“Poetry!” said Vaudrey.  “Will you be quiet!  The Gersons would find me as antiquated as Ramel.  It is old-fashioned.”

“I am no longer surprised,” added the young wife, “at being so little fashionable.  Morally speaking, those hot-houses of platitudes stifle one.  Never fear, Sulpice, I shall not be the one to ever again drag you into salons.  Are you tired?  Are you weary?”

“No, I was thinking of something else,” replied Vaudrey, who really was thinking of Marianne.

Madame Vaudrey had not left Madame Gerson’s salon before that pretty little Parisian whispered imprudently enough in the ear of a female friend: 

“Our ministers’ wives are always from Carpentras, Pont-a-Mousson, or Moulins; don’t you think so?”

“And what would you have!” said Lissac, who on this evening heard everything that he ought not to hear, “it is as good as being from the Moulin-Rouge!”

Madame Gerson smiled, thought the expression charming, very apt, very happy, but again reflected that Lissac was exceedingly considerate toward Adrienne and that Madame Vaudrey was a little too indulgent toward Monsieur de Lissac.

V

Since the moment when it had entered her mind that she might find something more than a lover in Monsieur de Rosas, Marianne had been sorely puzzled.  She was playing a strong hand.  Between the minister and the duke she must make a choice.

She did not care seriously for Vaudrey.  In fact she found that he was ridiculously unreserved.  “He is a simple fellow!” she said to Claire Dujarrier.  But she had sufficient amour-propre to retain him, and she felt assured that Sulpice was weak enough to obey her in everything:  such an individual was not to be disdained.  As to Rosas, she felt a sentiment which certainly was not love, but rather a feeling of astonishment, a peculiar affection.  Rosas held her in respect, and she was flattered by his timid bearing, as he had in his veins the blood of heroes.  He spoke almost entirely of his love, which, however, he never proposed to her to test, and this platonic course, which in Vaudrey’s case she would have considered simple, appeared to her to be “good form” in the great nobleman’s case.  The duke raised her in her own eyes.

He had never repeated that word, doubtless spoken by him at random:  marriage, and Marianne was too discreet and shrewd to appear to have specially noticed it.  She did not even allude to it.  She waited patiently.  With the lapse of time, she thought, Rosas would be the more surely in her grasp.  Meantime it was necessary to live and as she was bent on maintaining her household, she kept Vaudrey, whom she might need at any moment.

Her part was to carry on these two intrigues simultaneously, leading Rosas to believe that the minister was her friend only, nothing more, the patron of Uncle Kayser, and making Vaudrey think that since she had dismissed the duke he had become resigned and would “suppress his sighs.”  She could have sworn, in all sincerity, that Jose was not her lover.