“But, my dear, the King himself is compelled to smile graciously on men he would fain put in the Bastille,—­if we still had a Bastille and the Charter permitted him.”

Madame de Rastignac made no reply, and without bidding her husband good-night, she went up to her room.  A few moments later the minister went to the private door which led into it, and not finding the key in the lock, he said, “Augusta!” in the tone of voice a simple bourgeois might have used in such a case.

For all answer, he heard a bolt run hastily on the other side of the door.

“Ah!” he thought to himself with a gesture of vexation, “there are some pasts very different from that door,—­they are always wide open to the present.”

Then, after a moment’s silence, he added, to cover his retreat, “Augusta, I wanted to ask you what hour Madame de l’Estorade receives.  I ought to call upon her to-morrow, after what happened here to-night.”

“At four o’clock,” said the young wife through the door,—­“on her return from the Tuileries, where she takes the children to walk every day.”

One of the questions that were frequently put by Parisian society after the marriage of Madame de Rastignac was:  “Does she love her husband?”

The doubt was permissible.  The marriage of Mademoiselle de Nucingen was the unpleasant and scarcely moral product of one of those immoral unions which find their issue in the life of a daughter, after years and satiety have brought them to a condition of dry-rot and paralysis.  In such marriages of convenience the husband is satisfied, for he escapes a happiness which has turned rancid to him, and he profits by a speculation like that of the magician in the “Arabian Nights” who exchanges old lamps for new.  But the wife, on the contrary, must ever feel a living memory between herself and her husband; a memory which may revive, and while wholly outside of the empire of the senses, has the force of an old authority antagonistic to her young influence.  In such a position the wife is a victim.

During the short time we have taken to give this brief analysis of a situation too frequently existing, Rastignac lingered at the door.

“Well,” he said at last, deciding to retire, “good-night, Augusta.”

As he said the words, rather piteously, the door opened suddenly, and his wife, throwing herself into his arms, laid her head upon his shoulder sobbing.

The question was answered:  Madame de Rastignac loved her husband; but for all that, the distant muttering of a subterranean fire might be heard beneath the flowers of their garden.

III

A MINISTER’S MORNING

The next day, when Rastignac entered his office, the adjoining waiting-room was already occupied by eleven persons waiting with letters of introduction to solicit favors, also two peers of France and several deputies.

Presently a bell rang.  The usher, with an eagerness which communicated itself to all present, entered the sanctum; an instant later he came out, bearing this stereotyped message:—­