"That is good," thought Lissac. "There is one, at least, who is not so stupid. It is true, perhaps because I think just the same."
Nevertheless, he went and listened, mixing with the crowd, haphazard. His preoccupation was not there. In reality, he thought only of Adrienne. How the poor woman must suffer!
With a feeling of physical and moral overthrow, she had left the threshold of the salon, where she had been standing since the commencement of the soirée. She was mixing with the crowd in her desire to forget her sorrows amid the deafening of the music, the songs, the laughter, and the murmur of the human billows that filled her salons. She had taken her place in front of the little improvised theatre, beside all those ladies who dissected her toilette, scanned her pallid face, analyzed and examined her piece by piece, body and soul. But there, seated near the stage, exactly in front of her, exposing, as in a stall, her blonde beauty, and radiant as a Titian, was that Marianne whose gleaming white shoulders appeared above her black satin corsage. Again she saw her, as but a little while before, unavoidable, haughty and bold, smiling with insolence.
At every minute she was attracted by a movement of a head, or fan, or a laugh from this pretty creature, who leaned toward Sabine Marsy, then raised her brow and showed, in all the brilliancy of fatal beauty, her black corsage, striped with those fine red roses. And now Adrienne's anger, the grief that she had trampled under for some hours, increased from moment to moment, heightened and stung by the sight of this creature, by all kinds of bitter thoughts and by visions of treason and baffled love. She felt that she was becoming literally mad at the thought that, upon those red and painted lips, Sulpice had rested his, that his hands had stroked those shoulders, unwound that hair, that this woman's body had been folded in his arms. Ah! it was enough to make her rise and cry out to that creature: "You are a wretch. Get you gone! Get you gone, I say!"
And if she did so?
Why not? Had they the right to scorn her thus in public because she owned an official title and position? Was not this vulgar salon of a furnished mansion her salon then?
Now it seemed to her that they were whispering about her; that they were sneering behind their fans, and that all these women knew her secret and her history.
Why should they not know them? All Paris must have read that mocking, offensive and singular article: The Mistress of an Archon! All these people had, perhaps, learned it by heart. There were people here who frequented the salons and who probably kept the article in their pockets.
Yes, that would be to commit a folly, to brave everything and to destroy all!
Sulpice, then, did not know her; he believed her to be insignificant because she was gentle, resigned to everything because she was devoted to his love and his glory?—Ah! devoted even to the point of killing herself, devoted to the extent of dying, or living poor, working with her own hands, if only he loved her, if only he never lied to her!