“All has to be recommenced.  To lead the stupid life of a needy, lost, harassed woman; no, that is too ridiculous, too sad!  What then—­” she said to herself, as with fixed eyes she gazed into the infinite and discovered no solution.

She was savagely annoyed at Rosas.  She would have liked to tear him in pieces like the handkerchief that she shredded.  Ah! if he should ever return to her after this flight!

But perhaps it was not a flight—­who knows?  The duke would write, would perhaps reappear.

“No,” a secret voice whispered to Marianne.  “The truth is that he is afraid of you!  It is you, you, whom he flees from.”

To renounce everything was enough to banish all patience.  Yesterday, on leaving Rosas, she believed herself to be withdrawn forever from the wretched Bohemian life she had so painfully endured.  To-day, she felt herself sunk deeper in its mire.  Too much mire and misery at last!  However, if she only had courage!

It was while looking at the great blue lake, the snowy swans, the gleaming barks, that she dreamed, as she had just told Vaudrey, of making an end of all.  Madness, worse than that, stupidity!  One does not kill one’s self at her age; one does not make of beauty a valueless draft.  In order to occupy herself, she had bought some brown bread, which she mechanically threw to the ducks, in order to draw her out of herself.  It was then that Sulpice saw her.

“Assuredly,” she thought, as she left the minister, “those who despair are idiots!”

In fact, it seemed that chance, as her fingers had cast mouthfuls of bread to the hungry bills, had thrown Vaudrey to her in place of Rosas.

A minister! that young man who smiled on her just now in the alleys of the Bois and drew near her with trembling breath was a minister.  A minister as popular as Vaudrey was a power, and since Marianne, weary of seeking love, was pursuing an actuality quite as difficult to obtain—­riches, Sulpice unquestionably was not to be despised.

“As a last resource, one might find worse,” thought Marianne, as she entered her home.

She had not, moreover, hesitated long.  She was not in the mood for prolonged anger.  She was at an age when prompt decisions must be made on every occasion that life, with its harsh spurs, proposed a problem or furnished an opportunity.  On the way between the Lake and Rue de Navarin, Marianne had formed her plan.  Since she had to reply to Vaudrey, she would write him.  She felt an ardent desire to avenge herself for Rosas’s treatment, as if he ought to suffer therefor, as if he were about to know that Sulpice loved her.

Had she found the duke awaiting her, as she entered the house, she would have been quite capable of lashing his face with a whip, while making the lying confession: 

“Ah! you here?  It is too late!  I love Monsieur Vaudrey.”