propitious for Rabourdin. What could better conduce to the stability
of the government than to propose and carry through a reform whose
beneficial results were to be so vast?

Never had Rabourdin seemed so anxious and preoccupied as he now did
in the mornings as he walked from his house to the ministry, or at
half-past four in the afternoon, when he returned. Madame Rabourdin, on
her part, disconsolate over her wasted life, weary of secretly working
to obtain a few luxuries of dress, never appeared so bitterly
discontented as now; but, like any wife who is really attached to her
husband, she considered it unworthy of a superior woman to condescend
to the shameful devices by which the wives of some officials eke out
the insufficiency of their husband's salary. This feeling made her
refuse all intercourse with Madame Colleville, then very intimate with
Francois Keller, whose parties eclipsed those of the rue Duphot.
Nevertheless, she mistook the quietude of the political thinker and
the preoccupation of the intrepid worker for the apathetic torpor of
an official broken down by the dulness of routine, vanquished by that
most hateful of all miseries, the mediocrity that simply earns a
living; and she groaned at being married to a man without energy.

Thus it was that about this period in their lives she resolved to take
the making of her husband's fortune on herself; to thrust him at any
cost into a higher sphere, and to hide from him the secret springs of
her machinations. She carried into all her plans the independence of
ideas which characterized her, and was proud to think that she could
rise above other women by sharing none of their petty prejudices and
by keeping herself untrammelled by the restraints which society
imposes. In her anger she resolved to fight fools with their own
weapons, and to make herself a fool if need be. She saw things coming