well, what has this to do with me?" asked Vaudrey indifferently.

Granet! Prangins! He was thinking of a very different matter. Adrienne knew all and Marianne deceived him. She was to marry Rosas.

The very serious Warcolier manifested much surprise at the little energy displayed by Monsieur le Ministre. He expected to see him bound, in order to rebound, as he said, believing himself witty. Was Vaudrey himself giving up the game? Was Granet then sure of the game? He surmised it and had already taken the necessary measures in that direction. But surely if Granet were the rising sun, Vaudrey was himself abandoning his character of the setting sun. He was not setting, he was falling. A sovereign contempt for this man entered Warcolier's lofty soul, Warcolier the friend of success.

"Then you do not understand, Monsieur le President?"

Vaudrey drew himself up with a sudden movement that was frequent with him. He struck the table on which his open portfolio rested, and said:

"I understand that Granet wants that portfolio! Well, be it so! I set little store by it, but he does not have it yet!"

"That is something like it! It is worthy of a brave man to show a resolute front to his enemies! It is in battle that talent is retempered, as formerly in the Styx were tempered—"

"I know," said Sulpice.

Warcolier's intelligent smile was not understood by the minister.

Sulpice, who was in despair over his shattered domestic joys, had no wish to enter on a struggle except to bring about a reaction on himself. To hold his own against Granet, was to divert his own present sadness.

"All right," he said to Warcolier. "Let Granet interpellate us when he pleases—In eight days, to-morrow, yes, to-day even, I am ready!"

"Interpellate us!" thought Warcolier. "You should say, interpellate you."

He had already got out of the scrape himself.

Vaudrey debated with himself as to whether he would try to see Adrienne. No? What should he say to her? It would be better to let a little time shed its balm upon the wound. Then, too, if he wished to bar the way to Granet, he had not too much time before him. The shrewd person should act promptly.

"I shall see him on the Budget Committee!" thought Vaudrey.

He found it necessary now to force an interest in the struggle which a few months before would have found him eagerly panting to enter on. The honeymoon of his love of power had passed. He had too keenly felt, one after another, the discouragements of the office that he sought in order to do good, to reform, to act, in the pursuit of which he found himself, from the first moment, clashing with routine, old-fashioned ideas, petty ambitions, the general welfare, all the brood of selfish interests. It had been his to dream a sort of Chimera bearing the country toward Progress on outstretched wings: he found himself entangled in the musty mechanism of a worn-out and rancid-smelling engine, that dragged the State as a broken-winded horse might have done. Then, little by little, weariness and disgust had penetrated the heart of this visionary who desired to live, to assert himself in putting an end to so many abuses, and whom his colleagues, his chiefs of division, his chief of service, the chief of the State himself cautiously advised: "Make no innovations! Let things go! That has gone on so for so long! What is the use of changing? It will still do very well!"

Ah! it was to throw off the shackles and to try the impossible! Vaudrey found himself hemmed in between his dearest hopes and the most disheartening realities. He was asked for offices, not reforms. The men charged with the fate of the country were not straggling after progress, they were looking after their own interests, their landed and shopkeeping interests. He felt nauseated by all this. He held those deputies in contempt who besieged his cabinet and filled his antechamber in order to beg, claim and demand. All of them sought something, and they were almost strangled by the solicitations of their own constituents. They appeared to Sulpice to be rather the commissionaires of universal suffrage than the servants. This abasement before the manipulators of the votes made Vaudrey indignant. He felt that France was becoming by degrees a vast market for favors, a nation in which everyone asked office from those who to keep their own promised everything, and the thought filled him with terror. The ministers, wedded to their positions, became the mere servants of the deputies, while the latter obeyed the orders of their constituents. All was kept within a vast network of office-seeking and trafficking. And with it all, a hatred of genuine talent, bitter selfishness and the crushing narrowness of ideas!

Vaudrey recalled a story that had been told him, how during the Empire, the Emperor, terrified, feeling himself isolated, asked and searched for a man, and how a certain little bell in the Tuileries was especially provided to warn the chamberlains of the entry into the chateau of a new face, of the visit of a stranger, in order that the camarilla, warned by the particular ring, would have time to place themselves on their guard, and to send the newcomer to the right about if he might become an aid to the master and a danger to the servants. Well! Sulpice did not hear that invisible and secret bell, but he guessed its presence, he divined its presence around him, warning the interested, always ready to chase away the stranger; he felt that its secret thread was everywhere thrown around the powerful, the mighty of four days or a quarter of a century and that, so long as influence existed in the world, there would be courtiers and that these courtiers, eager for a crumb, would prevent the stranger, that is to say, truth, from reaching the light, fearing that this stranger might play the part of the lion and chase the flies away from the honeycomb.

Thus, how much nausea and contempt he felt for that transient power which in spite of himself was rendered useless! A power that placed him at the mercy of the bawling of a colleague or an enemy, and even at the mercy of that all-powerful master so readily dissatisfied: everybody. He had seen, at too close quarters, the vile intrigues, the depressing chafferings, the grinding of that political kitchen in which so many people,—this Warcolier with his voluble rhetoric, this Granet with his conceited smile of superiority,—were hungering to hold the handle of the saucepan. He recalled a remark that Denis Ramel had often repeated to him: "What is the use of putting one's self out in order to bask in the sunshine? The best are in the shade."

He was seized with lawful indignation against his own ambitions, against the lack of energy that prevented him from sweeping away all obstacles,—men, and routine,—and he recalled with afflicting bitterness his entry on public life, in the blaze of divine light, and his dreams, his poor noble dreams! "A great minister! I will be a great minister!"

"Ah! yes, indeed! one is a minister, that is all! And that is enough! It is often too much! We shall see indeed what he will do, that Granet who ought to do so much!"

