“You should be mine, Monsieur Choulette, if I were interested in Academic elections.  But does the Institute excite your envy?”

He kept for a few moments a solemn silence, then: 

“I am going now, Madame, to confer with divers notable persons of the political and religious worlds who reside at Neuilly.  The Marquise de Rieu wishes me to be a candidate, in her country, for a senatorial seat which has become vacant by the death of an old man, who was, they say, a general during his illusory life.  I shall consult with priests, women and children—­oh, eternal wisdom!—­of the Bineau Boulevard.  The constituency whose suffrages I shall attempt to obtain inhabits an undulated and wooded land wherein willows frame the fields.  And it is not a rare thing to find in the hollow of one of these old willows the skeleton of a Chouan pressing his gun against his breast and holding his beads in his fleshless fingers.  I shall have my programme posted on the bark of oaks.  I shall say ’Peace to presbyteries!  Let the day come when bishops, holding in their hands the wooden crook, shall make themselves similar to the poorest servant of the poorest parish!  It was the bishops who crucified Jesus Christ.  Their names were Anne and Caiph.  And they still retain these names before the Son of God.  While they were nailing Him to the cross, I was the good thief hanged by His side.’”

He lifted his stick and pointed toward Neuilly: 

“Dechartre, my friend, do you not think the Bineau Boulevard is the dusty one over there, at the right?”

“Farewell, Monsieur Choulette,” said Therese.  “Remember me when you are a senator.”

“Madame, I do not forget you in any of my prayers, morning and evening.  And I say to God:  ’Since, in your anger, you gave to her riches and beauty, regard her, Lord, with kindness, and treat her in accordance with your sovereign mercy.”

And he went erect, and dragging his leg, along the populous avenue.

CHAPTER XXX

A LETTER FROM ROBERT

Enveloped in a mantle of pink broad cloth, Therese went down the steps with Dechartre.  He had come in the morning to Joinville.  She had made him join the circle of her intimate friends, before the hunting-party to which she feared Le Menil had been invited, as was the custom.  The light air of September agitated the curls of her hair, and the sun made golden darts shine in the profound gray of her eyes.  Behind them, the facade of the palace displayed above the three arcades of the first story, in the intervals of the windows, on long tables, busts of Roman emperors.  The house was placed between two tall pavilions which their great slate roofs made higher, over pillars of the Ionic order.  This style betrayed the art of the architect Leveau, who had constructed, in 1650, the castle of Joinville-sur-Oise for that rich Mareuilles, creature of Mazarin, and fortunate accomplice of Fouquet.