ote for Jansoulet, you shall have
fifty francs to-morrow morning,'"--And this: "I, the undersigned,
Lavezzi (Jacques-Alphonse), declare that I refused with scorn seventeen
francs offered me by the mayor of Pozzo-Negro to vote against my cousin
Sebastiani."--It is probable that for three francs more Lavezzi
(Jacques-Alphonse) would have devoured his scorn in silence. But the
Chamber did not go so deep as that.

It was moved to indignation, was that incorruptible Chamber. It
muttered, it moved about restlessly on its soft benches of red velvet,
it uttered noisy exclamations. There were "Ohs!" of stupefaction, eyes
like circumflex accents, sudden backward movements, or appalled,
discouraged gestures, such as the spectacle of human degradation
sometimes calls forth. And observe that the majority of those deputies
had used the identical electoral methods, that there were on those
benches heroes of the famous "rastels," of those open-air banquets at
which begarlanded and beribboned calves were borne aloft in triumph as
at Gargantua's kermesses. They naturally cried out louder than the
others, turned in righteous wrath toward the high, solitary bench where
the poor leper sat motionless, listening, his head in his hands. But
amid the general hue and cry, a single voice arose in his favor, a low,
unpractised voice, rather a sympathetic buzzing than speech, in which
could be vaguely distinguished the words: "Great services rendered to
Corsica. Extensive enterprises. _Caisse Territoriale._"

The man who spoke thus falteringly was a little fellow in white
gaiters, with an albino's face and scanty hair that stood erect in
bunches. But that tactless friend's interruption simply furnished Le
Merquier with a pretext for an immediate and natural transition. A
hideous smile parted his flabby lips. "The honorable Monsieur Sarigue
refers to the _Caisse Territoriale_; we proceed to answer him." The
Paganetti den of thieves seemed to be, in truth, very familiar to him.
In a few concise, keen words he threw light into the inmost depths of
that dark lair, pointed out all the snares, all the pitfalls, the
windings, the trap-doors, like a guide waving his torch above the
underground dungeons of some hideous _in pace_. He spoke of the
pretended quarries, the railroads on paper, the imaginary steamboats,
vanished in their own smoke. The ghastly desert of Taverna was not
forgotten, nor the old Genoese tower that served as an office for the
Mariti