They would have remained at Sairmeuse.  They would have had lovely children playing around them!  He would not be condemned to this continual warfare—­to this hollow, unsatisfying, restless life.

The truly happy are not those who parade their satisfaction and good fortune before the eyes of the multitude.  The truly happy hide themselves from the curious gaze, and they are right; happiness is almost a crime.

So thought Martial; and he, the great statesman, often said to himself, in a sort of rage: 

“To love, and to be loved—­that is everything!  All else is vanity.”

He had really tried to love his wife; he had done his best to rekindle the admiration with which she had inspired him at their first meeting.  He had not succeeded.

Between them there seemed to be a wall of ice which nothing could melt, and which was constantly increasing in height and thickness.

“Why is it?” he wondered, again and again.  “It is incomprehensible.  There are days when I could swear that she loved me.  Her character, formerly so irritable, is entirely changed; she is gentleness itself.”

But he could not conquer his aversion; it was stronger than his own will.

These unavailing regrets, and the disappointments and sorrow that preyed upon him, undoubtedly aggravated the bitterness and severity of Martial’s policy.

But he, at least, knew how to fall nobly.

He passed, without even a change of countenance, from almost omnipotence to a position so compromising that his very life was endangered.

On seeing his ante-chambers, formerly thronged with flatterers and office-seekers, empty and deserted, he laughed, and his laugh was unaffected.

“The ship is sinking,” said he; “the rats have deserted it.”

He did not even pale when the noisy crowd came to hoot and curse and hurl stones at his windows; and when Otto, his faithful valet de chambre, entreated him to assume a disguise and make his escape through the gardens, he responded: 

“By no means!  I am simply odious; I do not wish to become ridiculous!”

They could not even dissuade him from going to a window and looking down upon the rabble in the street below.

A singular idea had just occurred to him.

“If Jean Lacheneur is still alive,” he thought, “how much he would enjoy this!  And if he is alive, he is undoubtedly there in the foremost rank, urging on the crowd.”

And he wished to see.

But Jean Lacheneur was in Russia at that epoch.  The excitement subsided; the Hotel de Sairmeuse was not seriously threatened.  Still Martial realized that it would be better for him to go away for a while, and allow people to forget him.

He did not ask the duchess to accompany him.

“The fault has been mine entirely,” he said to her, “and to make you suffer for it by condemning you to exile would be unjust.  Remain here; I think it will be much better for you to remain here.”