Sulpice often reproached her for having clipped the wings of his ambition.
"I!" she would say, "it is rather the fans of your windmills that I break, you Don Quixote!"
He would then smile at her, and look earnestly into the depths of the timid creature's lovely blue eyes, causing her to blush as if ashamed of having seemed to be witty.
Her chief aim was to be the devoted, loving friend of this man whom she thought so superior to herself, and although she was totally ignorant of political intrigues, she was by virtue of the mere instinct of love, his best and most perspicacious adviser and felt delighted only when Vaudrey, by chance, listened to her counsel.
"I love you so dearly!" she confessed with the unlimited candor of a poor creature who has but a single affection, a single pretext for loving.
He saw in the life he led, only the penumbra: his neglected youth, his hopes fled, his fears, the disgust which at times filled him as he thought of the never-ending recommencements and trickeries of political life. So dearly cherished, so beloved, it seemed to him, nevertheless, that his life lacked something. He would have liked a child, a son to bring up, a domestic tie, since political conditions prevented him from accomplishing a civic duty. Ah! yes, a son, a being to mould, a brow to kiss, a soul to fashion after the image of his own, a child who would not know all the sorrows of life that his own generation had laid on him! Perhaps it was only a child that he needed. Something, however, he evidently lacked.
Still he smiled, always in love with that young woman of twenty-four years, delicate, slender, and full of the fears and artlessness of a child. Accustomed to the quiet solitude of the house of her guardian, she, when at Paris, in her husband's study, arranging his books, his papers, his legislative plans and reports, sought to surround her dear Sulpice with the comforting felicity of bourgeois happiness that was enjoyed calmly, like a cordial sipped at the fireside.
Then suddenly one day, the news of a startling political change broke in on this household.
Sulpice reached home one evening at one and the same time nervous, anxious, and happy.
His name was on almost every lip, in connection with a ministerial combination. His last speech on domestic policy had more than ever brought him into prominence and he was considered to have boldly contributed to the development of a fearful crisis.