curves of that exquisite torso, the back that he had pressed,
all the being moulded by voluptuousness, that had been his.

This was the vanishing of his last dream! This love gone, this deception
driven into his heart like a knife, his last faith mocked at, insulted,
and branded with its true name, _folly_, he felt as if a yawning chasm
had been opened in him. Life was over! He was old now and he had wasted,
yes, wasted his happiness in playing at youth. He had believed himself
loved! Loved! Imbecile that he was!

He felt himself urged by a strong temptation to go to that box and open
its door and cry out to that man who had not yet given his name to that
woman:

"You do not know her! She is debauchery and falsehood itself!"

It seemed to Vaudrey that at times a bearded face, surmounting a white
cravat, appeared behind Rosas and Marianne: the haughty face of Uncle
Simon.

While the throng of Egyptians filed on the stage, Sulpice endeavored to
turn away his thoughts and remove his glances from that group that
attracted him. He still, however, looked at it, in spite of himself, and
voluntarily wounded his own heart.

Marianne did not seem to have even noticed him.

The curtain fell and he wandered into the wings, less to be there than
to escape that irritating sight. In breathing that atmosphere of a
theatre, he experienced a strange sensation that pained and consoled him
at the same time. The scene-shifters were rolling back the illuminating
apparatus pierced with light, and dragged to the rear the huge white
sphinxes and the immense canvas on which the palm-trees were outlined
upon a blue sky. Sulpice felt the cruelly ironical sensation of finding
himself, disheartened and defeated, once more on the very boards where
he had entered the first time, smiling, swelling with joy, saluting and
saluted and hearing on every side the same murmur, sweet as a May
zephyr:

"Monsieur le Ministre."

It was the same scene, the same dress-coats upon the same luminous
boards, the same electric rays that fell around him in the hour of his
accession, creating the same vulgar aureole. Some firemen crossed the
stage slowly and with a wearied expression made their examinations; some
water-carriers were sprinkling the parquet, while others were brushing
away the dust. And as if these common duties interested Sulpice, he
looked on with a vacant expression, as if his thoughts had taken wing.

Suddenly, in the centre of a group, wit