"Ah! joker, I understand!—Your wife was too strict!—Bless me, a provincial! Bah! that will come right! And if it doesn't, why, you will be free, that's all! But, say, then, if you are not re-elected, you will rejoin her at Grenoble. Oh! your clients will return to you. You are highly esteemed as an advocate, but as a minister, I ought to say—"
"I shall be re-elected," said Vaudrey, in a decisive tone, so as to cut short Jéliotte's interminable phrases.
He was exceedingly unnerved. This man's stupidity would exasperate him. He would never come across any but subjects of irritation or disheartenment. He felt inclined to seek a quarrel with some one. He would have liked to wrench Marianne's wrist with his fingers.
As he entered the hall leading to the assembly, he unwittingly stumbled against a gentleman who was walking rapidly and without saluting him, although he thought that he recognized him.
"Yet I know him!"
He had not gone three steps before he perfectly recalled this eternal lobbyist, always bending before him and clinging to the armchairs of the antechambers, like an oyster to a rock, and whom the messengers, accustomed to his soliciting, bowing and scraping for years past, called Monsieur Eugène—out of courtesy.
It was too much! And, in truth, this strange fellow's impoliteness was ill-timed.
Sulpice suddenly turned round, approached Renaudin, and said to him sharply:
"You bowed more obsequiously to me a short time since, monsieur! It seems to me that you were in the ministerial antechambers every morning!"
He expected a haughty reply from Renaudin, and that this man would have compensated him for the others.