“Ah! what a wretch I have been!” he said as he struck his knee with his closed fist.  “How unhappy I am!  Adrienne!”

He rose abruptly, as if moved by a spring, and bounded toward a window which he threw wide open to admit the cold wind of this November evening, and tried to distinguish among the many carriages that rolled through the brownish mud, with their lighted lamps shining like so many eyes, to discover, to imagine the carriage that was bearing Adrienne away.  He believed that he recognized it in a vehicle that was threading its way, loaded with trunks, almost out of sight yonder.

He leaned upon the window-sill, and like a shipwrecked sailor who sees a receding ship, he called out, with a loud cry lost in the tempest of that bustling and busy street: 

“Adrienne!  Adrienne!”

No reply!  The carriage had disappeared in the distance, in the fog.

For a moment, Sulpice remained there crushed but drawn by the noise of the street, as if by some whirlpool in the deep sea.  Had he been thrown out and been dashed upon the pavements, he would have been happy.  Only a void seemed about him, and before him that black hollow in which moved confusedly only strangers who in no way formed part of his life.

This isolation terrified him.  At last, he went downstairs in haste, threw himself into a carriage and had himself driven to the railway, intending to see Adrienne again.

“Quickly! quickly! at your best speed!”

The driver whipped up his horses and the carriage-windows clattered with the noise of old iron.

Vaudrey arrived too late.  The train had left twenty minutes before.  He had reflected too long at his window.

“Besides,” he said to himself sadly, “she would not have forgiven me!  She will never forget!”

Buried in the corner of the coach that took her away, and closing her eyes, recalling all her past life, so cruelly ironical to-day, Adrienne, disturbed by the noise and rolling of the train that increased her feverish condition, felt her heart swell, and poor, broken creature that she was, called all her strength to her aid to refrain from weeping, from crying out in her grief.  She was taking away, back to the country, the half-withered Christmas roses received from Grenoble, and in the morbid confusion of the ideas that clashed in her poor brain, she saw once more Lissac’s blanched face and heard Guy tell her again:  “It is because you are a virtuous woman that I love you!”

“A virtuous woman!  Does he know how to love as well as the others?” she murmured, as she thought of Vaudrey whom she would never see again, and whom she no longer loved.

“See!  I am a widow now, and a widow who will never love anyone, and who will never marry again.”

VIII

Alone in Paris now, a body without a soul, distracted, and the prey of ennui, with sad and bitter regret for his wasted life, repeating to himself that Adrienne, far away from him, would never forgive, and was doubtless, at this moment, saying and saying again to herself in her solitude at Grenoble, that these politicians, at least, owed her divorce, Vaudrey, not knowing what to do after a weary day of troubled rest, mechanically entered the Opera House to distract his eyes if not his mind.