innocent modesty.  But Adrienne’s love was insipid compared with the intoxicating and appetizing voluptuousness of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her attitudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared everything, mocked, caressed, beginning with a pout and ending with some drollery, and challenged passion by exasperating it with refusals and mockery that changed into distracting lasciviousness.

When she extended to Vaudrey her little hand, covered with rings, and indolent and soft, he felt as if he had received an electric shock and that his marrow had been touched.  This man of forty felt all the enthusiasm and distraction of a youth.  It seemed to him that this was the only woman that he possibly could love, and in truth she was the only one that he could have loved as he did, with his forgetfulness of self, his outbursts of madness, the distracted sentiment of a love for which he would have braved and risked everything.

When he confessed it frankly, she had a way of answering with a questioning manner full of doubt, which conveyed the delicacy of the woman’s self-love and the intentionally refined doubt of the coquette, a questioning yes: 

“Yes?”

Simply that.

And in this yes, there was a world of tenderness, excitement and burning promises for Sulpice.

Then he drew her to him: 

“Yes, yes, yes, yes!” he repeated in burning tones, as he thrust his head between her shoulders that emerged from her embroidered chemise, and her neck perfumed and satiny, that he covered with eager kisses.

Yes!  And he would have uttered this yes before every one like a bravado. Yes! It was his delight to give himself wholly to Marianne and to tell her again and again that nothing in the whole world could take the place of this mistress who made him forget everything:  politics, the home, the ambition that had been his life, and his affection for Adrienne that had been his joy.

Thanks to the Dujarrier, Marianne had paid the rent of the house, the servants and the pressing debts.  Claire Dujarrier advanced the hundred thousand francs demanded by Mademoiselle Kayser, and which she had apparently—­in reality she took them from her own funds—­borrowed from Adolphe Gochard, her lover, who had not a sou, and in whose favor Vaudrey signed in regular legal form, a bill of exchange at three months’ date value received in cash.  The Dujarrier merely retained twenty thousand francs as her commission and handed only eighty thousand to Marianne.

“But Vaudrey’s acceptance to Gochard is for one hundred thousand!”

“You are silly, my girl!  What if I lose the balance?  If your minister should not pay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Stranger things have happened, my little one.”

Vaudrey having paid, given his name, signed this bill of exchange, felt the extreme joy arising from the base self-love of the man who pays a lovely creature and who, nevertheless, believes himself loved.