“Nothing, your Prefect of Police only spoke a little too loud.  He seemed to me to understand.”

Vaudrey’s hand rapidly seized Lissac’s wrist.

“Hush! be silent!”

“Very well!  Good!” said Lissac to himself.  “Poor little Adrienne.”

“I will tell you all about that later.  Oh! nothing is more simple!  It isn’t what you think!”

“I am sure of that!” answered Lissac, with a smile.

In a mechanical way, and as if to evade his friend, Sulpice left the smoking-room for the salon, tritely observing: 

“We must rejoin the ladies—­the cigar kills conversation—­”

He felt uncomfortable.  It was the first time that Jouvenet had informed him that there are agents for learning the movements of ministers.  The Prefect of Police, in a chance conversation at the Opera with the editor-in-chief of a very Parisian journal, had suppressed a rumor which stated that a minister hailing from Grenoble set propriety at defiance in his visits to Rue Prony.  It would have been as well to print Vaudrey’s name.

Hitherto he had been able to enjoy his passion for Marianne without scandal and secretly.  His mysterious intrigue was now known to the police, to everybody, to a reporter who had stumbled against him on leaving a supper-party at the house of a courtesan in the neighborhood.

The minister was bitterly annoyed.  The very flattering applause that the women bestowed upon him when he returned to the salon could not dissipate his ill-humor.  He tried to chat and respond to the affected remarks of Madame Gerson and to the smiles of the women; but he was embarrassed and nervous.  Adrienne thought he looked ill.

Everything was spoken of in the light but pretentious, easy tone of the conversation of those second-rate salons where neither ideas nor men are made, where, on the contrary, they are accepted, ready-made and en bloc.  On every question, the picture in vogue, the favorite book, the man of the hour, they expressed themselves by the same stereotyped, expected word, borrowed from the ceaseless repetition of current polemics.  Nothing was new.  The conversation was as well worn as an old farthing.  Adrienne was pained to see a man of Vaudrey’s intelligence compelled to listen to these truisms and wondered if he would presently reproach her for having brought him into the suffocating void of this Parisian establishment where all was superficial, glittering and chic.

She was in a hurry to get away.  She saw that Sulpice was growing weary, and took advantage of the first opportunity to whisper to him: 

“Would you like to go?”

“Yes, let us go!” he said.

He sought Lissac and repeated to him that he would have something to say to him, and Guy bowed to the Minister and Madame Vaudrey, who left too early to please the Gersons.

Adrienne, out of heart and discouraged by commonplace gossip and slander, was eager to be again with her husband, to tell him that nothing could compensate her for the deep joy of the tete-a-tete, their evenings passed together as of old—­he remembered them well,—­when he read to her from the works of much-loved poets.