He declared to Madame Ceres that he would give up his attempt to take the dust out of her eye.

By this attitude he did not deceive the husband, but he was able to leave the room with some dignity.
Hippolyte Ceres was thunderstruck.

Eveline's conduct appeared incomprehensible to him; he asked her what reasons she had for it.
"Why?
why ?" he kept repeating continually, "why ?" She denied everything, not to convince him, for he had seen them, but from expediency and good taste, and to avoid painful explanations.
Hippolyte Ceres suffered all the tortures of jealousy.

He admitted it to himself, he kept saying inwardly, "I am a strong man; I am clad in armour; but the wound is underneath, it is in my heart," and turning towards his wife, who looked beautiful in her guilt, he would say: "It ought not to have been with him." He was right--Eveline ought not to have loved in government circles.
He suffered so much that he took up his revolver, exclaiming: "I will go and kill him!" But he remembered that a Minister of Commerce cannot kill his own Prime Minister, and he put his revolver back into his drawer.
The weeks passed without calming his sufferings.

Each morning he buckled his strong man's armour over his wound and sought in work and fame the peace that fled from him.