weary-looking guardians of the peace were chatting together. At the end
of the court before the perron, a small, red carpet was laid upon the
steps and in front of the marquee faint lights gleamed. Vaudrey recalled
that joyous morning when he entered there, arriving and descending from
his carriage with his portfolio under his arm.

He hurried his steps and found himself on Place Beauvau. His glance was
attracted by the grille, the hotel, the grand court at the end of the
avenue. Sulpice experienced a feeling of sudden anger as he passed in
front of the Ministry of the Interior whose high grille, now closed, he
had many times passed through, leaning back in his coupe. He pictured
himself entering there, where he would never again return except as a
place-seeker like those eternal beggars who blocked its antechambers. He
still heard the cry of the lackey when the coachman crushed the sand of
the courtyard under the wheels of the carriage: "Monsieur le Ministre's
carriage!"--He went upstairs, the lackeys saluted him, the coupe rolled
off toward the Bois.

Now, here in that vulgar mansion another was displaying himself, seated
on the same seats, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same bed
and giving his orders to the same servants. He experienced a strange
sensation, as of a theft, of some undue influence, of suffering an
ejectment by a stranger from some personal property, and this Granet,
the man sent there as he had been, by a vote, seemed to him to be a
smart fellow, a filibuster and an intruder.

"How one becomes accustomed to thinking one's self at home everywhere!"
thought Vaudrey.

He partially forgot the keen wound given to his self-love by the time
that he found himself close to Parc Monceau approaching Rue Prony. In
Marianne's windows the lights were shining. To see that woman and hold
her again in his arms, overjoyed, that happiness would console him for
all his mortifications. Marianne's love was worth a hundred times more
than the delights of power.

Marianne Kayser was evidently waiting for Sulpice. She received him in
her little, brilliantly-lighted salon, superb amid these lights, in a
red satin robe de chambre that lent a strange seductiveness to her bare
arms and neck which shone with a pale and pearly lustre beneath the
light.

Vaudrey felt infinitely moved, almost painfully though deliciously
stirred, as he always did when in the presence of this lovely creature.

She extended her hand