It rejects the men compromised by radical politics and religious persecution.

Some day or other it will be necessary to make over a Casimir-Perier ministry with other men, and that day--" He stopped: really she listened too inattentively.
She was thinking, sad and disenchanted.

It seemed to her that the pretty woman, who, among the warm shadows of a closed room, placed her bare feet in the fur of the brown bear rug, and to whom her lover gave kisses while she twisted her hair in front of a glass, was not herself, was not even a woman that she knew well, or that she desired to know, but a person whose affairs were of no interest to her.

A pin badly set in her hair, one of the pins from the Bohemian glass cup, fell on her neck.

She shivered.
"Yet we really must give three or four dinners to our good political friends," said M.Martin-Belleme.