Yes, this immense gilded dwelling with its Gobelins tapestries stifled her with its terrifying gloom, where nothing, not a single article, recalled her charming provincial home, her Grenoble house with its garden filled with lilacs where she was often wont to read while Sulpice worked upstairs, bent over his table crowded with papers, before his open window.  Ah! those cherished rooms, in the humble corner of the provincial home, their happy crouching in the peaceful nest; aye, even the happy first days in Paris, in the Chaussee-d’Antin apartments, in which Adrienne at least felt herself in her own home, free in her actions and thoughts, and where she could talk aloud without feeling that an eye was constantly watching her, and ears were always strained, in fact, a perpetual espionage upon all her actions and a criticism of all her words.

She had reached a point when she asked herself if, even for Sulpice, happiness was not far removed from this life of slavery, of feverish politics, which for some time past had been visibly paling his cheeks and rendering him nervous and altogether different from of old.

“If you did not love me so much,” she said with a sweet smile, “I could believe that you loved me no longer.”

“What folly! you have only one rival, Adrienne.”

“Ah!  I know that very well, but that robs me of everything.  It is politics.  Come! be great, and I shall be happy or resigned, as you wish.  I adore you so much!  I would give you my life, so I would gladly give you my days of weariness!”

Although she was rich, she strove to introduce into her official surroundings the bourgeois and provincial orderly methods that she had been so virtuously taught.  She found that her desserts vanished with frightful rapidity, that dishes scarcely touched and bottles whose contents had only been tasted, were removed to the kitchen.  She commented thereon, but the somewhat contemptuous smile of her domestics was her only reply and it made her feel ashamed.

Vaudrey’s predecessor, Monsieur Pichereau, was exacting, close-fisted.  His table was meagre but there was nothing astonishing in that, Monsieur Pichereau had a delicate stomach.  Well and good, but the predecessors of Monsieur Pichereau, they had given fetes, they had!  It is true that one was a count and the other a marquis.  One can always tell a gentleman anywhere.

One evening, they heard one of the domestics of the ministry say to another: 

“As if it were not our money that the ministers spend!  It is the electors’ money.  They give us wages:  we give them salaries.  There it is!”

The domestic was discharged immediately, but these remarks, however, recurred to Adrienne’s memory and filled her with dislike for the flunkeyism that surrounded her, waiting on her with cold civility, but without any attachment, like hotel waiters or girls at an inn that one will leave the next day, giving them a gratuity.