Marianne did not seem to have even noticed him.

The curtain fell and he wandered into the wings, less to be there than to escape that irritating sight.  In breathing that atmosphere of a theatre, he experienced a strange sensation that pained and consoled him at the same time.  The scene-shifters were rolling back the illuminating apparatus pierced with light, and dragged to the rear the huge white sphinxes and the immense canvas on which the palm-trees were outlined upon a blue sky.  Sulpice felt the cruelly ironical sensation of finding himself, disheartened and defeated, once more on the very boards where he had entered the first time, smiling, swelling with joy, saluting and saluted and hearing on every side the same murmur, sweet as a May zephyr: 

“Monsieur le Ministre.”

It was the same scene, the same dress-coats upon the same luminous boards, the same electric rays that fell around him in the hour of his accession, creating the same vulgar aureole.  Some firemen crossed the stage slowly and with a wearied expression made their examinations; some water-carriers were sprinkling the parquet, while others were brushing away the dust.  And as if these common duties interested Sulpice, he looked on with a vacant expression, as if his thoughts had taken wing.

Suddenly, in the centre of a group, with his hat on, escorted by bending men, whose lips expressed flattery, Sulpice recognized Lucien Granet, who in the dazzling triumph of his new kingdom, crossed and recrossed the stage, distributing here and there patronizing bows.

The coarse Molina accompanied the new minister, laughing in a loud tone like the sound of a well-filled cash-box suddenly shaken.

Vaudrey felt just as if he had received a blow full in the chest.

He recalled his own meeting as a successful man with Pichereau the beaten one, on these very boards and almost in the same place, and in order to avoid having to endure the friendly ironical hand-shake that Pichereau was approaching him to give—­the hand-shake formerly given to Pichereau—­he quickly hid himself behind a wing, receiving as he did so, a blow, accompanied with a:  Pardon, monsieur, from a workman who was pushing along a piece of scenery, and a:  What a clumsy fellow! from a little danseuse, the tip of whose pink slipper he had unwittingly grazed with his heel.

He turned to the danseuse to apologize, when he perceived a young girl, all in pink, whose blue eyes looked frightened and her cheeks reddened when she recognized Vaudrey.  It was Marie Launay, whom he had seen in the greenroom the previous year, who had not yet scored a success, while he was retired.

“Oh!  I did not recognize you,” she said.  “I beg your pardon, Monsieur le Ministre!”

He wished to make some reply; but this title used by the young girl, ignorant of the political change, grated on his heart like the scratching of a nail and he saw on the other side of the stage, reaching the house by the communicating door, Lucien Granet, surrounded by his staff, and followed by the eternal cortege of powerful ones, among whom Warcolier was talking loudly, and Molina the Tumbler was recognizable by his enormous paunch and loud laugh.