United States or Kuwait ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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?
De Vaudrey scarcely glanced at him. Taking Henriette by the hand, he rushed with her up the staircase and out to liberty. Before the Grand Seigneur's cronies thought to avenge their master, they had passed the astonished servants, passed the minatory beggars at the gates, and hailing a fiacre were on their way to Paris.
"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.
Guy de Lissac stood carelessly by, secretly very much amused at Pichereau, who did not move, but rubbing his hands nervously together was trying to appear at ease, yet by his sour smile at his successor allowing it to be plainly seen how gladly he would have strangled Vaudrey. "My dear colleague," said Sulpice, gayly, "we will talk elsewhere about your communities. This is hardly the place.
Her corsage was ornamented on the left side by an embroidered black butterfly, with outstretched wings of a brownish, brilliant tint, and Vaudrey, with a smile, asked her, without quite understanding what he said, if it were an emblematic crest. She smiled. "Precisely," she replied. "What I wear in my corsage I have in my mind. Black butterflies or blue devils, as you choose."
Eh! bon Dieu! one must do something for one's friends! Vaudrey's accession to the Department of the Interior had given birth to many new hopes; on all grounds they must be satisfied. Vaudrey would never be forgiven for such deception. "What deception?" asked Sulpice. "I promised reforms and I am going to carry them out, but people laugh at my reforms and ask what? Places."
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.
Nothing can be more brilliantly original than the introductory chapter of Monsieur le Ministre. Sulpice Vaudrey makes his first appearance behind the scenes of the Opéra, and from the sides of the stage, in the stage boxes, opera-glasses are turned upon him, and he hears whispered: "'It is the new Minister of the Interior. "'Nonsense! Monsieur Vaudrey? "'Yes, Monsieur Vaudrey
The man entered, saluting Vaudrey, who was not known to him, and at a gesture from Denis, he took a seat on the edge of a chair, scarcely sitting down and constantly twirling his round-shaped hat between his lean fingers. From time to time, he raised his left hand to his mouth to check the sound of a dry cough which rose in his muscular throat, that might be supposed to be a prey to laryngitis.
This Guy enjoyed in Paris a free and easy life, leaving to Vaudrey, his old college-comrade at Grenoble, the pursuit of the pleasures of political life, and, as Lissac said in that bantering tone which is peculiar to Parisian gossip, the relish of the "sweets of power"; for himself, what kept him in Paris was Paris itself, just that and nothing more: its pleasures, its first nights, its surprises, its women, that flavor of scandal and perfume of refined immorality that seemed peculiar to his time and surroundings.
Word Of The Day