But the years had rolled by amid the excitement and nervous strain of political life.  He lived with Adrienne in an artificial and overheated atmosphere.  Happy because he was loved, that his ambitions were realized, that he charmed an assembly of men by the same power that had obtained him the adoration of this woman, yes, he was happy, very happy:  to bless life, to excite envy, to arouse jealousy, to appear simply ridiculous if he complained of destiny; and nevertheless, at the bottom of his soul, discontented without knowing why, consumed by intangible, feverish instincts, ill-defined desires for Parisian curiosities, having dreamed in his youth of results very inferior to those he had realized, yet finding when he analyzed the realities that he enjoyed, that the promises of his dreams were more intoxicating than the best realizations.

Vaudrey was an ambitious man, but he was ambitious to perform valiant feats.  Life had formerly seemed to him to be made up of glory, triumphal entries into cities, accompanied by the fluttering of flags and the flourish of trumpets.  He pictured conquests, victories, exaltations!  Theatrical magnificence!  But now, more ironical, he was contented with quasi-triumphs, if his restless, anxious nature could be satisfied with what he obtained.

Adrienne loved him.  He loved her profoundly.

Why had the meeting with Marianne troubled him so profoundly, then?  Manifestly, Mademoiselle Kayser realized the picture of his vanished dreams, and the desires of a particular love that the passion for Adrienne, although absolute, could not satisfy.  This man had a nature of peculiar ardor—­or rather, curious desires, a greedy desire to know, an itching need to approach and peep into abysses.

Sometimes it seemed to Vaudrey that he had not lived at all, and this was the fear and desire of his life:  to live that Parisian life which flattered all his instincts and awoke and reanimated all his dreams.  But yesterday it had appeared to him when he met this young woman who raised her eyes to him, half-veiled by her long eyelashes, that a stage-curtain had been raised, disclosing dazzling fairy scenery, and since then that scenery had been always before him.  It banished, during his drive, all peace, and while the coupe threaded its way along the Faubourg Saint-Honore toward the Arc-de-Triomphe, the minister who, but two hours before, had been plunged in state affairs, settled himself down in a corner of the carriage, his legs swaddled in a robe and his feet resting on a foot-warmer, looking at, but without observing the cold figures that walked rapidly past him, the houses lighted up by the sun’s rays, and the dry pavements, and he thought of those strange eyes and those black butterflies, which seemed to him to flutter over that fair hair like swallows over a field of ripe wheat.