This huge mansion seemed to her to be entirely innocent of all memories, and though peopled with phantoms, was as commonplace and vulgar as an apartment house. There were no associations save dust and cracks. These salons, built for the Marechal de Beauvau, these walls that had listened to the sobs of Madame d'Houdetot at the death-bed of Saint-Lambert, appeared to Adrienne to exude ennui, strangling and inevitable ennui, solemn, official, absolute ennui, nothing but ennui in the very decorum of the place, and isolation in the midst of power. She cursed her loneliness, she felt lost amid the salons of this furnished ministerial mansion, whose cold, gloomy apartments, with the chairs symmetrically arranged along the walls, she wandered through, but evidently without expecting any one: state chairs lacking occupants,--ordinary chairs, domestic chairs seem to have tongues--that never exchanged conversation. Vast, deserted rooms where the green curtains behind the glass doors of the bookcases were eternally drawn, bookcases without books, forever open, mournful as empty sepulchres. Yes, this immense gilded dwelling with its Gobelins tapestries stifled her with its terrifying gloom, where nothing, not a single article, recalled her charming provincial home, her Grenoble house with its garden filled with lilacs where she was often wont to read while Sulpice worked upstairs, bent over his table crowded with papers, before his open window. Ah! those cherished rooms, in the humble corner of the provincial home, their happy crouching in the peaceful nest; aye, even the happy first days in Paris, in the Chaussee-d'Antin apartments, in which Adrienne at least felt herself in her own home, free in her actions and thoughts, and where she could talk aloud without feeling that an eye was constantly watching her, and ears were always strained, in fact, a perpetual espionage upon all her actions and a criticism of all her words. She had reached a point when she asked herself if, even for Sulpice, happiness was not far removed from this life of slavery, of feverish politics, which for some time past had been visibly paling his cheeks and rendering him nervous and altogether different from of old. "If you did not love me so much," she said with a sweet smile, "I could believe that you loved me no longer." "What folly! you have only one rival, Adrienne." "Ah! I know that very well, but that robs me of everything. It is politics. Come! be great, and I shall be happy or resigned, as you wish. I adore you so much! I would give you my life, so I would gladly give you my days of weariness!"