Like Sulpice, Adrienne suffered the annoyance of a constant surveillance. She was hungry when she sat down to table, but her appetite had vanished. The viands were served cold, brought on plates decorated with various designs and marked with the initials of Louis Philippe, L.P., intertwined, or with the monogram of the Empire, N.; the gilt was worn off, the fillets of gold half obliterated: a service of Sevres that had been used everywhere, in imperial dwellings, national palaces, and was at last sent to the various ministries as the remnant of the tables of banished sovereigns. Instead of eating, Adrienne musingly looked at the decorations. It seemed to her that she was in a gloomy restaurant where the badly served dishes banished her appetite. Sulpice, sad himself, scarcely spoke and in mute preoccupation, in turn confused the shrewd, sly Granet, the intriguing Warcolier, and Marianne Kayser, whose image never left him. He was discontented with himself and excited by the persistency with which the image of this woman haunted him. In vain did Adrienne smile and seek to divert him from the thoughts that besieged him--she was herself in a melancholy mood, without knowing why, and her endeavors were but wasted; if he abandoned the train of his reflections, it was merely to express a thought in rapid tones, and he seemed momentarily to shake off his torpor; he replied to his wife's forced smile by a mechanical grimace, and immediately relapsed into his nervously silent state. In the hours of anxious struggle, she had often seen him thus, hence she was not alarmed. If she had been in her own home, instead of occupying this strange mansion, she would have rushed to him, and seated on his knees, taken his burning head between her little hands and said: "Come now! what ails you? what is the matter? Tell me everything so that, child as I may be, I may comfort my big boy." But there, still in the presence of those people, always in full view, she dared not. She carefully and anxiously watched Sulpice's mortified countenance. Since his entry on his ministerial functions, this was the first occasion, probably, that he had been so preoccupied. "There is something the matter with you, is there not, my dear?" "No--nothing--Besides--" The minister's glance was a sufficient conclusion to his remark. Moreover, how could he, even if he had some trouble to confide, make it known before the ever watchful lackeys? Before these impassive attendants, who, though apparently obsequious, might in reality be hostile, and who looked at them with cold glances? What a distance separated them from the old-time intimacies, the cherished interchange of thought interrupted by piquant kisses and laughter, just like a young husband and wife! In truth, Adrienne had not thought of it: Sulpice could not talk. "You will serve the coffee at once," she said.