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iamentary parlance--the verification of his credentials. It bears some resemblance to the plight of a husband during the twenty-four hours between the marriage at the mayor's office and its consecration by the Church. Rights one cannot use, a semi-happiness, semi-privileges, the annoyance of having to hold oneself in check in one direction or another, the lack of a definite standing. You are married without being married, a deputy without being sure of it; but, in the case of the deputy, that uncertainty is prolonged for days and weeks, and the longer it lasts the more problematical the result becomes; and it is downright torture for the unfortunate representative on trial to be obliged to go to the Chamber, to occupy a seat which he may not keep, to listen to debates whose conclusion he is likely not to hear, to implant in his eyes and ears the delightful memory of parliamentary sessions, with their ocean of bald or apoplectic heads, the endless noise of crumpled paper, the shouts of the pages, the drumming of paper knives on the tables, and the hum of private conversations, above which the orator's voice soars in a timid or vociferous solo with a continuous accompaniment. That situation, disheartening enough at best, was made worse for the Nabob by the calumnious stones, whispered at first, now printed and put in circulation by thousands of copies, which resulted in his being tacitly quarantined by his colleagues. At first he went about in the corridors, to the library, to the restaurant, to the Salle des Conferences, like the others, overjoyed to leave his footprints in every corner of that majestic labyrinth; but, being a stranger to the majority, cut by some members of the club on Rue Royale, who avoided him, detested by the whole clerical coterie, of which Le Merquier was the leader, and by the financial clique, naturally hostile to that billionaire, with his power to cause a rise or fall in stocks, like the vessels of large tonnage which divert the channel in a harbor, his isolation was simply emphasized by change of locality, and the same hostility accompanied him everywhere. His movements, his bearing were marked by a sort of constraint, of hesitating distrust. He felt that he was watched. If he entered the restaurant for a moment, that great light room looking on the gardens of the presidency, which he liked because there, at the broad white marble counter laden with food and drink, the deputies laid aside
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