Departments of Public Instruction, and Post and Telegraph. He had
promised. Oh! yes, Pichereau! Pichereau, however, mattered very little
to Sabine now! _Ex_-ministers, indeed! she could always have enough of
them. It was not that kind that she wanted. She did not care about her
salon being called the _Invalides_ as that of a rival was called the
_Salon des Refuseès_. No, certainly not, that was something she would
never consent to.

Granet's impatience had upset all her plans.

So Madame Marsy, side by side in her box with Madame Gerson, whose dark,
brilliant beauty set off her own fair beauty, had listened with a bored
and sulky manner to the first act of _L'Africaine_, while Monsieur
Gerson conversed timidly, half under his breath, with Guy de Lissac, who
made the fourth occupant of the box.

At the end of the second act, however, Lissac suddenly caught sight of
Vaudrey's smiling countenance beside Granet's waxed moustaches in the
manager's box.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "there is Vaudrey!"

Madame Marsy, however, had already caught sight of him. She turned her
opera-glass upon the new Cabinet Minister, whose carefully arranged
blonde beard was parted in the middle and spread out in two light tufts
over his white necktie, his silky moustaches turned jauntily upwards
against his fleshy cheeks. Sabine, continuing to look at the newcomer
through her glass, saw as he moved within the shadow of the box, this
man of forty, with a very agreeable and still youthful face, and as he
leaned over the edge of the box to look at the audience, she noted that