While the little young men smiled, approved and loudly applauded, the old ambassador to whom the interests of a people were entrusted, hummed in a low tone, amid the noise of the reception: 

    “Aoh! aoh!  Je suis melede,
    Bien melede!  Tres melede!”

Guy de Lissac shrugged his shoulders.  He had heard a great deal of this man.  This diplomat of the chansonnette evoked his pity.  Where was he then?  At Paris or at Brives-la-Gaillarde?  At a ball at the Hotel Beauvau or in some provincial sub-prefecture?

Just before, he had heard Warcolier utter this epic expression: 

“If I were minister, I would give fireworks.  They are warlike and inoffensive at the same time!”

The voice of a young man with a Russian accent who talked politics in a corner, pleased him: 

“I am,” he said aloud, “from a singular country:  the Baltic provinces, where society is governed by deputies who, by birth, have the right to make laws, and I consider politics so tiresome, fatiguing and full of disgust and weariness as an occupation, that one ought to consider one’s self most fortunate that there are people condemned to take hold of this rancid pie, while others pass their lives in thinking, reading, talking and loving.”

“That is good,” thought Lissac.  “There is one, at least, who is not so stupid.  It is true, perhaps because I think just the same.”

Nevertheless, he went and listened, mixing with the crowd, haphazard.  His preoccupation was not there.  In reality, he thought only of Adrienne.  How the poor woman must suffer!

With a feeling of physical and moral overthrow, she had left the threshold of the salon, where she had been standing since the commencement of the soiree.  She was mixing with the crowd in her desire to forget her sorrows amid the deafening of the music, the songs, the laughter, and the murmur of the human billows that filled her salons.  She had taken her place in front of the little improvised theatre, beside all those ladies who dissected her toilette, scanned her pallid face, analyzed and examined her piece by piece, body and soul.  But there, seated near the stage, exactly in front of her, exposing, as in a stall, her blonde beauty, and radiant as a Titian, was that Marianne whose gleaming white shoulders appeared above her black satin corsage.  Again she saw her, as but a little while before, unavoidable, haughty and bold, smiling with insolence.

At every minute she was attracted by a movement of a head, or fan, or a laugh from this pretty creature, who leaned toward Sabine Marsy, then raised her brow and showed, in all the brilliancy of fatal beauty, her black corsage, striped with those fine red roses.  And now Adrienne’s anger, the grief that she had trampled under for some hours, increased from moment to moment, heightened and stung by the sight of this creature, by all kinds of bitter thoughts and by visions of treason and baffled love.  She felt that she was becoming literally mad at the thought that, upon those red and painted lips, Sulpice had rested his, that his hands had stroked those shoulders, unwound that hair, that this woman’s body had been folded in his arms.  Ah! it was enough to make her rise and cry out to that creature:  “You are a wretch.  Get you gone!  Get you gone, I say!”