“Yes,” said Vaudrey, “but—­”

“You would not, I think, desire me to pay it with the duke’s money, that Monsieur de Rosas should pay your debts?”

“Marianne,” cried Sulpice, livid with rage.

“Bless me! you speak to me of money?  You chant your ruin to me!  The De Profundis of your money-box, should I know that?  I question with myself as to what it means!—­However, knowing you to be financially embarrassed, I have myself found you help—­Yes, I told someone who understands how to extricate business men, that you were embarrassed!”

“I?”

“There is nothing to blush about.  I told Molina the Tumbler—­You know him?”

Did he know him!  At that very moment he saw the ruddy gold moon that represented the banker’s face amid all the expanse of his shining flesh.  He trembled as if in the face of temptation.

“Molina is a man of means,” said Marianne.  “If you need money, you can have it there!  And now, once more, leave me to my new life!  The past is as if it had never been!—­Bonjour, Bonsoir!—­and adieu, go!—­Give me your hand!”

She smiled so strangely, half lying on the divan, and stretched out her white hand, which he covered with kisses, murmuring: 

“Well, yes, adieu!  Yes, adieu!—­But once more—­once!—­this evening—­I love you so dearly!—­Will you?”

She quietly reached out her bare arm toward a silk bell-rope that she jerked suddenly and Vaudrey rose enraged and humiliated.

“Show Monsieur Vaudrey out,” Marianne said to Justine, as she appeared at the door.  “Then you may go to bed, my girl!”

Vaudrey left this woman’s house in a fit of frenzy.  She had just treated him who had paid for the divan on which she was reclining as a genuine duchess might have treated a man who had been insolently disrespectful toward her.  He was almost inclined to laugh at it.

“It is well done! well done for you!  Ah! the dolt!  To trust a wanton!  To trust Warcolier!  To trust everybody!  To trust everybody except Adrienne!—­”

He, mechanically and without thought, resumed the way to Place Beauvau, forgetting that the ministerial home was no longer his.  The porter—­who knows? might not have opened the gate to him.  The lackeys would have driven him off as the girl had done whom he had paid, yes, paid, paid!  For she was a harlot, nothing more!

Gradually, the thought of that debt swelled by successive bills of exchange, and almost forgotten during the recent days of feverish excitement, took possession of his mind, he remembered that it must be discharged on the first day of December, in five days, and the thought troubled him like an impending danger.  The prospect had often, during the last few weeks, made him anxious.  He saw the months pass, the days flit with extraordinary rapidity, and the maturity, the inevitable due date draw near with the mathematical regularity of a clock.  So long as months were