He hurried his steps and found himself on Place Beauvau. His glance was attracted by the grille, the hôtel, the grand court at the end of the avenue. Sulpice experienced a feeling of sudden anger as he passed in front of the Ministry of the Interior whose high grille, now closed, he had many times passed through, leaning back in his coupé. He pictured himself entering there, where he would never again return except as a place-seeker like those eternal beggars who blocked its antechambers. He still heard the cry of the lackey when the coachman crushed the sand of the courtyard under the wheels of the carriage: "Monsieur le Ministre's carriage!"—He went upstairs, the lackeys saluted him, the coupé rolled off toward the Bois.
Now, here in that vulgar mansion another was displaying himself, seated on the same seats, eating at the same table, sleeping in the same bed and giving his orders to the same servants. He experienced a strange sensation, as of a theft, of some undue influence, of suffering an ejectment by a stranger from some personal property, and this Granet, the man sent there as he had been, by a vote, seemed to him to be a smart fellow, a filibuster and an intruder.
"How one becomes accustomed to thinking one's self at home everywhere!" thought Vaudrey.
He partially forgot the keen wound given to his self-love by the time that he found himself close to Parc Monceau approaching Rue Prony. In Marianne's windows the lights were shining. To see that woman and hold her again in his arms, overjoyed, that happiness would console him for all his mortifications. Marianne's love was worth a hundred times more than the delights of power.
Marianne Kayser was evidently waiting for Sulpice. She received him in her little, brilliantly-lighted salon, superb amid these lights, in a red satin robe de chambre that lent a strange seductiveness to her bare arms and neck which shone with a pale and pearly lustre beneath the light.
Vaudrey felt infinitely moved, almost painfully though deliciously stirred, as he always did when in the presence of this lovely creature.
She extended her hand to him, saying in a singular tone that astonished him:
"Bonjour, vous!"
"Well!" she said at once, pointing to a journal which was lying on the carpet, "is there anything new?"
"Yes," he said. "But what is that to me? I don't think of that when I am near you!"