She was longing to escape from all that noise, that atmosphere that lacked air, and from Marianne’s look and smile that pierced her.  She went, as if by chance, instinctively guiding Lissac, led by him to a little, salon far from the reception rooms, and which was reserved for her and protected by a door guarded by an usher.  It might have been thought that she expected this solitude would be necessary to her as an escape from the fright of that reception, to which her overstrained and sick nerves made her a prey.

In passing, Lissac had whispered to Ramel, who was at his elbow: 

“Tell Sulpice that Madame Vaudrey is ill!”

“Ill?”

“You see that she is!”

When Adrienne was within the little salon hung with garnet silk draperies, in which the candelabras and sconces were lighted, she sank into an armchair, entirely exhausted and overwhelmed by the fearful resistance she had made to her feelings.  She remained there motionless, her eye fixed, her face pale, and both hands resting on the arms of her chair, abstractedly looking at the pattern of the carpet.

Guy stood near, biting his lips as he thought of the madman Vaudrey and that wretched Marianne.

“She at least obeys her instincts!  But he!”

“Ah! it is too much; yes, it is too much!” repeated Adrienne, as if Lissac were again repeating that phrase.

It seemed to her that she had been thrust into some cowardly situation; that she had been subjected to a shower of filth!  It was hideous, repugnant.  She now saw, in the depths of her life, events that she had never before seen; her vision had suddenly become clear.  Dark details she could now explain.  Vaudrey’s falsehoods were suddenly manifested.

“He lied!  Ah! how he had lied!”

She recalled his anxiety to hide the journals from her, his oft-repeated suggestions, his precautions, the increasing number of his night-sessions that made him pale.  Pale from debauchery!  And she pitied him!  She begged him not to kill himself for the politics that was eating his life.  Again she saw on the lips of her Wednesday’s guests the furtive smiles that were hidden behind muffs when she spoke of those nocturnal sessions of the Chamber, which were only nights passed in Marianne’s bed!  How those Parisians must have laughed at her and ridiculed the credulity of the woman who believes herself loved, but who is deceived and mocked at!  Madame Gerson, Sabine!  How overjoyed they must have been when, in their salons, they referred to the little, stupid Provincial who was ignorant of these tricks!

She felt ridiculed and tortured, more tortured than baffled, for her vanity was nothing in comparison with her love, her poor, artless and trusting love!

“Sulpice, I should never have believed—­Never!—­”

Why had they left Grenoble, their little house on the banks of the Isere?  They loved each other there, it was Paris that had snatched him away!  Paris!  She hated it now.  She hated that reputation that had carried Vaudrey into office, the politics that had robbed her of a kind and loving husband,—­for he had loved her, she was sure of that,—­and which had made him the lover of a courtesan, the liar and coward that he was!