Vaudrey laughed nervously.

"What he will do? Nothing! Nothing! Still nothing! That is very easy! To do anything, one should be a great man and not a politician captivated with the idea of reaching the summit of power. Ah! parbleu! to be a great man! 'That is the question.'"

He grew very excited over the proud rebellion of his old faith and shattered hopes against the negative success he had obtained. Besides, there was no reason for giving up the struggle. There was a council to be held at the Elysee. He went there, but at this moment of disgust, disgust of everything and himself, this palace like all the rest, seemed to him to be gloomy and mean. An usher in black coat and white cravat, wearing a chain around his neck, wandered up and down the antechamber, according to custom, his shoes covered with the dust from the carpet trodden upon by so many people, either applicants or functionaries. The gaslight burning in broad day as in the offices in London was reflected on the cold walls that shone like marble. Doors ornamented with gilt nails and round, ivory knobs and without locks, were noiselessly swinging to and fro. Wearied office-seekers with tired countenances were spread out upon the garnet-colored velvet chairs, which were like those of a middle-class, furnished house.

From time to time, the tiresome silence was broken by the sound of near or distant electric bells. Vaudrey, who arrived before his colleagues, studiously contemplated the surroundings ironically. An estafette, a gendarme, arrived with a telegram; the usher signed a receipt for it. That was all the life that animated this silent palace. A man with a military air, tall, handsome and in tightly-buttoned frock-coat, passed and saluted the President of the Council; then, Jouvenet, the Prefect of Police, looking like a notary's senior clerk, his abundant black hair plastered on his head, a large, black portfolio under his arm, approached the minister and bowed. Vaudrey, having Lissac in mind, returned his salutation coldly.

"I will speak to you presently, Monsieur le Prefet."

"Good! Monsieur le Ministre!"

In spite of the foot-soldier and the Parisian guard on duty at the door of the palace, all that now seemed to Vaudrey to lack official solemnity, and resembled rather a temporary and melancholy occupation.

"Bah! And if I should never set my foot in this place again," he thought, as he remembered Granet's interpellation, "what would it matter to me?"

He was informed first at the Council and then at the Chamber, that Granet would not introduce his question until the next day. Vaudrey had the desired time to prepare himself. In the Budget Committee, where he met Granet, the minister of to-morrow asked him an inopportune question concerning the expenses of the administration. Vaudrey was angered and felt inclined to treat it as a personal question. It now only remained for his adversaries to begin to suspect him! To appear so was even now too much. Sulpice took Granet up promptly, the latter assured him that "his colleague and friend, the President of the Council," had entirely misconstrued the meaning of his words.

"Well and good!" said Vaudrey.

He was not sorry that the interpellation was not to take place at once. Before to-morrow, he would have placed his batteries. And then he would think of quieting Adrienne, of regaining her, perhaps. On returning to the ministry, he caused some inquiries to be made as to whether Madame were not sick. Madame had gone out. She had gone out as if she were making a pilgrimage to a cemetery, to the apartment in Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin, whereon might have been written: Here lies. It was like the tomb of her happiness.

She would not see Sulpice again. In the evening, however, she consented to speak to him.

Her poor, gentle face was extremely pale, and as if distorted by some violent pain.

"You will find some excuse," she said, "for announcing that I am ill. I am leaving for Grenoble. I have written to my uncle, the Doctor expects me, and all that now remains to me is a place in his house."

"Adrienne!" murmured Sulpice.

She closed her eyes, for this suppliant voice doubtless caused her a new grief, but neither gesture nor word escaped her. She was like a walking automaton. Even her eyes expressed neither reproach nor anger, they seemed dim.

There was something of death in her aspect.

After a few moments, she said: "I hope that my resolve will not work any prejudice to your political position. In that direction I will still do my duty to the full extent of my strength. But people will not trouble themselves to inquire whether I am at Grenoble or Paris. They trouble themselves very little about me."

By a gesture, he sought to retain her. She had already entered her room, and Vaudrey felt that between this woman and him there stood something like a wall. He had now only to love Marianne.

To love Marianne, ah! yes, the unhappy man, he still loved her. When he thought of Marianne, it was more in wrath, when he thought of Adrienne, it was more in pity; but, certainly, his wife's determination to leave Paris caused him less emotion than the thought that his mistress was to wed Rosas.

That very evening he went to Marianne's.

They told him that Madame was at the theatre. Where? With whom? Neither Jean nor Justine knew.

Vaudrey despised himself for jealously questioning the servants who, when together, would burst with laughter in speaking of him.

"Oh! miserable fool!" he said to himself. "There was only one woman who loved you:—Adrienne!"

Nevertheless, he recalled Marianne in the hours of past love, and the recollection of her kisses and sobs still made his flesh creep. The tawny tints that played in her hair as it strayed unfastened over the pillow, the endearing caresses of her bare arms, he wished to see and feel again. He calculated in his ferocious egotism that Adrienne's wrath would afford him more complete liberty for a time, and that he would have Marianne more to himself, if she were willing.

He had written to Mademoiselle Kayser, but his letter had remained unanswered. He thought that he would go to Mademoiselle Vanda's house the next day, after the Chamber was up. Very late, he added, since the sitting would be prolonged. Long and decisive, as the fate of his ministry was at stake.

Granet's interpellation did not make him unusually uneasy. He had acquainted himself in the morning with a resume of the journals. Public opinion seemed favorable to the Vaudrey ministry, except in the case of some insufferable radical organs, and with which he need not in anyway concern himself, read the report. Vaudrey did not remember that it was in almost these very terms that the daily resume of the press expressed itself on the eve of Pichereau's fall, to the Minister of the Interior, in speaking of Pichereau's cabinet.

"I shall have a majority of sixty votes," he said to himself. "Everything will be carried—save honor!"

