in the presence of this sceptic in whom all demonstrativeness aroused
distrust. And the Minister of State, left alone, rolled up in his wraps
before the crackling and blazing fire, sheltered in the padded warmth of
his luxury, doubled that day by the feverish caress of the May sunshine,
began to shiver with cold again, to shiver so violently that Felicia's
letter which he had reopened and was reading rapturously shook in his
hands.

A deputy is in a very singular situation during the period which follows
his election and precedes--as they say in parliamentary jargon--the
verification of its validity. It is a little like the position of the
newly married man during the twenty-four hours separating the civil
marriage from its consecration by the Church. Rights of which he cannot
avail himself, a half-happiness, a semi-authority, the embarrassment
of keeping the balance a little on this side or on that, the lack of a
defined footing. One is married and yet not married, a deputy and yet
not perfectly sure of being it; only, for the deputy, this uncertainty
is prolonged over days and weeks, and since the longer it lasts the more
problematical does the validation become, it is like torture for the
unfortunate representative on probation to be obliged to attend the
Chamber, to occupy a place which he will perhaps not keep, to listen to
discussions of which it is possible that he will never hear the end, to
fix in his eyes and ears the delicious memory of parliamentary sittings
with their sea of bald or apoplectic foreheads, their confused noise of
rustling papers, the cries of attendants, wooden knives beating a tattoo
on the tables, private conversations from amid which the voice of
the orator issues, a thundering or timid solo with a continuous
accompaniment.

This situation, at best so trying to the nerves, was complicated in
the Nabob's case by these calumnies, at first whispered, now printed,
circulated in thousands of copies by the newspapers, with the
consequence that he found himself tacitly put in quarantine by his
colleagues.

The first days he went and came in the corridors, the library, the
dining-room, the lecture-hall, like the rest, delighted to roam through
all the corners of that majestic labyrinth; but he was unknown to most
of his associates, unacknowledged by a few members of the Rue Royale
Club, who avoided him, detested by all the clerical party of which
Le Merquier was the head. The financial set was