For these two galley-slaves of chic, the winter passed in this manner, as fatiguing as months of penal servitude, and they went none too soon, when the summer arrived, to breathe the sea air or enjoy the sunshine of the country, in order to restore their frames, wan, worn-out, seedy and “gruelled,” as Sabine Marsy said, when she recalled her connection with the artists.

“Ah! how much better I like my home!” thought Madame Vaudrey.

Sabine and Madame Gerson, with the wives of the ministers, those of the chiefs of departments, and the regular visitors, were the most assiduous in their attentions to Adrienne, whom they considered decidedly provincial.  She, stupefied, was alarmed by these Parisian bustlers, that resembled machines in running order, jabbering away as music-boxes play.

“Do they tire you?” said Guy de Lissac to her bluntly one evening, succumbing to a feeling of pity for this pensive young woman,—­who was a hundred times prettier than Madame Gerson, whose beauty was so highly extolled in the journals,—­this minister’s wife, who voluntarily kept herself in the background with a timidity that betrayed no awkwardness, but was in every way attractive, especially to a man about town like Guy.

“They do not tire me, they upset me,” Adrienne replied.

“Ah! they are in full go, as it is called.  An express train.  But they amuse themselves so much that they have not even time to smile.  When the locomotive spins along too rapidly, try to distinguish the scenery!”

Adrienne instinctively felt that under his irony this sceptic disguised a sort of sincerity.  Lissac’s wit pleased her.  He surprised her somewhat at times, but the probably assumed raillery of the young man compensated for the insipid nonsense of the conversation to which she listened daily.

At first from mere curiosity and after from a sentiment of respectful devotion, Guy was impelled to study that delicate and sensitive nature, entirely swayed by love of Sulpice, that suffered at times a vague pressure as of some indefinable anguish at the throat, as if a vacuum—­a choking vacuum—­had been created about her by some air-pump.

This huge mansion seemed to her to be entirely innocent of all memories, and though peopled with phantoms, was as commonplace and vulgar as an apartment house.  There were no associations save dust and cracks.  These salons, built for the Marechal de Beauvau, these walls that had listened to the sobs of Madame d’Houdetot at the death-bed of Saint-Lambert, appeared to Adrienne to exude ennui, strangling and inevitable ennui, solemn, official, absolute ennui, nothing but ennui in the very decorum of the place, and isolation in the midst of power.

She cursed her loneliness, she felt lost amid the salons of this furnished ministerial mansion, whose cold, gloomy apartments, with the chairs symmetrically arranged along the walls, she wandered through, but evidently without expecting any one:  state chairs lacking occupants,—­ordinary chairs, domestic chairs seem to have tongues—­that never exchanged conversation.  Vast, deserted rooms where the green curtains behind the glass doors of the bookcases were eternally drawn, bookcases without books, forever open, mournful as empty sepulchres.