He thought of Adrienne as he thus wished.

The session of the Chamber was to furnish him the most cruel deception. Granet had most skilfully prepared his plan of attack. Vaudrey's ministry was threatened on all sides by lines of approach laid out without Sulpice's knowledge. Granet had promised, here and there, new situations, or had undertaken to confirm the old. He came to the assault of the ministry with a compact battalion of clients entirely devoted to his fortunes, which were their own. They did not reproach Vaudrey too strongly with anything, unless it was that these impatient ones considered that he had given away all that he had to give, prefectures, sub-prefectures, councillors' appointments, crosses of the Legion of Honor, and especially for having lasted too long. Vaudrey would fall less because he had forfeited esteem than because others were impatient to succeed him. Granet was tired of being only the minister of to-morrow, he wished to have his day. He had just affirmed his policy, he asserted that the whole country, weary of Vaudrey's compromises, demanded a more homogeneous ministry. Homogeneity! Nothing could be said against such a word. Granet favored the policy of homogeneity. This vocable comprehended his entire programme. The Vaudrey Cabinet lacked homogeneity! The President of the Republic decidedly ought to form a homogeneous cabinet.

"Granet is then homogeneous?" said Sulpice, with a forced laugh, as he sat on the ministerial bench while Lucien Granet was speaking from the tribune, his right hand thrust into his frock-coat.

The bon mot uttered by the President of the Council, although spoken loudly enough, did not enliven any one, neither his colleagues who felt themselves threatened nor his usual claqueurs who felt themselves vanquished. Navarrot, the ministerial claqueur, was already applauding Granet most enthusiastically. Monsieur le Ministre felt himself about to become an ex-minister. He vaguely felt as if he were in the vacuum of an air-pump.

The order of the day of distrust, smoothed over by Granet with the formulas of perfidious politeness—castor-oil in orange-juice, as Sulpice himself called it, trying to pluck up courage and wit in the face of misfortune,—that order of the day that the Vaudrey Cabinet would not accept, was adopted by a considerable majority: one hundred and twenty-two votes.

For Sulpice, it was a crushing defeat.

"One hundred and twenty-two deputies," he said, still speaking in a loud voice in the corridors, "to whom I have refused the appointment of some mayor or the removal of some rural guard!"

Warcolier, ever dignified, remarked in his usual style, that this manner of defending himself probably lacked some of that nobility which becomes a defeat bravely endured.

Vaudrey had only one course open, to send in his resignation. He was beaten, thoroughly beaten. He returned to the Hotel Beauvau and after preparing his letter he took it himself to the President at the Elysee.

The President accepted it without betraying any feeling, as an employe at the registry office receives any deed of declaration. Two or three commonplace expressions of regret, a diplomatic shake of the hand, expressive of official sympathy, that was all. Vaudrey returned to the ministry and ordered his servants to prepare everything for leaving the ministerial mansion.

"When is that to be, Monsieur le Ministre?"

"To-morrow," answered Vaudrey, to whom the title seemed ironical and grated on his nerves.

He caused himself to be announced to Adrienne.

Adrienne, weary looking, was seated before a small desk writing, and beneath her fair hair, her face still looked as white as that of a corpse.

"There is some news," Vaudrey said to her abruptly. "I am no longer minister!"

"Ah!" she said.

Not a tremor, not a word of consolation. Three days previously, she would have leaped to his neck and said: "How happy we shall be! I have you back; I have found you again! What joy!"

Again, she would have tried to console him had he been suffering.

Now, she remained passive, frozen, indifferent to that news.

"We shall leave the Hotel Beauvau!" said Sulpice.

"I am already preparing to leave," she replied. "My trunks are packed."

"Will you do me the kindness of leaving here with me and of going back to Rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin with me?—After that, you can set out at once for Grenoble. But let us have no sign of scandal. The world must be considered."

She had listened to him coldly, unmoved by his trembling voice.

"That is proper," she said ironically. "The world must be thought of. I will wait then before leaving."

He was stupefied to find so much coldness and so unswerving a determination in this woman, as gentle as a child—my wife-child, he so frequently said to her of old. In her presence he felt ill at ease, discontented, hesitating whether he should throw himself at her feet and wring pardon from her, or fly from her and be with Marianne, perhaps forever. But no, it was Adrienne, his poor, his dear Adrienne that he would keep and love! Ah! if she pardoned him! If he had dared to kneel at her feet, to plead and to weep! But this living corpse froze him, he was afraid of her, of that gentle and devoted creature.

He went downstairs again, saying to himself that he would take a hurried dinner and then go to Rue Prony.

He was, however, obliged to occupy himself in despatching the last current business. He must hand over his official duties to his successor. There was a mocking expression in these words: his successor!

"After all, he will have one also!"

He still had unexpected heartbreakings to experience. People to whom he had promised appointments and decorations came, almost breathless, suddenly stirred by the news, to entreat him to sign the nominations and to prepare the decrees while he was still minister. The ravens were about the corpse. Monsieur Eugene, still bowing low, although not quite so low as heretofore, endeavored to dismember Vaudrey the Minister. He wanted a little piece, only one piece! A sub-prefecture of the third class!

He had already been informed at the Elysee that Granet was to be his successor. Parbleu! he expected it! But the realization of his fears annoyed him. And who would Granet keep for his Secretary of State? Warcolier, yes Warcolier, with the promise of giving him the first vacant portfolio.

"How correct was Ramel's judgment?" thought Sulpice.

Vaudrey, with a sort of rage urging him, immediately set himself about a task as mournful as a funeral: packing up. It now seemed to him that he had just suffered a total overthrow. Books and papers were being packed in baskets. Before he was certain of his fall, he thought it was delightful to escape from so much daily bother, but now he felt as if he were being discrowned and ruined. Ruin! It truly threatened him indeed and held him by the throat. He had realized on many pieces of property within the past year for Marianne!

