,--a minister,--she has her
nest lined."

Sulpice was not the man long to resist so refined a Parisienne as
Marianne. In him, the repressed ardors, the poetic ideas of a man of
twenty, had become the appetites of a man of forty. This provincial,
hungry for Parisianism,--very young in feelings and soul,--felt, as soon
as he found himself in Marianne's company, mad with desire for a new
life. The dazzling honors attending his entry into the ministry found
their culmination in the burning glance of Marianne, as their eyes met.

Hardly was she installed in Rue Prony than she reminded him of his
promise to call on her. He hastened to her with strange eagerness and he
left her more disturbed, as if he had just taken a peep at an unknown
world. The feminine elegance of the Hotel de Vanda had suddenly
intoxicated him. Marianne played her part very calmly in producing the
daily ravage that passion was making on Sulpice. She studied its rapid
progress with all the sang-froid of a physician. She regulated the doses
of her toxicant, the poison of her glance instilled into the veins of
this man. Determined to become his mistress, she desired to fall in the
guise of a woman madly in love, and not as an ordinary courtesan. With
any other man than Vaudrey, she would, perhaps, have yielded more
quickly. But she acted with Vaudrey as formerly she had done with Rosas.
Seeing that these idealists caressed their dreams, she coquetted with
platonic love, besides, she preferred to remain free for a short time,
without the burden of those pleasures of which she had grown tired, and
which had always caused her more disgust than delight.

Moreover, she said to herself that it was necessary in Sulpice's case to
have the appearance of playing frankly, of loving truly, as in the case
of Rosas. But, this time, she would not let Vaudrey escape her by
flight, as the duke did. She would yield at the desired moment, certain
that Sulpice would not leave her the next day.

"Rosas would be here," she said to herself self-confidently, "if he had
been my lover."

After a moment of regretful preoccupation, she shrugged her shoulders
and said quickly:

"Bah! _what is written is written_, as he said. If I haven't him, I have
the other."

The "other" grew day by day more deeply enamored. He rushed off in hot
haste to visit Marianne; his hired hack, in which he sometimes left his
minister's portfolio peacefully at rest, pending his return, stood
before t