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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 Crépeau 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.
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.
He had risen to receive Guy and remained standing in front of the fireplace looking at his friend, who questioned him with his glance to discover if Vaudrey could really be in ignorance as to such a matter. "Ah, so! but," said Lissac with trembling voice and in a tone of angry bitterness, "do you not know then, what takes place in Paris?"
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.
"Yes, of what I was thinking as I cast the brown bread to those ducks? An idyll, is it not? Well! I was thinking that if one dared a quick plunge into such a sheet of water very pure quite tempting Eh! well! it would end all." Vaudrey did not reply. He looked at her stupidly, his glance betraying the utmost anxiety. "Oh! fear nothing," she said.
"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!"
"Will you accompany me for a moment, Monsieur le Ministre?" Vaudrey paled slightly, divining under this question a seductive prospect. Marianne's gray eyes were never turned from him.
But how was she to deceive this man as to her condition, how cloak her want, how cause herself to pass for what she was not? With Rosas it would have been a simple matter. Poor, she presented herself to him in her poverty. He loved her so. She could the better mislead him. But with Vaudrey, on the contrary, she must dazzle.
Sulpice, whose feelings were overcome by this great popular consecration, felt a kind of anger stir his heart against this solicitor, who, in the triumph of a great popular cause, saw only a means of self-advancement, of securing an appointment. The deputy for he was a deputy now, each commune adding its total to the Vaudrey vote was moved by a feeling of disgust.
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.
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