Adrienne, on the contrary, left this great cold hotel of Place Beauvau, as if she were leaving a prison, with a comforting sense of deliverance. A bad dream was ended. She could lay down her official mask, weep at ease, complain at will, fly to that Dauphiny where her youth was left. She would leave to-morrow. Doctor Reboux awaited her in ignorance.

After having given his first orders and arranged his most important documents, Sulpice went out to walk to Marianne's. At first he wandered along mechanically without realizing that he was going toward the quays, almost fearing the interview with his mistress, now that he was only a defeated man. He had nearly reached the Seine before he was aware of it. He looked at his watch.

Eleven o'clock.

Marianne had been awaiting him for some time.

He now followed, with the slow march of persons oppressed with a sense of weariness, these deserted quays, that terrace on the bank of the river, whose balustrades permitted glimpses of the silhouettes of slender trees. He met no one. Upon the Place de la Concorde, still wet with the scarce dried rain of this November night, as mild as an evening in spring, permeated by a warm mist, he looked for a moment at the Palace of the Corps Legislatif, gloomy-looking and outlining its roofs against the misty sky, whose gleams fell on the horizon with a bluish tint, while upon the broad sidewalks, the jets of gas magnified the reddened reflections with their own ruddy hues. Along the grand avenue of the Champs-Elysees there were only two immense parallel rows of gas-lamps and here and there, moving, luminous points that looked like glow-worms. Vaudrey mechanically stopped a moment to contemplate the scene.

That did not interest him, but something within him controlled him. He continued to walk unwittingly in the direction of Parc Monceau. The solitude of the Champs-Elysees pleased him. While passing before an important club with its windows lighted, he instinctively shuddered. Through the lace-like branches of the trees, he looked at the green shades, the lustres, the unpolished sconces, with the backgrounds of red and gold hangings, and the great, gold frames, and he imagined that they were discussing the causes of his defeat and the success of Granet.

"They are speaking of me, in there! They are talking about my fall! He is fallen! Fallen! Beaten!—They are laughing, they are making jokes! There are some there who yesterday were asking me for places."

He continued on his way without quickening his pace; the deserted cafe concerts, as melancholy-looking as empty stages, the wreaths of suspended pearl-like lamps illuminated during the summer months but now colorless, seemed ironical amid the clumps of bare trees as gloomy as cemetery yews, exhaling a sinister, forsaken spirit as if this solitude were full of extinct songs, defunct graces, phantoms, and last year's mirth. And Vaudrey felt a strangely delicious sensation even in his bitterness at this impression of solitude, as if he might have been lost, forgotten forever, in the very emptiness of this silent corner.

Going on, he passed before the Elysee.

A sergent de ville who was slowly pacing up and down in front of an empty sentry-box, his two hands ensconced in the sleeves of his coat, the hood of which he had turned up, cast a sidelong glance at him, almost suspiciously, as if wondering what a prowler could want to do there, at such an hour.

"He does not know whom he has looked at," he said. "And yesterday, only yesterday, he would have saluted me subserviently!"

The windows of the Elysee facing the street were still lighted up and Vaudrey thought that shadows were moving behind the white curtains.

"The President has not yet retired! He has probably received Granet! And Warcolier!—Warcolier!"

Before the large door opening on Faubourg Saint-Honore, four lamps were burning over the head of a Parisian guard on duty, with his musket on his shoulder, the light shining on the leather of his shako. Some weary-looking guardians of the peace were chatting together. At the end of the court before the perron, a small, red carpet was laid upon the steps and in front of the marquee faint lights gleamed. Vaudrey recalled that joyous morning when he entered there, arriving and descending from his carriage with his portfolio under his arm.

He hurried his steps and found himself on Place Beauvau. His glance was attracted by the grille, the hotel, the grand court at the end of the avenue. Sulpice experienced a feeling of sudden anger as he passed in front of the Ministry of the Interior whose high grille, now closed, he had many times passed through, leaning back in his coupe. He pictured himself entering there, where he would never again return except as a place-seeker like those eternal beggars who blocked its antechambers. He still heard the cry of the lackey when the coachman crushed the sand of the courtyard under the wheels of the carriage: "Monsieur le Ministre's carriage!"—He went upstairs, the lackeys saluted him, the coupe rolled off toward the Bois.

Now, here in that vulgar mansion another was displaying himself, seated on the same seats, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same bed and giving his orders to the same servants. He experienced a strange sensation, as of a theft, of some undue influence, of suffering an ejectment by a stranger from some personal property, and this Granet, the man sent there as he had been, by a vote, seemed to him to be a smart fellow, a filibuster and an intruder.

"How one becomes accustomed to thinking one's self at home everywhere!" thought Vaudrey.

He partially forgot the keen wound given to his self-love by the time that he found himself close to Parc Monceau approaching Rue Prony. In Marianne's windows the lights were shining. To see that woman and hold her again in his arms, overjoyed, that happiness would console him for all his mortifications. Marianne's love was worth a hundred times more than the delights of power.

Marianne Kayser was evidently waiting for Sulpice. She received him in her little, brilliantly-lighted salon, superb amid these lights, in a red satin robe de chambre that lent a strange seductiveness to her bare arms and neck which shone with a pale and pearly lustre beneath the light.

Vaudrey felt infinitely moved, almost painfully though deliciously stirred, as he always did when in the presence of this lovely creature.

She extended her hand to him, saying in a singular tone that astonished him:

"Bonjour, vous!"

"Well!" she said at once, pointing to a journal which was lying on the carpet, "is there anything new?"

"Yes," he said. "But what is that to me? I don't think of that when I am near you!"

