When Paul Visire went to Eveline’s house and found her alone, they used to say, as they embraced each other; “Not here! not here!” and immediately they affected an extreme reserve.  That was their invariable rule.  Now, one day, Paul Visire went to the house of his colleague Ceres, with whom he had an engagement.  It was Eveline who received him, the Minister of Commerce being delayed by a commission.

“Not here!” said the lovers, smiling.

They said it, mouth to mouth, embracing, and clasping each other.  They were still saying it, when Hippolyte Ceres entered the drawing-room.

Paul Visire did not lose his presence of mind.  He declared to Madame Ceres that he would give up his attempt to take the dust out of her eye.  By this attitude he did not deceive the husband, but he was able to leave the room with some dignity.

Hippolyte Ceres was thunderstruck.  Eveline’s conduct appeared incomprehensible to him; he asked her what reasons she had for it.

“Why? why?” he kept repeating continually, “why?”

She denied everything, not to convince him, for he had seen them, but from expediency and good taste, and to avoid painful explanations.  Hippolyte Ceres suffered all the tortures of jealousy.  He admitted it to himself, he kept saying inwardly, “I am a strong man; I am clad in armour; but the wound is underneath, it is in my heart,” and turning towards his wife, who looked beautiful in her guilt, he would say: 

“It ought not to have been with him.”

He was right—­Eveline ought not to have loved in government circles.

He suffered so much that he took up his revolver, exclaiming:  “I will go and kill him!” But he remembered that a Minister of Commerce cannot kill his own Prime Minister, and he put his revolver back into his drawer.

The weeks passed without calming his sufferings.  Each morning he buckled his strong man’s armour over his wound and sought in work and fame the peace that fled from him.  Every Sunday he inaugurated busts, statues, fountains, artesian wells, hospitals, dispensaries, railways, canals, public markets, drainage systems, triumphal arches, and slaughter houses, and delivered moving speeches on each of these occasions.  His fervid activity devoured whole piles of documents; he changed the colours of the postage stamps fourteen times in one week.  Nevertheless, he gave vent to outbursts of grief and rage that drove him insane; for whole days his reason abandoned him.  If he had been in the employment of a private administration this would have been noticed immediately, but it is much more difficult to discover insanity or frenzy in the conduct of affairs of State.  At that moment the government employees were forming themselves into associations and federations amid a ferment that was giving alarm both to the Parliament and to public feeling.  The postmen were especially prominent in their enthusiasm for trade unions.