He felt himself urged by a strong temptation to go to that box and open its door and cry out to that man who had not yet given his name to that woman:
"You do not know her! She is debauchery and falsehood itself!"
It seemed to Vaudrey that at times a bearded face, surmounting a white cravat, appeared behind Rosas and Marianne: the haughty face of Uncle Simon.
While the throng of Egyptians filed on the stage, Sulpice endeavored to turn away his thoughts and remove his glances from that group that attracted him. He still, however, looked at it, in spite of himself, and voluntarily wounded his own heart.
Marianne did not seem to have even noticed him.
The curtain fell and he wandered into the wings, less to be there than to escape that irritating sight. In breathing that atmosphere of a theatre, he experienced a strange sensation that pained and consoled him at the same time. The scene-shifters were rolling back the illuminating apparatus pierced with light, and dragged to the rear the huge white sphinxes and the immense canvas on which the palm-trees were outlined upon a blue sky. Sulpice felt the cruelly ironical sensation of finding himself, disheartened and defeated, once more on the very boards where he had entered the first time, smiling, swelling with joy, saluting and saluted and hearing on every side the same murmur, sweet as a May zephyr:
"Monsieur le Ministre."
It was the same scene, the same dress-coats upon the same luminous boards, the same electric rays that fell around him in the hour of his accession, creating the same vulgar aureole. Some firemen crossed the stage slowly and with a wearied expression made their examinations; some water-carriers were sprinkling the parquet, while others were brushing away the dust. And as if these common duties interested Sulpice, he looked on with a vacant expression, as if his thoughts had taken wing.
Suddenly, in the centre of a group, with his hat on, escorted by bending men, whose lips expressed flattery, Sulpice recognized Lucien Granet, who in the dazzling triumph of his new kingdom, crossed and recrossed the stage, distributing here and there patronizing bows.
The coarse Molina accompanied the new minister, laughing in a loud tone like the sound of a well-filled cash-box suddenly shaken.