"Oh! besides, my dear," Marianne continued, "your darling sin has not been to think of two things at one time! I don't understand anything of politics, it bothers me. I have been advised, however, that you have been thrashed by that Granet!"

"Thrashed, yes," said Sulpice, laughing, "you use peculiar phrases!—"

"Topical ones. I am of the times! But it appears that one must read the journals to learn about you. I am going to tell you some news however, before it appears in print."

"That interests me?"

"Perhaps, but it most assuredly interests me!"

"Important news?" asked Sulpice.

"Important or great, as you will!"

He nibbled his blond moustache nervously.

Guy had not deceived him.

"Then I think I know your news, my dear Marianne!"

"Tell me!" she said, as she stretched herself on a divan, her arms crossed, looking ravishingly lovely in her red gown.

He sought some forcible phrase that would crush her, but he could find none. His only desire was to take that fair face in his hands and to fasten his lips thereon.

Marianne smiled maliciously.

"It is true then," Vaudrey exclaimed, "that you love Monsieur de Rosas?"

"There, you are well-informed! It is strange! Perhaps that is because you are no longer a minister!"

"You love Rosas?"

"Yes, and I am marrying him. I have the honor to announce to you my marriage to Monsieur le Duc Jose de Rosas, Marquis de Fuentecarral. It surprises me, but it is so!—I have known days when I have not had six sous to take the omnibus, and now I am to be a duchess! This does not seem to please you? Are you selfish, then?"

Stretched on her divan, her neck and arms sparkling under the light of the sconces, she appeared to make sport of Vaudrey's stupefaction as he looked at her almost with fright.

"Now, my dear," she said curtly, but politely, as she toyed with a ring on her finger, "this is why I desired to see you to-day. It is to tell you that if you care to remain friendly on terms that forbid sensual enjoyment, which is not objectionable in putting a lock on the past, you may visit the Duchesse de Rosas just as you have Mademoiselle Kayser. But if you are bent on finding in the Duchesse de Rosas the good-natured girl that I have been toward you, and you are quite capable of it, for you are a sentimental fellow, then it will be useless to even appear to have ever known each other. I am turning the key on my life. Crac! Bonsoir, Sulpice!"

The unhappy man! He had cherished the thought of still visiting his mistress, but he found there an unlooked-for being, a new creature, who was unmistakably determined, in spite of her cunning charm, and she spoke to him in stupefying, ironical language.

"You would have me go mad, Marianne?"

"Why! what an idea! The phrase is decidedly romantic.—You should dispense with the blue in love as well as the exaggeration in politics."

"Marianne," Vaudrey said abruptly, "do you know that for your sake I have destroyed my home and mortally wounded my wife?"

"Well," she replied, "did I ask you to do so? I pleased you, you pleased me; that was quite enough. I desire no one's death and if you have allowed everything to be known, it is because you have acted indiscreetly or stupidly! But I who do not wish to mortally wound," she emphasized these words with a smile—"my husband, I expect him to suspect nothing, know nothing, and as you are incapable of possessing enough intelligence not to play Antony with him, let us stop here. Adieu, then, my dear Vaudrey!"

She extended her hand to him, that soft hand that imparted an electrical influence when he touched it.

"Well, what!—You are pouting?"

"I love you," he replied distractedly. "I love you, you hear, and I wish to keep you!"

"Ah! no, no! no roughness," she said with a laugh, as he, taking a seat near her, tried to draw her to him in his arms.

"To keep you, although belonging to another," whispered Vaudrey slowly.

"For whom do you take me?" said Marianne, proudly drawing herself up. "If I have a husband, I require that he be respected. A man who gives his name to a woman is clearly entitled to be dealt with truthfully!"

"Then," stammered Sulpice, "what?—Must we never see each other again?"

"We shall recognize each other."

"You drive me away?"

"As a lover!"

"Ah! stay," said Vaudrey, as, pale with anger, he walked across the room, "you are a miserable woman, a courtesan, you understand, a courtesan!—Guy has told me everything! You gave yourself to Jouvenet to avenge yourself on Lissac, you made a tool of me and you are making a sport of Rosas who is marrying you!—What have I not done for you!—I have ruined myself! yes, ruined myself!"

"My dear," interrupted Marianne, "see the difference between a gentleman like Monsieur de Rosas and a little bourgeois like yourself. The duke might have ruined himself for me but he would never have reproached me. One never speaks of money to a woman. You are a very honest, domestic man and you were born to worship your wife! You should stick to her! You are not made of the stuff of a true-born lover. What you have just told me is the remark of a loon!"

"Ah! if I had only known you!"

"Or anything! But I am better than you, you see. I was better advised than you. The bill of exchange that you owe to the Dujarrier or to Gochard,—whichever you like—it inconveniences you, I know!"

"Yes," said Vaudrey, "but—"

"You would not, I think, desire me to pay it with the duke's money, that Monsieur de Rosas should pay your debts?"

"Marianne," cried Sulpice, livid with rage.

"Bless me! you speak to me of money? You chant your ruin to me! The De Profundis of your money-box, should I know that? I question with myself as to what it means!—However, knowing you to be financially embarrassed, I have myself found you help—Yes, I told someone who understands how to extricate business men, that you were embarrassed!"

"I?"

"There is nothing to blush about. I told Molina the Tumbler—You know him?"

Did he know him! At that very moment he saw the ruddy gold moon that represented the banker's face amid all the expanse of his shining flesh. He trembled as if in the face of temptation.

"Molina is a man of means," said Marianne. "If you need money, you can have it there! And now, once more, leave me to my new life! The past is as if it had never been!—Bonjour, Bonsoir!—and adieu, go!—Give me your hand!"

