Before the buffet, brilliant with light and the gleaming of crystal, the golden-tinted champagne sparkling in the goblets, the ruddy tone of the punch, the many fruits, the bright-colored granite and the ices, Vaudrey stopped, releasing the arm of the young girl but remaining beside her and passing her the sherbet which a lackey handed him over the piled-up plates.

Groups were always encircling him; searching, half-anxious glances greeted his.  An eager hunt after smiles and greetings accompanied the hunt for tutti frutti.  But the minister confined his attentions to Marianne, chafing under the eagerness of his desires, though bearing them with good grace, as if he were really the lover of the pretty girl.

Marianne stood stirring the sherbet with the point of a silver-plated spoon, examining this statesman, as seductive as a fashionable man, with that womanly curiosity that divines a silent declaration.  A gold weigher does not balance more keenly in his scales an unfamiliar coin than a woman estimates and gauges the value of a stranger.

Marianne readily understood that she had fascinated Vaudrey.  This Vaudrey!  Notwithstanding that he possessed a charming wife, he still permitted himself to recognize beauty in other women, and to tell them so, for he so informed Marianne!  He declared it by his smile, his sparkling eyes, and the protecting bearing that he instinctively manifested in the presence of this creature who glanced at him with perfect composure.

In the confusion attending the attack on the buffet and in the presence of the crowd that formed a half-circle round the minister, it was not possible for him to commit himself too much; and the conversation, half-drowned by the noise of voices, was carried on by fits and starts; but in order to make themselves understood, Vaudrey and Marianne drew nearer each other and found themselves occasionally almost pressed against each other, so that the light breath of this woman and the scent of new-mown hay that she exhaled, wafted over Sulpice’s face.  He looked at her so admiringly that it was noticeable.  She was laced in a light blue satin gown that showed her rosy arms to the elbows, and her shoulders gleamed with a rosy tint that suggested the rays of a winter sun lighting up the pure snow.  A singular animation, half-feverish, beamed in her small, piercing, restless eyes, and her delicate ears with their well-marked rims were quite red.  The light that fell from the wax candles imparted to her hair a Titian red tint as if she had bound her locks with henna during the night.  She was visibly assured of her power and smiled with a strange and provoking air.

Vaudrey felt really much disturbed, he was attracted and half-angered by this pretty girl with dilating nostrils who calmly swallowed her glass of sherbet.  He thought her at once exquisite and lovely, doubly charming with her Parisian grace and in her ball costume, her bare flesh as lustrous as mother-of-pearl under the brilliant light.