es, and by the idleness of this walk,
unaccompanied by the faithful distaff which had never quitted her
for fifty years. All these ideas of enmities and persecutions, the
mysterious words of the priest, the guarded talk of Cabassu, frightened
and agitated her. She found in them the meaning of the presentiments
which had so overpowered her as to snatch her from her habits, her
duties, the care of the house and of her invalid. Besides, since Fortune
had thrown on her and her son this golden mantle with its heavy folds,
Mme. Jansoulet had never become accustomed to it, and was always waiting
for the sudden disappearance of these splendours. Who knows if the
break-up was not going to begin this time? And suddenly, through these
sombre thoughts, the remembrance of the scene that had just passed,
of the little one rubbing himself on her woollen gown, brought on her
wrinkled lips a tender smile, and she murmured in her peasant tongue:

"Oh, for the little one, at any rate."

She crossed a magnificent square, immense, dazzling, two fountains
throwing up their water in a silvery spray, then a great stone bridge,
and at the end was a square building with statues on its front, a
railing with carriages drawn up before it, people going on, numbers of
policemen. It was there. She pushed through the crowd bravely and came
up to the high glass doors.

"Your card, my good woman?"

The "good woman" had no card, but she said quite simply to one of the
porters in red who were keeping the door:

"I am Bernard Jansoulet's mother. I have come for the sitting of my
boy."

It was indeed the sitting of her boy; for everywhere in this crowd
besieging the doors, filling the passages, the hall, the tribune, the
whole palace, the same name was repeated, accompanied with smiles and
anecdotes. A great scandal was expected, terrible revelations from the
chairman, which would no doubt lead to some violence from the barbarian
brought to bay, and they hurried to the spot as to a first night or a
celebrated trial. The old mother would hardly have been heard in the
middle of this crowd, if the stream of gold left by the Nabob wherever
he had passed, marking his royal progress, had not opened all the roads
to her. She went behind the attendant in this tangle of passages,
of folding-doors, of empty resounding halls, filled with a hum which
circulated with the air of the building, as if the walls, themselves
soaked with babble, were joining to the sou