She smiled so strangely, half lying on the divan, and stretched out her white hand, which he covered with kisses, murmuring:

"Well, yes, adieu! Yes, adieu!—But once more—once!—this evening—I love you so dearly!—Will you?"

She quietly reached out her bare arm toward a silk bell-rope that she jerked suddenly and Vaudrey rose enraged and humiliated.

"Show Monsieur Vaudrey out," Marianne said to Justine, as she appeared at the door. "Then you may go to bed, my girl!"

Vaudrey left this woman's house in a fit of frenzy. She had just treated him who had paid for the divan on which she was reclining as a genuine duchess might have treated a man who had been insolently disrespectful toward her. He was almost inclined to laugh at it.

"It is well done! well done for you! Ah! the dolt! To trust a wanton! To trust Warcolier! To trust everybody! To trust everybody except Adrienne!—"

He, mechanically and without thought, resumed the way to Place Beauvau, forgetting that the ministerial home was no longer his. The porter—who knows? might not have opened the gate to him. The lackeys would have driven him off as the girl had done whom he had paid, yes, paid, paid! For she was a harlot, nothing more!

Gradually, the thought of that debt swelled by successive bills of exchange, and almost forgotten during the recent days of feverish excitement, took possession of his mind, he remembered that it must be discharged on the first day of December, in five days, and the thought troubled him like an impending danger. The prospect had often, during the last few weeks, made him anxious. He saw the months pass, the days flit with extraordinary rapidity, and the maturity, the inevitable due date draw near with the mathematical regularity of a clock. So long as months were ahead he felt no anxiety. Like gamblers he counted on chance. Besides, he still had some farms in Dauphiny. In short, a word to his notary and he could speedily get out of danger. Then, too, the date of payment was far away. He calculated that by economy as to his personal income and his official salary he could meet the bill to Gochard, whose very name sometimes made him laugh. But Marianne's exactions, unforeseen outlays, the eternal leakage of Parisian life had quite prevented saving, and had dissipated in a thousand little streams the money that he wished to pay out in a lump in December. He soon grew alarmed by degrees at the approach of the maturity of the debt. He had written to his notary at Grenoble, and this old friend had replied that the farms of Saint-Laurent-du-Pont, mortgaged and cut up one after another, now represented only a ridiculous value, but that after all, Vaudrey had nothing to be concerned about, seeing that Madame Vaudrey's fortune was intact.

Adrienne's fortune! That then was all that remained to Vaudrey, and that might be his salvation. A fortune that was not very considerable, but still solid and creditable. But even if he were strangled by debt, dunned and driven into a corner, could he pay the debts he had contracted for his mistress by means of his wife's fortune? He was disgusted at the thought. It was impossible.

Vaudrey felt his head turn under the humiliation of his double defeat, the loss of parliamentary confidence, and Marianne's insulting laugh, and urged by the anxiety he felt about the obligation to be met in eight days, in his bewilderment he thought of writing to Gochard of Rue des Marais, to ask for time. This Gochard must be a half-usurer. Certain of being paid, some day, he would perhaps be delighted to renew the bill of exchange in inordinately swelling the amount. The letter was written and Vaudrey mailed it himself the following morning.

That very evening Adrienne was to leave. He endeavored to dissuade her from her plan. She did not even reply to him. She stood looking at a crystal vase on the chimney-piece in which were some winter roses, Christmas roses, fresh and milk-white, that had been sent as a souvenir from yonder Dauphiny. Her glance rested fixedly on that fair bouquet that seemed like a bursting cloud of whiteness.

"Then," said Vaudrey, "it is settled—quite settled—you are going?"

"I am."

"In three hours?"

"In three hours!"

"I know where those roses were gathered," said Sulpice tenderly. "It was at the foot of the window where we leaned elbow to elbow and dreamed."

"Yes," Adrienne answered, in a broken voice whose sound was like that which might have been given out by the vase had it been struck and shattered. "We had lovely dreams! The reality has indeed belied them!"

"Adrienne!" he murmured.

She made no reply.

He tried to approach her, feeling ashamed as he thought that he had similarly wished to approach Marianne.

She instinctively drew back.

"You remember," she said coldly, "that one day when we were speaking about divorce, I told you that there was a very simple way of divorce? It was never to see each other again, never, to be nothing more to each other from the day on which confidence should die?—You have deceived me, it is done. I am a stranger to you! If I were a mother, I should have duties to fulfil. I would not have failed therein. I would have endured everything for a son!—Nothing is left to me. I have not even the joy of caressing a child that would have consoled me. I am your widow while you yet live. Well, be it so. You have willed it, there, then, is divorce!"

For the third time since Adrienne had learned everything, he tried to stammer the word pardon. He felt it was useless. This sensitive being had withdrawn within herself and wrapped herself, as with a cloak, in all her outraged chastity. He could only humiliate himself without softening her. All Adrienne's deceived trustfulness and insulted love strengthened her in her determination never to forgive.

She would go.

Vaudrey in despair returned to his study, where the books that had been sent from the ministry were piled upon the carpet in all the confusion attending an entry into occupation. The servant at once brought him his lamp and handed him a package of cards in envelopes,—cards of condolence as for a death—and a large card, saying: "That gentleman is here!"

"Molina!" said Vaudrey, becoming very pale. "Show him in!"

The fat Salomon entered puffing and smiling, and spread himself out on an armchair as he said to the former minister:

"Well, how goes it?—Not too badly crushed, eh?—Bah! what is it after all to quit office?—Only a means for returning to it, sometimes!"

"All the same," he said with his cackling laugh that sounded like the jingling of a money-bag, "there are too many changes of ministers! They change them like shirts! It puts me out. I get used to one Excellency and he is put aside! So it is settled, henceforth I will not say Excellency save to the usher or an office-boy!"

