ating continually, "why?"

She denied everything, not to convince him, for he had seen them, but
from expediency and good taste, and to avoid painful explanations.
Hippolyte Ceres suffered all the tortures of jealousy. He admitted it
to himself, he kept saying inwardly, "I am a strong man; I am clad in
armour; but the wound is underneath, it is in my heart," and turning
towards his wife, who looked beautiful in her guilt, he would say:

"It ought not to have been with him."

He was right--Eveline ought not to have loved in government circles.

He suffered so much that he took up his revolver, exclaiming: "I will go
and kill him!" But he remembered that a Minister of Commerce cannot kill
his own Prime Minister, and he put his revolver back into his drawer.

The weeks passed without calming his sufferings. Each morning he buckled
his strong man's armour over his wound and sought in work and fame the
peace that fled from him. Every Sunday he inaugurated busts, statues,
fountains, artesian wells, hospitals, dispensaries, railways, canals,
public markets, drainage systems, triumphal arches, and slaughter
houses, and delivered moving speeches on each of these occasions.
His fervid activity devoured whole piles of documents; he changed the
colours of the postage stamps fourteen times in one week. Nevertheless,
he gave vent to outbursts of grief and rage that drove him insane; for
whole days his reason abandoned him. If he had been in the employment of
a private administration this would have been noticed immediately, but
it is much more difficult to discover insanity or frenzy in the conduct
of affairs of State. At that moment the government employees were
forming themselves into associations and federations amid a ferment
that was giving alarm both to the Parliament and to public feeling. The
postmen were especially prominent in their enthusiasm for trade unions.

Hippolyte Ceres informed them in a circular that their action was
strictly legal. The following day he sent out a second circular
forbidding all associations of government employees as illegal. He
dismissed one hundred and eighty postmen, reinstated them, reprimanded
them--and awarded them gratuities. At Cabinet councils he was always
on the point of bursting forth. The presence of the Head of the State
scarcely restrained him within the limits of the decencies, and as
he did not dare to attack his rival he consoled himself by heaping
invectives upon General De