“Realized!” said Vaudrey.

He made an effort to shake his head deprecatingly as if his vanity were not flattered by those honeyed words of his friend; but his glance displayed such sincere delight and so strong a desire to be effusive and in evidence, that he could not repress a smile upon hearing from the companion of his youth, such a confirmation of his triumph.  They are our most severe critics, these friends of our youth, they who have listened to the stammering of our hopes and dreams of the future.  And when at length we have conquered the future, these are often the very ones to rob us of it!  Lissac, however, was not one of these envious ones.

“Let us go to Madame Marsy’s box, my dear Guy,” said Sulpice.  “The more so because if she at all resembles her portrait at the last Salon, she must be lovely indeed.”

He left the greenroom, leaning on the arm of Lissac, after throwing a glance backward, however, at the girls whirling about there, and where in the presence of their stiff, ancient superiors, the young sub-prefects still hid their faces behind their opera hats.  Granet with Molina went to take leave of Vaudrey, leaving little Marie Launay smiling artlessly because the financier, the Tumbler, had said to her, in drawing down her eyelids with his coarse finger:  “Will you close your periwinkles—­you kid?”

“Your Excellency,” the banker had said, cajoling his Excellency with his meaning glance, “I am always at your orders you know.”

“To-morrow, at the Prisons’ Commission, Monsieur le Ministre,” said Granet.  And amid salutations on every side Vaudrey withdrew, smiling and good-humored as usual.

In order to reach the box, Vaudrey had to cross the stage.  The new scene was set.  Buddhist temples with their grotesque shapes and huge statues stood out against a background of vivid blue sky, and on the canvas beyond, great pink flowers glowed amid refreshing verdure.  Over all fell a soft fairy-like light from an electric lamp, casting on the floor a fantastic gleam, soft and clear as the rays of the moon.  Sulpice smiled as he passed beneath this flood of light and saw his shadow projected before him as upon the glassy waters of a lake.  It seemed to him that this sudden illumination, a sort of fantastic apotheosis as it were, was like the fairy-like aureole that attended his progress.

At the very moment of leaving the greenroom, Sulpice had jostled accidentally against a man of very grave aspect wearing a black coat closely buttoned.  He was almost bald save for some long, thin, gray locks that hung about his huge ears, his cheeks had a hectic color and his skull was yellow.  He entered this salon in a hesitating, inquisitive way, with wide-open eyes and a gourmand’s movement of the nostrils, and gazed about the room, warm with lights and heavy with perfume.

Sulpice glanced at him carelessly and recognized him as the man whom he himself had superseded on Place Beauvau—­a Puritan, a Huguenot, a widower, the father of five or six daughters, and as solemn and proper in his ordinary demeanor as a Sunday-school tract.  Sulpice could not refrain from crying out merrily:  “Bless me!  Monsieur Pichereau!”