urance and bold audacity. "The enemy is there. Attention!" As
he crossed the Salle des Pas-Perdus, he caught sight of the financier
chatting in a corner with Le Merquier, the examiner; he passed quite
near them, and looked at them with a triumphant air which made people
wonder:

"What is the meaning of this?"

Then, highly pleased at his own coolness, he passed on towards the
committee-rooms, big and lofty apartments opening right and left on a
long corridor, and having large tables covered with green baize, and
heavy chairs all of a similar pattern and bearing the impress of a dull
solemnity. People were beginning to come in. Groups were taking up their
positions, discussing matters, gesticulating, with bows, shakings
of hands, inclinations of the head, like Chinese shadows against the
luminous background of the windows.

Men were there who walked about with bent back, solitary, as it were
crushed down beneath the weight of the thoughts which knitted their
brow. Others whispering in their neighbour's ears, confiding to each
other exceedingly mysterious and terribly important pieces of news,
finger on lip, eyes opened wide in silent recommendation to discretion.
A provincial flavour characterized it all, varieties of intonation, the
violence of southern speech, drawling accents of the central districts,
the sing-song of Brittany, fused into one and the same imbecile
self-conceit, frock-coats as they cut them at Landerneau, mountain
shoes, home-spun linen, and a self-assurance begotten in a village or in
the club of some insignificant town, local expressions, provincialisms
abruptly introduced into the speech of the political and administrative
world, that flabby and colourless phraseology which has invented such
expressions as "burning questions that come again to the surface" and
"individualities without mandate."

To see these excited or thoughtful people, you might have supposed them
the greatest apostles of ideas in the world; unfortunately, on the days
of the sittings they underwent a transformation, sat in hushed silence
in their places, laughing in servile fashion at the jests of the
clever man who presided over them, or only rising to make ridiculous
propositions, the kind of interruption which would tempt one to believe
that it is not a type only, but a whole race, that Henri Monnier has
satirized in his immortal sketch. Two or three orators in all the
Chamber, the rest well qualified to plant themselves be