He went away, much dissatisfied with himself and but little less with Vaudrey.  Again he considered this man foolish, adored as he was by such a wife, whom he deceived.  He was not sure that at the bottom of his own heart he did not feel a sentiment of love toward Adrienne.  Ah! if he had been loved by such a creature, he would have been capable of great things!—­He would have arranged and utilized his life instead of spoiling it.  In place of vulgar love, he would have kept this unique love intact from the altar to the tomb!

Pale and tottering, and a child once more under her sorrow, as he had just seen her, she was so adorably lovely that he had received an entirely new impression, one of almost jealousy against Sulpice, and therefore, brusquely overcoming this strange, unseemly emotion, he had himself thrust Vaudrey toward his wife and had departed hastily, as if he felt that he must hurry away and never see them again.  But as he left, on the contrary, he saw her again with her sad, wretched, suffering look and the young wife’s sorrowful voice went with him, repeating in a tone of broken-hearted grief: 

“That is known then!”

“Ah! that miserable fellow, Vaudrey!” thought Guy.

In going out, he had to wait a moment in the antechamber, to admit of the passage of some vases of flowers, green shrubs and variegated foliage plants that were being brought in to decorate the salons.  A fete!  And this evening!  In the arrival of those flowers for decoration, at the moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed that crushing news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their hothouse bloom.

Would Adrienne have the courage or strength to undertake the reception of the evening, within a few hours?  Guy was annoyed at having come.

“I could well have waited and kept my anger to myself.  The unhappy woman would have known nothing.”

“Bah!” he added.  “She is kind, she adores Sulpice, it is only a passing storm.  She will forgive!”

He promised himself, moreover, to return in the evening, to excuse himself to Adrienne, to comfort her if he could.

“There is some merit, after all, in that,” he thought again.  “On my word!  I believe I love her and yet I am angry with that animal Vaudrey for not loving her enough.”

She will forgive!—­Lissac knew courtesans but he did not know this woman, energetic as she was under her frail appearance, a child, a little provincial lost in the life of Paris, lost and, as it were, absorbed in the hubbub of political circles, smitten with her husband, who comprehended in her eyes every seduction and superiority, having given herself entirely and wishing to wholly possess the elect being who possessed her, in whom she trusted and to whom she gave herself, body and soul, with all her confidence, her innocence and her modesty.  He did not know what such a sensitive, nervously frail nature could feel on the first terrible impulses, full of enthusiasm under her exterior coldness, of resolution concealed under her timid manners, capable of madness, distracted in spite of her reason and calm; this candor of thought, of education, and associations that made her, with all her irresistible attractiveness, the virtuous woman with all her charm.