said
Ramel, still smiling.

Vaudrey took great delight in chatting with his old friend, but for a
moment he had been seized with an eager desire to find amid the
increasing crowd that thronged the salons, the pretty girl who had
appeared to him like a statue of Desire, whetted desire, but even in her
charms somewhat unwholesome, yet disturbing and appetizing.

He had come to Sabine Marsy's only by chance and as if to display in
public the joy of his triumph, just as a newly decorated man willingly
accepts invitations in order to show off his new ribbon, but he now felt
happy for having done so. He had promised himself only to put himself in
evidence and then disappear with Adrienne to the enjoyment of their
usual chats, to taste that intimacy that was so dear to him, but which,
since his establishment on Place Beauvau, had vanished.

He habitually disliked such receptions as that in which he now took
part, those soirees as fatiguing as those crowds where one packs six
hundred persons in salons capable of holding only sixty: commonplace
receptions, where the master of the house is as happy when he refuses
invitations as a theatre-manager when his play is the rage; where one is
stifled, crushed, and where one can only reach the salon after a
pugilistic encounter, and where the capture of a glass of syrup entails
an assault, and the securing of an overcoat demands a battle. He held in
horror those salons where there is no conversation, where no one is
acquainted, where, because of the hubbub of the crowd or the stifling
silence attending a concert, one cannot exchange either ideas or
phrases, not even a furtive handshake, because of the packing and
crushing of the guests. It was a miracle that he had just been able to
exchange a few words with Mademoiselle Kayser and Ramel. The vulgarity
of the place had at once impressed him,--the more so because he was the
object of attraction for all those crowded faces.

All that gathering of insignificant, grave and pretentious young men,
who, while they crowded, made their progress in the ranks of the
sub-prefects, councillors of prefectures, picking up nominations under
the feet of the influential guests as they would cigar stumps, disgusted
him; men of twenty years, born, as it were, with white cravats,
pretentious and pensive, creatures of office and not of work, haunting
the Chambers and the antechambers, mere collectors of ideas, repeaters
of serious commonplaces, salon demo