windows with their old-fashioned panes there often used to escape snatches of song, airs of waltzes, fragments of quadrilles.  Vanda’s horses pawed the ground spiritedly as they started at the fashionable hour for the Bois, through the great gateway leading to the stables.  And now, for months, a corner of Rue Prony had been silent and drowsy, and weighted with the melancholy that surrounds forsaken objects.

It was here that Marianne, in carrying out her determination, entered with a high head, resolved to cast off her sombre misery or to sink, her plans defeated.  The Dujarrier had greatly assisted her in taking up her abode, building her hopes on Mademoiselle Kayser’s beauty as on some temporary profitable investment.  As the old woman looked at her, she shook her head.  Marianne had to be quick.  She was pale, already weary, and her beauty, heightened by this weariness, was “in full blast,” as the former bungling artiste said in her capacity of a connoisseur.

“After all,” Dujarrier said to herself, “it is the favorable moment for success.  One does not become a general except through seniority.”

Marianne also experienced the same feelings as the Dujarrier.  She realized that she had reached the turning-point of her life, it was like a game of baccarat that she was playing with fate.  She might come out of it rich and preserved from the possibility of dying in a hospital or a hovel after having dragged her tattered skirts through the streets, or overwhelmed with debts, ruined forever, strangled by liabilities.  This commercial term made her smile ironically when she thought of it.  Against her she had her past, her adventurous life, almost the life of a courtesan, carried away by the current of her amorous whims; it now needed only the burden of liabilities for her to become not only completely disclassed, but ruined by Parisian life.  She had given the Dujarrier receipts for all that that quasi-silent-partner had advanced her, the old lady excusing herself for the precaution she took by saying precisely: 

“In that way one can hold people.  Grateful acknowledgments are good; written acknowledgments are better!”

The Dujarrier considered herself witty.

Marianne had signed, moreover, all that the other had asked.  She still needed, indeed, to make further outlay.  And what mattered it if she plunged deeper while she was taking a dive, as she expressed it in her language, which was a mixture of street slang and the elegant phraseology of the salon.

“Bah!  I know how to swim.”

She suddenly straightened herself under this anxiety, reassured, moreover, and spurred on as she was by the Dujarrier herself, who said as she shrugged her shoulders: 

“When a woman like you has a man like Vaudrey,—­a minister,—­she has her nest lined.”

Sulpice was not the man long to resist so refined a Parisienne as Marianne.  In him, the repressed ardors, the poetic ideas of a man of twenty, had become the appetites of a man of forty.  This provincial, hungry for Parisianism,—­very young in feelings and soul,—­felt, as soon as he found himself in Marianne’s company, mad with desire for a new life.  The dazzling honors attending his entry into the ministry found their culmination in the burning glance of Marianne, as their eyes met.