"He lied! Ah! how he had lied!"
She recalled his anxiety to hide the journals from her, his oft-repeated suggestions, his precautions, the increasing number of his night-sessions that made him pale. Pale from debauchery! And she pitied him! She begged him not to kill himself for the politics that was eating his life. Again she saw on the lips of her Wednesday's guests the furtive smiles that were hidden behind muffs when she spoke of those nocturnal sessions of the Chamber, which were only nights passed in Marianne's bed! How those Parisians must have laughed at her and ridiculed the credulity of the woman who believes herself loved, but who is deceived and mocked at! Madame Gerson, Sabine! How overjoyed they must have been when, in their salons, they referred to the little, stupid Provincial who was ignorant of these tricks!
She felt ridiculed and tortured, more tortured than baffled, for her vanity was nothing in comparison with her love, her poor, artless and trusting love!
"Sulpice, I should never have believed—Never!—"
Why had they left Grenoble, their little house on the banks of the Isère? They loved each other there, it was Paris that had snatched him away! Paris! She hated it now. She hated that reputation that had carried Vaudrey into office, the politics that had robbed her of a kind and loving husband,—for he had loved her, she was sure of that,—and which had made him the lover of a courtesan, the liar and coward that he was!
"Do you see?" she said to Lissac suddenly. "I detest these walls!"
She pointed to the gilded ceilings with an angry gesture.
"Since I entered here, my life has come to a close!—It is that, that which has taken him from me!—Ah! this society, this politics, these meannesses, this life exposed to every one and everything, to temptation and to fall, I am entirely sick of, I am disgusted with. Let me be snatched from it, let me be taken away! Everywhere here, one might say, there is an atmosphere of lying!"
"Do you hear? She laughs, she is happy! She! And I, ah! I!"
She had risen to her feet, suddenly recovering all her energy, as if stirred by the air of a Hungarian dance, whose strains dimly reached them from the distant, warm salons, where Marianne was disporting her beauty—