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ministry!" said the minister, as he got into his carriage. He stretched himself out as if intoxicated. He looked at all the carriages along the drive of the Bois de Boulogne, the high life was already moving toward the Lake. In caleches, old ladies in mourning appeared with pale nuns, and old men with red decorations stretched out under lap-robes. Pretty girls with pale countenances pierced with bright eyes, like fragments of coal in flour, showed themselves at the doors of the coupes, close to the muzzles of pink-nosed, well-combed, white-haired little dogs. Vaudrey strove to find Marianne amid that throng, to see her again. She was far away. He thought only of her, while his coupe went down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, bustling with noise and movement and flooded with light. The coachman took a side street and the carriage disappeared through an open gateway between two high posts surmounted by two lamps, in a passage leading to a huge white mansion whose slate roof was ablaze with sunlight. An infantry soldier in red trousers, with a shako on his head, mounted guard and stood motionless beside a brown-painted sentry-box that stood at the right. Above the gateways a new tricolor flag, in honor of the new ministry, waved in the sunshine. Against the ministerial edifice were two gas fixtures bearing two huge capital letters: R.F., ready to be illuminated on important reception nights. Two lackeys hastily opening the door, rushed up to the halted carriage and stood at its door. "Adieu! Marianne," thought Sulpice, as he placed his foot in the antechamber of this vast mansion as cold as a tomb. * * * * * _She was still mechanically throwing crumbs of bread around her, which were eagerly snatched at by the many-colored ducks_ ... [Illustration: VAUDREY MEETS MARIANNE IN THE BOIS] VIII Marianne Kayser was superstitious. She believed that in the case of compromised affairs, salvation appeared at the supreme moment of playing the very last stake. She had always rebounded, for her part,--like a rubber-ball, she said--at the moment that she found herself overthrown, and more than half conquered. Fate had given some cause for her superstitious ideas. She thought herself lost, and was weary of searching, of living, in fact, when suddenly Monsieur de Rosas reached Paris from the other end of the world. That was salvation. The duke did not prove very difficult to ens
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