Adrienne felt a little stunned by the noise of the conversation which increased in proportion as the dinner advanced.  She was also very much astonished and not a little grieved when Madame Gerson abruptly spoke in a loud voice before all the guests concerning Madame Marsy, at whose house it was, in fact, that she made the acquaintance of Vaudrey.  Madame Gerson showed her pretty teeth in a very charming manner as she tore her old friend Sabine to pieces, as it were.  In a tenderly indulgent tone which was the more terrible, she repeated the tales that were formerly current:  the affecting death of Philippe Marsy, the painter of Charity, and a particular escapade in which Sabine was involved with Emile Cordier, one of the leaders of the intransigeante school of painters.

“What! you did not know that?” said the pretty Madame Gerson in astonishment.

Adrienne knew nothing.  She was delighted moreover to know nothing.  She heard this former friend relate how Sabine had, at one time, exhibited at the Salon.  Oh! mere students’ daubs, horrid things!  Still-life subjects that might have passed for buried ones, and yet, perhaps, Cordier retouched them.

“I thought that Madame Gerson was on the best of terms with Madame Marsy,” whispered Adrienne to Lissac, who replied: 

“They have been on better!  They perhaps will be so again.  That is of very little importance.  Women revile each other and associate at the same time.”

Adrienne decided that she would not listen.  She knew Sabine Marsy only slightly; she was not interested as a friend; but this little execution, gracefully carried out here by a woman who recently did the honors at the Salon of Boulevard Malesherbes seemed to her as cowardly as treachery.  This, then, was society!  And how right was her choice in preferring solitude!

Then, in order that she might not hear the slander that was greeted with applause by those very persons who but yesterday besieged Madame Marsy’s buffet, and who would run to-morrow to pay court to that woman, she conversed with Lissac.  She frankly told him what she suffered at Place Beauvau.  She spoke of Sulpice, as Sulpice was loved by her beyond all else in the world.

“Fancy!  I do not see him, hardly ever!  The other week he passed two days at Laon, where an exposition was held at which he was present.”

“An exposition at Laon?” asked Lissac, astonished.  “What exposition?”

“I do not know.  I know nothing myself.  Perhaps it is wrong of me not to keep myself informed of passing events, but all that wearies me.  I detest politics and journals—­I am told quite enough about them.  Politics! that which takes my husband from me!  My uncle, Doctor Reboux, often said to me:  ‘Never marry a doctor; he is only half a husband.’  Vaudrey is like a doctor.  Always absent, with his everlasting night-sessions.”

“Night-sessions?” asked Lissac.