The President listened.  Sulpice sometimes allowed himself to muse while seated at this green-covered table, forgetting altogether the affairs under consideration.  Sometimes he recalled those green-covered tables of the Council Chambers of the Grenoble Prefecture, finding that this Ministerial Council recalled the mean impression invoked by his provincial recollections, at other times, a vein of poesy would flit across his mind, or an eloquent word would reach his ear, suggesting to him the thought that, after all, these men seated there before their open portfolios, turning over or scattering about the papers, nevertheless represented cherished France and held in their leather pouches the secrets, the destinies, aye, even the very fate of the fatherland.

And this Sulpice, overjoyed to expand at his ease in the delights of power, sitting there in his accustomed chair,—­a chair which now seemed to be really his own—­enjoying a sort of physical satisfaction ever new, inhaling power like the fumes of a nargileh, forgot himself, however, and suddenly felt himself recalled to the urgent reality when his colleague, the Minister of War, a spare man with a grizzled moustache, dropped an infrequent remark in which, in the laconic speech of a soldier, could be comprehended some cause of anxiety or of hope.  Sulpice listened then, more moved than he was willing to have it appear, trying, in his turn, to hide all his artistic and patriotic anxieties under that firm exterior which his colleague of the Department of Foreign Affairs wore, a dull-eyed, listless face, and cheeks that might be made of pasteboard.

The business of the Council was of little importance that morning.  The Keeper of the Seals, Monsieur Collard—­of Nantes—­a fat, puffing, apoplectic man with somewhat glassy, round eyes, proposed to the President, who listened attentively but without replying, some reform to which Vaudrey was perfectly indifferent.  He did not even hear his colleague’s dull speech, the latter lost himself in useless considerations, while the Minister of War looked at him, as if his eyes, loaded with grapeshot said, in military fashion:  “Sacrebleu! get done!”

Vaudrey looked out of the window at the dark horizon of the winter sky and the gray tints of the leafless trees, and watched the little birds that chased one another among the branches.  His thoughts were far, very far away from the table where the sober silence was broken by the interminable phrases of the Minister of Justice, whose words suggested the constant flow of an open spigot.

The vision of a female form at the end of the garden appeared to him, a form that, notwithstanding the cold, was clothed in the soft blue gown that Marianne wore yesterday at Sabine’s.  He seemed to catch that fleeting smile, the exact expression of which he sought to recall, that peculiar glance, cunning and enticing, that exquisite outline of a perfect Parisian woman.  How charming she was!  And how sweet that name, Marianne!