not send the police
to rob me of."
VII
On rising the following morning, after a feverish night, Sulpice
realized a feeling of absolute moral destruction. It seemed to him that
he had lost a dear being. In that huge, silent hotel one would have
thought that a corpse was lying. He did not dare to present himself to
Adrienne. He could not tell what to say to her. He went downstairs
slowly, crossing the salons that were still decorated with the now
fading flowers, to reach his cabinet. The carpet was littered with the
broken leaves of dracaenas and petals that had fallen from the azaleas,
and presented the gloomy, forsaken aspect peculiar to the morrow of a
fete. The furniture, stripped of its coverings, offered the faded tint
of old maids at their rising. With heavy head, he sat at his desk and
looked at the piled-up documents with a vague expression. Always the
eternal pile of despatches, optimistic reports, and banal summaries of
the daily press. Nothing new, nothing interesting, all was going well.
This tired world had no history.
The minister still remained there, absorbed as after an unhealthy
insomnia, when Warcolier entered, ever serious, with his splendid,
redundant phrases and his usual attitude of a pedantic rhetor. He came
to inform the minister that a matter of importance, perhaps of a
troublesome nature, loomed on the horizon. Granet was preparing an
interpellation. Oh! upon a matter without any real importance. An affair
of a procession that had taken place at Tarbes, accompanied by some
little disturbance. It was only a pretext, but it was sufficient,
perhaps, to rally a majority around the _minister of to-morrow_. Old
Henri de Prangins, with his eye on a portfolio, and always thirsting for
power, was keeping Granet company: the man who would never be a minister
with the man who was sure to be.
"Well, what has this to do with me?" asked Vaudrey indifferently.
Granet! Prangins! He was thinking of a very different matter. Adrienne
knew all and Marianne deceived him. She was to marry Rosas.
The very serious Warcolier manifested much surprise at the little energy
displayed by Monsieur le Ministre. He expected to see him bound, in
order to rebound, as he said, believing himself witty. Was Vaudrey
himself giving up the game? Was Granet then sure of the game? He
surmised it and had already taken the necessary measures in that
direction. But surely if Granet were the rising sun, Vaudrey was him
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