er his irony this sceptic disguised
a sort of sincerity. Lissac's wit pleased her. He surprised her somewhat
at times, but the probably assumed raillery of the young man compensated
for the insipid nonsense of the conversation to which she listened
daily.

At first from mere curiosity and after from a sentiment of respectful
devotion, Guy was impelled to study that delicate and sensitive nature,
entirely swayed by love of Sulpice, that suffered at times a vague
pressure as of some indefinable anguish at the throat, as if a vacuum--a
choking vacuum--had been created about her by some air-pump.

This huge mansion seemed to her to be entirely innocent of all memories,
and though peopled with phantoms, was as commonplace and vulgar as an
apartment house. There were no associations save dust and cracks. These
salons, built for the Marechal de Beauvau, these walls that had
listened to the sobs of Madame d'Houdetot at the death-bed of
Saint-Lambert, appeared to Adrienne to exude ennui, strangling and
inevitable ennui, solemn, official, absolute ennui, nothing but ennui in
the very decorum of the place, and isolation in the midst of power.

She cursed her loneliness, she felt lost amid the salons of this
furnished ministerial mansion, whose cold, gloomy apartments, with the
chairs symmetrically arranged along the walls, she wandered through, but
evidently without expecting any one: state chairs lacking
occupants,--ordinary chairs, domestic chairs seem to have tongues--that
never exchanged conversation. Vast, deserted rooms where the green
curtains behind the glass doors of the bookcases were eternally drawn,
bookcases without books, forever open, mournful as empty sepulchres.

Yes, this immense gilded dwelling with its Gobelins tapestries stifled
her with its terrifying gloom, where nothing, not a single article,
recalled her charming provincial home, her Grenoble house with its
garden filled with lilacs where she was often wont to read while Sulpice
worked upstairs, bent over his table crowded with papers, before his
open window. Ah! those cherished rooms, in the humble corner of the
provincial home, their happy crouching in the peaceful nest; aye, even
the happy first days in Paris, in the Chaussee-d'Antin apartments, in
which Adrienne at least felt herself in her own home, free in her
actions and thoughts, and where she could talk aloud without feeling
that an eye was constantly watching her, and ears were always strained