itics in a
corner, pleased him:

"I am," he said aloud, "from a singular country: the Baltic provinces,
where society is governed by deputies who, by birth, have the right to
make laws, and I consider politics so tiresome, fatiguing and full of
disgust and weariness as an occupation, that one ought to consider one's
self most fortunate that there are people condemned to take hold of this
rancid pie, while others pass their lives in thinking, reading, talking
and loving."

"That is good," thought Lissac. "There is one, at least, who is not so
stupid. It is true, perhaps because I think just the same."

Nevertheless, he went and listened, mixing with the crowd, haphazard.
His preoccupation was not there. In reality, he thought only of
Adrienne. How the poor woman must suffer!

With a feeling of physical and moral overthrow, she had left the
threshold of the salon, where she had been standing since the
commencement of the soiree. She was mixing with the crowd in her desire
to forget her sorrows amid the deafening of the music, the songs, the
laughter, and the murmur of the human billows that filled her salons.
She had taken her place in front of the little improvised theatre,
beside all those ladies who dissected her toilette, scanned her pallid
face, analyzed and examined her piece by piece, body and soul. But
there, seated near the stage, exactly in front of her, exposing, as in a
stall, her blonde beauty, and radiant as a Titian, was that Marianne
whose gleaming white shoulders appeared above her black satin corsage.
Again she saw her, as but a little while before, unavoidable, haughty
and bold, smiling with insolence.

At every minute she was attracted by a movement of a head, or fan, or a
laugh from this pretty creature, who leaned toward Sabine Marsy, then
raised her brow and showed, in all the brilliancy of fatal beauty, her
black corsage, striped with those fine red roses. And now Adrienne's
anger, the grief that she had trampled under for some hours, increased
from moment to moment, heightened and stung by the sight of this
creature, by all kinds of bitter thoughts and by visions of treason and
baffled love. She felt that she was becoming literally mad at the
thought that, upon those red and painted lips, Sulpice had rested his,
that his hands had stroked those shoulders, unwound that hair, that
this woman's body had been folded in his arms. Ah! it was enough to make
her rise and cry out to that creature: "Y