At first she allowed Vaudrey, who knelt at her feet, as Lissac had told him on going away, to take her hand that hung listlessly down.  Then she gently withdrew it as if she felt herself seized by an instinctive sense of outraged modesty.

Vaudrey tried to speak.  At first only confused words, silly excuses, clumsy falsehoods, cruelly absurd phrases—­caprices, nothing serious, whim, madness—­so many avowals, so many insults, came to his lips.  But then, before the silence of Adrienne, he could say nothing more, he was speechless, overwhelmed, and sought a hand that was refused.

“Will you never forgive me?” he asked at last, not knowing too well what he said.

“Never!” she said coldly.

She rose and with as much sudden energy as but a moment before she had felt of weakness, she crossed the room.

“Are you going away?” stammered Sulpice.

“Yes, I must be alone—­Ah! quite alone,” she said, with a sort of gesture of disgust as she saw her husband approach her.

He stopped and said, as if by chance: 

“You know that—­this evening—­”

“Yes, yes,” she replied, “do not be anxious about anything!  I am still the minister’s wife, if I am Madame Vaudrey no longer.”

He tried in vain to reply.

Adrienne had already disappeared.

“There is the end of my happiness!” Sulpice stammered as he suddenly confronted an unknown situation dark as an abyss.  “Ah! how wretched I am!  Very wretched! whose fault is it?”

He plunged gladly into the work of examining the bundles of reports from the prefects, feverishly inspecting them to deafen and blind his conscience, and seized at every moment with a desire to make an appeal to Adrienne or to go and insult Marianne.  Oh! especially to tell Marianne that she had betrayed him, that she was a wretch, that she was the mistress of Rosas, the mistress of Jouvenet, a strumpet like any other strumpet, yes, a strumpet!

Amid all the disturbance of that day of harsh misfortune, perhaps he thought more of the Marianne that he had lost than of the Adrienne that he had outraged; while the wife questioned with herself if it were really she coming and going, automatically trying on her ball costume, abandoning her head to the hair-dresser, feeling that in two hours she would be condemned to smile on the minister’s guests, the senators and the deputies and play the part of a spectre, marching in the land of dreams, in a nightmare that choked her, fastened on her throat and heart and prompted her to cry and weep, all her poor nerves intensely strained and sick, subdued by the energy of a tortured person, imposing on herself the task of not appearing to suffer and—­a still more atrocious thing—­of not even suffering in reality and waiting, yes, waiting to sob.