It pleased him to think of that woman.  It was an entirely changed preoccupation, a relaxation.  A curious, strangely agreeable sensation:  his imagination thus playing truant, and wandering toward that vision, renewed his youth.  He experienced therein the perplexities that troubled him at twenty.  Love in the heart means fewer white hairs on the brow.  And then, indeed, he would never, perhaps, see Mademoiselle Kayser again!  He would, however, do everything to see her again at the coming soiree at the ministry, an invitation—­Suddenly his thoughts abruptly turned to Ramel, whom he also wished to invite and meet again.  He loved him so dearly.  It was he who formerly, in the journalistic days, and at the time of the battles fought in the Nation Francaise, had called Denis “a conscience in a dress-coat.”

Therefore, since he had an afternoon to spare, he would call on Ramel.  He was determined to show him that he would never preserve the dignity of a minister with him.

“Rue Boursault, Batignolles,” he said to the coachman, lowering one of the windows; “after that, only to the Bois!”

The coachman drove the coupe toward the right, reaching the outer boulevards by way of Monceau Park.

Vaudrey was delighted.  He was going to talk open-heartedly to an old friend.  Ah, Ramel! he was bent on remaining in the background, on being nothing and loving his friends only when they were in defeat, as Jeliotte had said.  Well, Vaudrey would take him as his adviser.  This devil of a Ramel, this savage fellow should govern the state in spite of himself.

The minister did not know Ramel’s present lodging which he had occupied only a short time.  He expected to find dignified poverty and a cold apartment.  As soon as Denis opened the door to him, he found himself in a workman’s dwelling that had been transformed by artistic taste into the small museum of a virtuoso.  After having passed through a narrow corridor, and climbed a small, winding staircase, Vaudrey rang at the third floor of a little house in Rue Boursault and entered a well-kept apartment full of sunlight.

Hanging on the walls were engravings and crayons in old-fashioned frames.  A very plain mahogany bookcase contained some select volumes, which, though few, were frequently perused and were swollen with markers covered with notes.  The apartment was small and humble:  a narrow bedroom with an iron bedstead, a dressing room, a tiny dining-room furnished with cane-seated chairs, and the well-lighted study with his portraits and his frames of the old days.  But with this simplicity, as neat as a newly-shaved old man, all was orderly, and arranged and cared for with scrupulous attention.