The session of the Chamber was to furnish him the most cruel deception. Granet had most skilfully prepared his plan of attack. Vaudrey's ministry was threatened on all sides by lines of approach laid out without Sulpice's knowledge. Granet had promised, here and there, new situations, or had undertaken to confirm the old. He came to the assault of the ministry with a compact battalion of clients entirely devoted to his fortunes, which were their own. They did not reproach Vaudrey too strongly with anything, unless it was that these impatient ones considered that he had given away all that he had to give, prefectures, sub-prefectures, councillors' appointments, crosses of the Legion of Honor, and especially for having lasted too long. Vaudrey would fall less because he had forfeited esteem than because others were impatient to succeed him. Granet was tired of being only the _minister of to-morrow_, he wished to have his day. He had just affirmed his policy, he asserted that the whole country, weary of Vaudrey's compromises, demanded a more homogeneous ministry. Homogeneity! Nothing could be said against such a word. Granet favored the policy of homogeneity. This vocable comprehended his entire programme. The Vaudrey Cabinet lacked homogeneity! The President of the Republic decidedly ought to form a homogeneous cabinet. "Granet is then homogeneous?" said Sulpice, with a forced laugh, as he sat on the ministerial bench while Lucien Granet was speaking from the tribune, his right hand thrust into his frock-coat. The _bon mot_ uttered by the President of the Council, although spoken loudly enough, did not enliven any one, neither his colleagues who felt themselves threatened nor his usual _claqueurs_ who felt themselves vanquished. Navarrot, the ministerial claqueur, was already applauding Granet most enthusiastically. _Monsieur le Ministre_ felt himself about to become an ex-minister. He vaguely felt as if he were in the vacuum of an air-pump. The order of the day of distrust, smoothed over by Granet with the formulas of perfidious politeness--castor-oil in orange-juice, as Sulpice himself called it, trying to pluck up courage and wit in the face of misfortune,--that order of the day that the Vaudrey Cabinet would not accept, was adopted by a considerable majority: one hundred and twenty-two votes. For Sulpice, it was a crushing defeat. "One hundred and twenty-two deputies," he said, still speaking in a loud voice in the corridors, "to whom I have refused the appointment of some mayor or the removal of some rural guard!" Warcolier, ever dignified, remarked in his usual style, that this manner of defending himself probably lacked some of that nobility which becomes a defeat bravely endured. Vaudrey had only one course open, to send in his resignation. He was beaten, thoroughly beaten. He returned to the Hotel Beauvau and after preparing his letter he took it himself to the President at the Elysee.