Sulpice was anxious for the Council to be over.  The President, before the close of the session, repeated, with all the seriousness of a judge of the Court of Appeal:  “Above all, messieurs, no innovations, don’t try to do too well, let things alone.  Don’t let us trouble about business!  Let us be content to live!  The session is ended.”

“Not about business?” said Vaudrey to himself.

He understood power in quite a different way.  Longing for improvements, he did not understand how to let himself be dragged on like a cork upon a stream, by the wave of daily events.  He was determined to put his ideas into force, to give life and durability to his ministry.  There was no use in being a minister if he must continue the habitual go-as-you-please of current politics.  In that case, the first chief of bureau one might meet would make as good a minister as he.

At the moment of leaving the Council Chamber, the Minister of War said to him, in a jocose, brusque way:  “Well! my dear colleague, Warcolier’s election does not seem to have pleased you?  Bah! if he has changed shoulders with his gun, that only proves that he knows how to drill.”

And the soldier laughed heartily behind his closely buttoned frock coat.

Vaudrey got into his carriage and returned to the ministry to breakfast.

Formerly the breakfast hour was generally the time of joyous freedom for Sulpice.  He felt soothed beside Adrienne and forgot his daily struggles.

In their home on Chaussee d’Antin, he usually abandoned himself freely to lively and cheerful conversation, to allow his wife to find in him, the man of forty years, the fiance, the young husband of former days.  But here, before these exclusive domestics, the familiars of the ministry, planted around the table like so many inspectors, rather than servants, he dared not manifest himself.  He scarcely spoke.  He felt that he was watched and listened to.  The valet who passed him the dishes watched over Monsieur le Ministre.  He imagined that his attendants in their silent reflections compared the present minister with those that had gone before him.  On one occasion, one of the domestics replied to a remark made by Adrienne:  “Monsieur Pichereau, who preceded Monsieur le Ministre, and Monsieur le Comte d’Harville, who preceded Monsieur Pichereau, considered my service very proper, madame.”

Adrienne accepted as well as she could the necessities of her new position.  Since that was power, let power rule!  She was resigned to those wastes whose luxury was apparent, since the political fortunes of her husband cast her there, like a prisoner, in that huge, commonplace, ministerial mansion, wherein none of the joys of home or of that Parisian apartment that she had furnished with such refined taste were left her.  She felt half lost in those vast, cold salons of that ancient Hotel Beauvau,—­cold in spite of their stoves, and which partook at one