k, a fine formula."

Loyer shrugged his shoulders.

"My dear Martin, we have nothing essential to change in the declaration
of the preceding Cabinet; the situation is unchanged."

He struck his forehead with his hand.

"Oh, I had forgotten. We have made your friend, old Lariviere, Minister
of War, without consulting him. I have to warn him."

He thought he could find him in the boulevard cafe, where military men
go. But Count Martin knew the General was in the theatre.

"I must find him," said Loyer.

Bowing to Therese, he said:

"You permit me, Countess, to take your husband?"

They had just gone out when Jacques Dechartre and Paul Vence came into
the box.

"I congratulate you, Madame," said Paul Vence.

But she turned toward Dechartre:

"I hope you have not come to congratulate me, too."

Paul Vence asked her if she would move into the apartments of the
Ministry.

"Oh, no," she replied.

"At least, Madame," said Paul Vence, "you will go to the balls at the
Elysees, and we shall admire the art with which you retain your
mysterious charm."

"Changes in cabinets," said Madame Martin, "inspire you, Monsieur Vence,
with very frivolous reflections."

"Madame," continued Paul Vence, "I shall not say like Renan, my beloved
master: 'What does Sirius care?' because somebody would reply with reason
'What does little Earth care for big Sirius?' But I am always surprised
when people who are adult, and even old, let themselves be deluded by the
illusion of power, as if hunger, love, and death, all the ignoble or
sublime necessities of life, did not exercise on men an empire too
sovereign to leave them anything other than power written on paper and an
empire of words. And, what is still more marvellous, people imagine they
have other chiefs of state and other ministers than their miseries, their
desires, and their imbecility. He was a wise man who said: 'Let us give
to men irony and pity as witnesses and judges.'"

"But, Monsieur Vence," said Madame Martin, laughingly, "you are the man
who wrote that. I read it."

The two Ministers looked vainly in the theatre and in the corridors for
the General. On the advice of the ushers, they went behind the scenes.

Two ballet-dancers were standing sadly, with a foot on the bar placed
against the wall. Here and there men in evening dress and women in gauze
formed groups almost silent.

Loyer and Martin-Belleme, when they entered, took off their hats. They
saw, in th