He accompanied his clumsy jests with a loud laugh, then, changing his tone:

"Come, that is not all. I came to speak of business to you."

He looked Vaudrey full in the face with his piercing glance, took from his pocketbook a printed sheet and said in a precise tone:

"Here is an opportunity where your title of former minister will serve you better than that of minister. So much is being said of Algeria, its mines and its fibre. Well, read that!"

Vaudrey took the paper. It was the prospectus, very skilfully drawn, of a company established to introduce gas into Algeria, almost as far as the Sahara. They promised the subscribers wonders and miracles: acres upon acres of land as a bonus. There was a fortune to be made. Meantime, they would issue six thousand shares of five hundred francs. It was three millions they were asking from the public. A mere trifle.

"They might ask ten," said Molina, smiling. "They would give it!"

"And you wish me to subscribe to your Algerian gas?" asked Vaudrey.

The fat Molina burst out into loud laughter this time.

"I? I simply wish to give you the opportunity to make a fortune!"

"How?"

"That is one scheme. I will bring you four, five, ten of them! I have another, the Luxemburg coal. A deposit equal to that of Charleroi. You have only to allow me to print in the list of directors: Monsieur Sulpice Vaudrey, former President of the Council."

Vaudrey looked the fat man squarely in the face.

"Besides you will be in good company!" said the banker as he read over the names of deputies, senators, statesmen, coupled with those of financiers.

Sulpice knew most of them.

He despised nearly all of them. It was such that Molina styled good company!

"And those mines, are you certain they will produce what you promise?"

"Ah!" said Salomon, "that is the engineers' matter! Here is the report of a mining engineer who is perhaps straining after effect and doing a little puffing up! But one must go with the times! He who ventures nothing, has nothing. In war, one risks one's skin; in business, one risks one's money. That is war."

Vaudrey debated with himself whether he should tear the prospectus in pieces and throw them in the face of the fat man.

"My dear Vaudrey," said the Tumbler, "you have a vein that is entirely your own. A former minister remains always a former minister. Well, such a title as that is turned to account. It is quoted, like any other commodity. You are not rich, that fact proves your honesty, although in America, and we are Americanizing ourselves devilishly much, that would only be the measure of your stupidity. You can become rich, I have the means of making myself agreeable to you and you have the opportunity of becoming useful to us."

"In a word, you buy my name?"

"I hire it from you! Very dearly," said Molina, still laughing.

"Certainly," said Vaudrey, "you did not understand me on the first occasion that you called on me to speak about money, and when I questioned with myself whether I should ask you not to call again."

Molina interrupted him abruptly by rising. He felt that an insult was about to be uttered. He parried it by anticipating it.

"Stupidity!" he said. "Here is the prospectus. There are the names of the directors. You will consider. It has never injured any one to take advantage of his position. The puritans, in an age of trickery, are idiots; I say so. What I propose to you surprises you. To place your name beside that of Monsieur Pichereau or Monsieur Numa de Baranville! It is as simple as saying good-day. Perhaps you think then that you will be the only one? They all do it, all those who are extravagant and shrewd. It is a matter of coquetting in these days over a hundred-sou piece! Come, I will wager that Monsieur Montyon would not mince matters—especially if he had transferable paper in circulation!"

"You know that?" said Vaudrey, turning pale.

"Ah! I know many others in like condition! Come, no false modesty! It is a matter of business only! I tell you again, I have many other cases. All this is in order to have the pleasure of offering you certificates for attendance fees. I will open a credit for you of two hundred thousand francs, if you wish. We will arrange matters afterwards."

"I will leave you these declarations of faith!" added Molina, showing the prospectus of the gas undertaking. "Fear nothing! It is not more untruthful than the others! It is unnecessary to show me out. A la revista!"

He disappeared abruptly, Vaudrey hearing the floor of the hall creak under this man's hippopotamus feet, and the unhappy Sulpice who had spun so many, such glorious and grand dreams, dreams of liberty, freedom and virtue, civic regeneration, reconstructed national morals and character, the sacredness of the hearth and the education of the conscience; this Vaudrey, bruised by life, overthrown by his vices, was there under the soft light of his lamp, looking with staring eye, as a being who wishes to die contemplates the edge of an abyss, looking at that printed paper soliciting subscriptions, beating the big drum of the promoter in order to entrap the vast and ever-credulous horde.

His name! To put his name there! The name of Vaudrey that he had dreamed of reading at the foot of so many noble, eternal and reforming laws, to inscribe it upon that paper beneath so many cunning names, jugglers, habitual drainers of the public cash-box. To fall to that! To do that!

To lend himself?

To sell himself!

And why not sell himself? Who would discharge this bill of exchange? The Gochard paper! The debt of the past! The price of the nights spent with Marianne! The hundred thousand francs for that girl's kisses!

Sulpice felt in the weakness increased by a growing fever, that his self-possession was leaving him. All his ideas clashed confusedly. Amid the chaos, only one clear idea remained; a hundred and sixty thousand francs had to be found. Where were they to be found? Yes, where? Through Molina, who offered him two hundred thousand! This open credit seemed to him like an opened-up placer in which he had only to dig with his nails. The cunning and thick voice of the Hebrew banker echoed in Sulpice's ears: "They all do it!" It was not so difficult to give his name, or to hire it, as Salomon said. Who the devil would notice it at a time when indifference passes over scandals as the sea covers the putrid substances on the shore and washes them with its very scum?

"They all do it!"

No, despite the irony of the handler of money, there are some consciences that refuse to yield: and then, what then?—Vaudrey had desired virtue of a different kind and other morals! Ah! how he had suffered the poison to penetrate him; even to his bones! How Marianne had deformed and moulded him at her fancy, and he still thought of her only with unsatisfied longings for her kisses and ardor! Ah! women! Woman! Yes, indeed, yes, woman was the great source of moral weakness and inactivity. She used politics in her own way, in destroying politicians. If he had only left office with head erect and not dragging the chain-shot of debt! But that bill of exchange! Who would pay that?

