cannon. I love bronze because its voice wins
battles, the artillery being to-day the superior branch, although the
cavalry is the most chivalrous! I love bronze because it is the image of
the heart of the soldier, and I should like to see in our country an
army of men of bronze who--whom--"

He became confused and muddled, and rolled his white eyes about in his
purpled face and to close his observations brandished his glass as if it
had been his sword, and amid a frenzy of applause from the guests, he
valiantly howled: "I love bronze! I love bronze!"

Vaudrey could scarcely prevent himself from laughing hysterically, in
spite of his ministerial dignity, and when he returned to Grenoble, his
carriage full of the flowers that they had showered on him, he could
only answer to Adrienne, who asked him if he had spoken well, if it had
been a fine affair, by throwing his bouquets on the floor and saying:

"I have laughed heartily, but I am crushed, stupefied! What a headache!"

And Sulpice wrote all that to Marianne, and innocent that he was, told
her: "Ah! all those applauding voices are not worth a single word from
you! When shall I see you, Marianne, dear heart?"

"At the latest possible date!" _the dear heart_ said.

She regarded the close of summer and the beginning of autumn with
extreme vexation, for it would bring with it the parliamentary session
and Vaudrey, and inflict on her the presence of her lover.

Sulpice provided her liberally with all that her luxurious appetites
demanded, and it was for good reasons that she decided not to break with
him, although for a long time she had sacrificed this man in her
inclinations. "Ah! when I shall be able to bounce him!" she said,
expressing herself like a courtesan. She could not, she would not accept
anything from Rosas. On that side, the game was too fine to be
compromised. She could with impunity accept the position of mistress of
Vaudrey, but with Jose she must appear to preserve, as it were, an
aureole of modesty, of virginal charms, that she did not possess.

In fact, the Spaniard's mind became singularly crystallized, and she
turned this result to good account: in proportion as he associated
himself with the real Marianne, he created a fictitious Marianne, ideal,
kind, _spirituelle_, perhaps ignorant, but subtile and corrupted in
mind, who amused and disconcerted him at one and the same time. He had
left the Continental Hotel, and rented a house on Avenue Mont