jaw of a Molossian.  And now, in his unquenchable lust of power, amid the monuments of combination and deception he had created, this man was weary, disgusted and irritated,—­believing himself vanquished and smothering the anger of defeat in the luxurious isolation of his wealth.  He was neither officially influential nor liked.  Feared he was, probably, and envied because of his good fortune, recognized, too, as a force, but only as acting in the whirlwind of his ideas and struggling in the emptiness of his dreams.  After having immolated everything, youth, family, friendship, love, to this chimera:  power, he found himself old, worn-out, broken by his combats, face to face with the folly of his hopes and the worthlessness of his will.  Never had his nervous hand been able to grasp in its transition, the fragment of morocco of a portfolio and now that his parchment-like fingers were old and feeble, they would never cling to that shred of power!  And now this Prangins avenged himself for the contempt or the injustice of his colleagues and the folly of circumstances, by criticism, defiance, mockery, denial and by loudly expressing his opinion: 

“The defect of every government is that it will try to play new airs on an old violin!  Your violin is cracked, Monsieur Vaudrey!  I do not reproach you for that, you did not make it!”

Vaudrey laughed at the sally, but Warcolier felt that he was choking.  How could the minister allow his policy to be thus attacked at table?  Ah! how Warcolier would have clinched the argument of this Prangins.

Madame Gerson was delighted.  The dinner was served sumptuously and went off without a hitch.  The maitre d’hotel directed the service admirably.  The soiree that was to follow it would be magnificent.  The journals would most certainly report it.  Gerson had invited one reporter in spite of his dislike of journalists.  Ah! those gossipers and foolish fellows, they never forgot to describe the toilettes worn by “the pretty Madame Gerson” at first nights, at the Elysee or at Charity Bazaars.  Occasionally, her husband pretended to be angered by the successes of his wife: 

“Those journalists!  Just imagine, those journalists!  They speak about my wife just as they would about an actress!  ’The lovely Madame Gerson wore a gown of crepe de Chine!’ The lovely Madame Gerson!  What has my wife’s beauty or her toilette to do with them?”

In truth, however, he felt flattered.  He was only sincerely annoyed when people respected the devilish wall of private life, the cement of which he would have stripped off himself, in order to show his wife’s beauty.  To be quoted in the paper, why! that is chic.