Her corsage was ornamented on the left side by an embroidered black butterfly, with outstretched wings of a brownish, brilliant tint, and Vaudrey, with a smile, asked her, without quite understanding what he said, if it were an emblematic crest.

She smiled.

“Precisely,” she replied.  “What I wear in my corsage I have in my mind.  Black butterflies—­or blue devils, as you choose.”

“You are not exceptional,” said Sulpice.  “All women are such.”

“All women in your opinion then, are a little—­what is it called? a little out of the perpendicular—­or to speak more to the point, a little queer, Monsieur le Ministre?”

The minister smiled in his turn, and looked at Marianne, whose eyes, seen between the blinking lids, gleamed as the electric eyes of a cat shine between its long lashes.

“No,” he said, “no, but I blame them somewhat for loving the blue only in the butterflies of which you speak, the blue devils that penetrate their brain!  They are born for blue, however, for that which the provincial poets style ‘the azure’, and they shun it as if blue were detestable. Blue! Nonsense!  Good for men, those simpletons, who in the present age, are the only partisans of blue in passion and in life.”

Whether he desired it or not, he had drawn still closer to this creature who studied him like a strategist while he fawned on her with his glances, losing himself in that “blue” of which he spoke with a certain elegance, in which he desired to express mockery, but which was nevertheless sincere.  In the same jesting tone, pointing to the light blue of her gown, she said: 

“You see, your Excellency, that all women do not dislike blue.”

“If it is fashionable, parbleu! And if it becomes their beauty as well as this stuff of yours, they would adore it, most assuredly.”

“They love it otherwise, too—­In passion and in life.  That depends on the women—­and on men,” she added, showing her white teeth while smiling graciously.

She dropped her spoon in the saucer and handed the sherbet to a servant.  With an involuntary movement—­or perhaps, after all, it was a shrewdly calculated one—­she almost grazed Sulpice’s cheek and lips when she extended her round and firm arm, and Sulpice, who was somewhat bewildered, was severely tempted, like some collegian, to kiss it in passage.

He closed his eyes and a moment after, on reopening them, the disturbing element having passed, he saw Marianne before him with her fan in her hand, and as if the image of which he spoke only now recurred to his memory, he said: 

“Mademoiselle, it seems to me that in this very costume and as charming as you are at this moment, I have seen your portrait at the Salon; is it not so?”

“Yes,” she said.  “It is the very best painting that my uncle has produced.”

“I thought it excellent before seeing you,” said Sulpice, “but now—­”