Marianne was contented.  Not that her ambition was completely satisfied, but after all, Sulpice in place of Rosas was worth having.  Though a minister was only a passing celebrity, he was a personage.  From the depths of the bog in which she lately rolled, she would never have dared to hope for so speedy a revenge.

Speedy, assuredly, but perhaps not sufficient.  Her eager hunger increased with her success.  Since Vaudrey was hers, she sought some means of bringing about some adventure that would give her fortune.  What could be asked or exacted from Sulpice?  She recalled the traditions of fantastic bargains, of extensive furnishings.  She would find them.  She had but to desire, since he had abandoned himself, bound hand and foot, like a child.

She knew him now, all his candor, all his weakness, for, in the presence of this blase woman, weary of love, Vaudrey permitted himself to confide his thoughts with unreserved freedom, opening his heart and disclosing himself with a clean breast in this duel with a woman:—­a duel of self-interest which he mistook for passion.

She had studied him at first and speedily ranked him, calling him: 

“An innocent!”

She felt that in this house in Rue Prony, where she was really not in her own home but was installed as in a conquered territory, Sulpice was dazzled.  Like a provincial, as Granet described him so often, he entered there into a new world.

Uncle Kayser frequently called to see his niece.  Severe in taste, he cast long, disdainful looks at the tapestries and the artistic trifles that adorned the house.  In his opinion, it was rubbish and the luxury of a decaying age.  He never changed his tune, always riding the hobby-horse of an aesthetic moralist.

“It lacks severity, all this furnishing of yours,” was his constantly repeated criticism to Marianne, as he sat smoking his pipe on a divan, as was his custom in his own, wretched studio.

Then, in an abrupt way, with his eye wandering over the ceiling as if he were following the flight of a chimera, he would say: 

“Why! your minister must do a great deal, if all this comes from the ministry!”

Marianne interrupted him.  It was no business of his to mix himself up with matters that did not concern him.  Above all, he must hold his tongue.  Did he forget that Vaudrey was married?  The least indiscretion—­

“Oh! don’t alarm yourself,” the painter broke in, “I am as dumb as a carp, the more so since your escapade is not very praiseworthy!—­For you have, in fact, deserted the domestic hearth—­yes, you have deserted the hearth.—­It is pretty here, a little like a courtesan’s, perhaps, but pretty, all the same.—­But you must acknowledge that it is a case of interloping.  It is not the genuine home with its dignity, its virtuous severity, its—­What time does your minister come?  I would like to speak to him—­”

“To preach morality to him?” asked Marianne, glancing at her uncle with an ironical expression.