ich
increased in proportion as the dinner advanced. She was also very much
astonished and not a little grieved when Madame Gerson abruptly spoke in
a loud voice before all the guests concerning Madame Marsy, at whose
house it was, in fact, that she made the acquaintance of Vaudrey. Madame
Gerson showed her pretty teeth in a very charming manner as she tore her
old friend Sabine to pieces, as it were. In a tenderly indulgent tone
which was the more terrible, she repeated the tales that were formerly
current: the affecting death of Philippe Marsy, the painter of
_Charity_, and a particular escapade in which Sabine was involved with
Emile Cordier, one of the leaders of the _intransigeante_ school of
painters.

"What! you did not know that?" said the pretty Madame Gerson in
astonishment.

Adrienne knew nothing. She was delighted moreover to know nothing. She
heard this former friend relate how Sabine had, at one time, exhibited
at the Salon. Oh! mere students' daubs, horrid things! Still-life
subjects that might have passed for buried ones, and yet, perhaps,
Cordier retouched them.

"I thought that Madame Gerson was on the best of terms with Madame
Marsy," whispered Adrienne to Lissac, who replied:

"They have been on better! They perhaps will be so again. That is of
very little importance. Women revile each other and associate at the
same time."

Adrienne decided that she would not listen. She knew Sabine Marsy only
slightly; she was not interested as a friend; but this little execution,
gracefully carried out here by a woman who recently did the honors at
the Salon of Boulevard Malesherbes seemed to her as cowardly as
treachery. This, then, was society! And how right was her choice in
preferring solitude!

Then, in order that she might not hear the slander that was greeted with
applause by those very persons who but yesterday besieged Madame Marsy's
buffet, and who would run to-morrow to pay court to that woman, she
conversed with Lissac. She frankly told him what she suffered at Place
Beauvau. She spoke of Sulpice, as Sulpice was loved by her beyond all
else in the world.

"Fancy! I do not see him, hardly ever! The other week he passed two days
at Laon, where an exposition was held at which he was present."

"An exposition at Laon?" asked Lissac, astonished. "What exposition?"

"I do not know. I know nothing myself. Perhaps it is wrong of me not to
keep myself informed of passing events, but all that wearies