She had not confessed whom she loved, she had spoken only by her looks. But Sulpice felt that he belonged to her, he was burning with passion, transported, insane from this avowal; his hands sought hers and drew her to him. He clasped her to his bosom, intoxicated by the pressure of this body against his own, and added in a very low tone while his fingers alternately wandered over her satiny neck and her silky hair:
"How can I help loving you, Marianne? Is it true, really true? You love me?—Ah! what the great nobleman has not done, do you think I cannot do? You are in your own home, you understand, Marianne.—Then, as he touched the young woman's exquisite ears with his lips, he added:
"Our home—will you have it so?—Our home!—"
He felt, as she remained in his embrace with her body leaning against his, that she quivered throughout her frame; his lips wandered from her ear to her cheek and then to her lips, there they rested long in a ravishing kiss that filled him with the languishing sensation of swooning, he holding her so tightly that, with a smile, she disengaged herself, pink with her blushes, and bright-eyed, said, with an expression of peculiar delight:
"It is sealed now!"
Sulpice, even in his youthful days, had never felt so intoxicating a sensation as that which he enjoyed to-day. It was a complete abandonment of himself, a forgetfulness of everything in the presence of his absolute intoxication. All the realities of life that were ready to take possession of him on leaving this place melted before this dream: the possession of that woman. He forgot the assembly, the foyer, that human crowd that he ruled from the height of the tribune, and Adrienne, who was seated yonder at the window, awaiting him. He forgot everything. Like those who possess the singular faculty of easily receiving and losing impressions, he fancied that his horizon was limited to these walls with their silken hangings, these carpets, this feminine salon, opening on a boudoir, a retreat whence escaped the odors of flowers and perfume bottles.
Then, too, a special feeling of pride entered his heart. He felt his joy increased tenfold at the thought that he, the petty bourgeois from Grenoble, had snatched this woman from a duke and, like a great nobleman, had paid the debts that she had contracted. He raised his head proudly from an instinctive impulse of vanity. Rosas! He, the son of honest Dauphiny folks, would crush him with his liberality.
"What shall I do to silence those creditors?" he said to Marianne,—whose hands he held and whose face grazed his in a way that almost made him frantic.
"Nothing," she replied. "What you have promised me is enough. Now I feel that I am saved. Our house, you said so, we are in our own house here. If the creditors will not believe me when I tell them to have patience—"
"They will believe you," said Vaudrey. "Come, we will find the means—On my signature, any one will lend me money."