as
her son.

In the Jansoulets' province there still exists in some old churches, at
the back of the choir, half-way up from the crypt, a little stone box,
to which lepers were admitted to listen to the services, exhibiting to
the curious and fearful throng their pitiable brute-like figures
cowering against the holes cut in the wall. Francoise well remembered
having seen, in the village in which she was brought up, the leper, the
terror of her childhood, listening to the mass in his stone cage, lost
in the shadow and in reprobation. When she saw her son sitting alone,
far back, with his face in his hands, that picture came to her mind.
"One would say he was a leper," muttered the peasant woman. And in very
truth the poor Nabob was a moral leper, upon whom his millions brought
from the Orient were at that moment imposing the torments of a terrible
and mysterious exotic disease. As it happened, the bench upon which he
had chosen his seat showed several gaps due to leaves of absence or
recent deaths; and while the other deputies talked and laughed together,
making signs to one another, he sat silent, apart, the object of the
earnest scrutiny of the whole Chamber,--a scrutiny which Mere Jansoulet
felt to be ironical, ill-disposed, and which burned her as it passed.
How could she let him know that she was there, close at hand, that one
faithful heart was beating not far from his? for he avoided turning
toward that gallery. One would have said that he felt that it was
hostile, that he was afraid of seeing discouraging things there.
Suddenly, at the ringing of a bell on the president's desk, a thrill ran
through the assemblage, every head was bent forward in the attentive
attitude that immobilizes the features, and a thin man with spectacles,
suddenly rising to his feet amid that multitude of seated men--a
position which gave him at once the authority of attitude--said, as he
opened the pile of papers which he held in his hand:

"Messieurs, I rise in the name of your third committee, to recommend to
you that the election in the second district of the department of
Corsica be declared void."

In the profound silence following that sentence, which Mere Jansoulet
did not understand, the stout creature sitting in front of her began to
wheeze violently, and suddenly a lovely woman's face, in the front row
of the gallery, turned to make him a rapid sign of intelligence and
satisfaction. Her pale brow, thin lips and eyebrows that