,
in fact, a perpetual espionage upon all her actions and a criticism of
all her words.

She had reached a point when she asked herself if, even for Sulpice,
happiness was not far removed from this life of slavery, of feverish
politics, which for some time past had been visibly paling his cheeks
and rendering him nervous and altogether different from of old.

"If you did not love me so much," she said with a sweet smile, "I could
believe that you loved me no longer."

"What folly! you have only one rival, Adrienne."

"Ah! I know that very well, but that robs me of everything. It is
politics. Come! be great, and I shall be happy or resigned, as you wish.
I adore you so much! I would give you my life, so I would gladly give
you my days of weariness!"

Although she was rich, she strove to introduce into her official
surroundings the bourgeois and provincial orderly methods that she had
been so virtuously taught. She found that her desserts vanished with
frightful rapidity, that dishes scarcely touched and bottles whose
contents had only been tasted, were removed to the kitchen. She
commented thereon, but the somewhat contemptuous smile of her domestics
was her only reply and it made her feel ashamed.

Vaudrey's predecessor, Monsieur Pichereau, was exacting,
_close-fisted_. His table was meagre but there was nothing astonishing
in that, Monsieur Pichereau had a delicate stomach. Well and good, but
the predecessors of Monsieur Pichereau, they had given fetes, they had!
It is true that one was a count and the other a marquis. One can always
tell a gentleman anywhere.

One evening, they heard one of the domestics of the ministry say to
another:

"As if it were not our money that the ministers spend! It is the
electors' money. They give us wages: we give them salaries. There it
is!"

The domestic was discharged immediately, but these remarks, however,
recurred to Adrienne's memory and filled her with dislike for the
flunkeyism that surrounded her, waiting on her with cold civility, but
without any attachment, like hotel waiters or girls at an inn that one
will leave the next day, giving them a gratuity.

Vaudrey saw much less of these daily little wounds. He lived in an
atmosphere of constant flattery, favor-begging cloaked under
complimentary phrases. Had he leisure, he would have been able to
calculate with mathematical exactitude how many angles the human form
would describe in the process of bowing and scrapin