Her intimate friend, pretty Madame Gerson, who assisted her in doing the honors of her salon until the time when she herself would have a rival salon and take Sabine’s guests away from her, sought in vain to comfort her by assuring her that Pichereau would be sure to come.  He had promised to do so.  He was a sincere man, and his word could be relied on.  He would, moreover, bring his former colleagues from the Departments of Public Instruction, and Post and Telegraph.  He had promised.  Oh! yes, Pichereau!  Pichereau, however, mattered very little to Sabine now! Ex-ministers, indeed! she could always have enough of them.  It was not that kind that she wanted.  She did not care about her salon being called the Invalides as that of a rival was called the Salon des Refusees.  No, certainly not, that was something she would never consent to.

Granet’s impatience had upset all her plans.

So Madame Marsy, side by side in her box with Madame Gerson, whose dark, brilliant beauty set off her own fair beauty, had listened with a bored and sulky manner to the first act of L’Africaine, while Monsieur Gerson conversed timidly, half under his breath, with Guy de Lissac, who made the fourth occupant of the box.

At the end of the second act, however, Lissac suddenly caught sight of Vaudrey’s smiling countenance beside Granet’s waxed moustaches in the manager’s box.

“Ah!” he exclaimed, “there is Vaudrey!”

Madame Marsy, however, had already caught sight of him.  She turned her opera-glass upon the new Cabinet Minister, whose carefully arranged blonde beard was parted in the middle and spread out in two light tufts over his white necktie, his silky moustaches turned jauntily upwards against his fleshy cheeks.  Sabine, continuing to look at the newcomer through her glass, saw as he moved within the shadow of the box, this man of forty, with a very agreeable and still youthful face, and as he leaned over the edge of the box to look at the audience, she noted that he had a slight bald spot on the top of his skull between the fair tufts that adorned the sides of his head.

“Oh!” she exclaimed suddenly, “I thought that he was a dark man.”

“No, no,” answered Lissac, “on the contrary, he was a fair, handsome youth when we both studied law here in Paris together.”

Madame Marsy, as if she had been touched by an electric spark, turned quickly round on her chair to look at Guy, displaying to him as she did so, a lovely face, surmounting the most beautiful shoulders imaginable.

“What! you know the minister so intimately?”

“Very intimately.”

“Then, my dear Lissac, you can do me the greatest favor.  No, I do not ask you to do it, I insist on it.”

Over the pretty Andalusian features of Madame Gerson, a mocking smile played.

“I have guessed it,” she exclaimed.

“And so have I,” said Lissac.  “You wish me to present the new Minister of the Interior to you?  You have a friend you want appointed to a prefecture.”