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.”