“Idiot that I am!—­I am at your orders, monsieur,” he said, making a sign to the Commissioner to pass out.

He again saluted the stupefied journalist, and the Commissioner bowing to him, out of politeness or prudence, Guy passed before him, angrily twirling his mustache.

Besides Brevans, nobody in all that crowd suspected that a man had just been arrested in the midst of the Exposition.  Unless the journalist had hawked the news from group to group, it would not have been suspected.

Lissac found at the door of the Club on Place Vendome a hired carriage which had come up as soon as the driver saw the Commissioner.  Two agents, having the appearance of good, peaceable bourgeois, were walking about, chatting together on the sidewalk, as if on duty.  The Commissioner said to one of them: 

“I have no further need of you, Crabot will do.”

Crabot, a little man with the profile of a weasel, slowly mounted the box beside the coachman, and the Commissioner of Police took his seat next to Lissac, who had nervously plucked the rosette of the Portuguese Order of Christ from his buttonhole.

“What!” he said.  “Really, then, it is for this?  Because I wear this ribbon without having paid five or six louis into the Chancellery?—­I have always intended to do so, but, believe me, I have not had the time.  But a fiscal question does not warrant publicly insulting—­”

“I do not know if it is for that,” interrupted the Commissioner; “but it is evident that a recent note in the Officiel points directly to the illegal wearing of foreign decorations.  You do not read the Officiel, Monsieur de Lissac.”

Guy shrugged his shoulders as if he considered the matter perfectly ridiculous.  It seemed to him that behind the alleged pretext there was some secret cause, something like a feminine intrigue.  He vaguely recalled that he had seen Marianne one evening at Madame de Marsy’s smile at the Prefect of Police, that Jouvenet who flirted so agreeably with that pretty girl in a corner of the salon.  And then, too, at the theatre, in Marianne’s box, the prefect found his way.  At the first moment, the idea that Marianne had a hand in this arrest took possession of his mind.  He saw her standing before him at his house, posing her little nervous, fidgety hand on his breast at the very spot occupied by this rosette; again he saw her smiling mysteriously, accompanying it with a caress which seemed to suggest the desire to end in a scratch.

Was it really true that Marianne was sufficiently audacious to have brought about this coup de theatre?  No, there was some error.  The stupid zeal of some subordinate officer was manifested in this outrage.  Some cowardly charge had perhaps been made against him at the prefecture.  Every man who crosses a street has so many enemies that look at him as he passes as if they would spy on him!  There are so many undeclared hatreds crawling in the rotten depths of this Parisian bog!  One fine morning one feels one’s self stung in the heel.  It is nothing:  only some anonymous gossip; some unknown person taking revenge!