"Eh! Molina, parbleu! Molina! Molina!"

He was right, too, that triumphant Jew with his insolent good humor. It is an absurd thing, after all, to be prudish and to thrust away the dish that is offered you. To be rich is, in fact, quite as good as to be powerful! Money remains! That is the only real thing in the world! It would be a fine sight to see a man refuse the opportunity to make a fortune, and to refuse it—why? For a silly, conscientious scruple. And after all, business was the very life of modern society. This Molina, circulating his money, was as useful as many others who circulate ideas.

"His Algerian gas is a work of civilization just like any other!"

Urged by the necessity of escaping from that debt that strangled him like a running noose, Sulpice gradually arrived at argumentative sophistries, which were but capitulations to his own probity, cowardly arrangements with his own conscience. His name? Well, he would turn it into money since it was worth a gold ingot! The journalist who sells his thought, the artist who sells his marble, the writer who sells his experiences and his recollections, equally sell their names and for money, the flesh of their flesh. Like a living answer and a remorse, he saw the lean face and white moustache of Ramel, who was seated at the window, breathing the warm rays of the sun, in the little room on Rue Boursault, but he answered, speaking aloud:

"Well, what?—Ramel is a saint, a hero!—But I am no saint. I am a man and I will live!"

Somewhat angered, he took the prospectus that Molina had left him and rereading it again and again, he relapsed into a sitting posture and with haggard eyes scanned the loud-swelling lines of that commercial announcement, seeking therein some pretext for accepting. For he would accept, that was done. Nothing more was to be said, his conscience yielded. He was inclined to laugh.

"Still another victim caught and floored by Molina the Tumbler!"

He remained there, terrified at the prospect of the quasi-association he had determined on and by his complicity with a jobber of questionable business.

With his eye fixed upon this solicitation for capital, wherein were the words which would formerly have repelled him: joint stock company, capital stock, public subscription, subscription certificate, and at the head of which he was about to inscribe his name as one of the directors, at the foot of a capitulation, as it were, Sulpice had not seen, standing in the doorway of his half-lighted study, a woman in travelling costume, who stopped for a moment to look at the unfortunate, dejected man within the shade of the lamp which made him look more bald than he was, then advanced gently toward him, coughing slightly—for she did not dare to call him by his name or touch him with her gloved hand—to warn him that she was there.

Vaudrey turned round abruptly, instinctively pushing aside Molina's prospectus, as if he already felt some shame in holding it in his hands.

He flushed as he recognized Adrienne.

The young woman's reserved attitude showed absolute firmness. She came to say adieu, she was about to leave.

He had not even the energy to keep her. He was afraid of an unbending reply that would have been an outrage.

"Do you intend to become associated with Molina?" Adrienne asked in a clear voice, as she looked at Sulpice, who had risen.

"What! Molina?" he stammered.

"Yes, oh! he understands business. On leaving, he called on me. He thought that I had still sufficient influence over you to urge you, as he says, to make your fortune. He told me that you were in want of money, and after having been sharp enough to try the husband, he offered me, as you might give a commission to a courtesan, I do not know what emerald ornament, if I would advise you to accept his proposals!—That gentleman does not know the people with whom he is dealing!"

"Wretch!" said Vaudrey. "He did that?"

"And I thanked him," Adrienne replied calmly. "I did not know that you had debts and that, in order to pay them, you had come so near accepting the patronage of such a man. He told me so and he rendered me and you a service."

"Me?"

Vaudrey snatched up the prospectus of the Algerian gas and angrily tore it in pieces.

"We shall probably not see each other again," said Adrienne, in a firm voice that contrasted strangely with her gentle grace; "but I shall never forget that I bear your name and that being mine, I will ever honor it."

She handed Sulpice a document.

"Here is a power of attorney to Monsieur Beauvais, my notary. All that you need of my dowry to free yourself from liabilities is yours. I do not wish to know why you have incurred debts, I am anxious only to know that you have paid them, and my signature provides you with the means to do so."

Dejected, his heart burning, and his sobs rising, Sulpice uttered a loud cry as he rushed toward her:

"Adrienne!"

She withdrew her hand slowly while he was trying to seize it.

"You have nothing to thank me for," she said. "I am a partner, saving, as I best can, the honor of the house. That association is better than Molina's."

"Adieu," she added bitterly.

"Are you going—? Going away?" asked Sulpice, trying to give to his entreaty something like an echo of the love of the former days.

"Whose fault is it?" replied the young woman, in a voice as chilly as steel.

She was no longer the Adrienne of old, the little timid provincial with blushing cheek and trembling gesture. Sorrow, the most terrible of disillusions, had hardened and, as it were, petrified her. Vaudrey felt that to ask forgiveness would be in vain. Time only could soften that poor woman, obstinately unbending in her grief. He needed but to observe her attitude and cutting tones to fully realize that.

"It is quite understood," she continued, treating this question of her happiness as if she were cutting deep into her flesh and severing the tenderest fibres of her being, but without trembling,—"it is quite understood, is it not, that we shall make no scene or scandal? We are separated neither judicially nor even in appearance. We live apart by mutual consent, far from each other, without anything being known by outsiders of this definitive rupture."

"Adrienne!" Sulpice repeated, "it is impossible, you will not leave!"

"Oh!" she said. "I gave myself and I have taken myself back. Your entreaties will not now alter my determination. I am eager to leave Paris. It seems to me that I have regained myself and that I escape from falsity, lies, and infamy, and from a swarm of insects that crawl over my body!—I bid you farewell, and farewell it is!"