y justice, in fights in the
open street; he relies on the abuses of power, and worse still, on
the venality and crouching baseness of all men. He is the merchant who
thinks that everything can be bought at a price--even the votes of the
electors, even the conscience of his colleagues."

One should have seen with what naive admiration these fat deputies,
enervated with good fortune, listened to this ascetic, this man
of another age, like some Saint-Jerome who had left his Thebaid to
overwhelm with his vigorous eloquence, in a full assembly of the
Roman Empire, the shameless luxury of the prevaricators and of the
_concussionaires_. How well they understood now this grand surname of
"My conscience" which the courts had given him. In the galleries the
enthusiasm rose higher still. Lovely heads leaned to see him, to drink
in his words. Applause went round, bending the bouquets here and there,
like the wind in a wheat-field. A woman's voice cried with a little
foreign accent, "Bravo! Bravo!"

And the mother?

Standing upright, immovable, concentrated in her desire to understand
something of this legal phraseology, of these mysterious allusions, she
was there like deaf-mutes who only understand what is said before them
by the movement of the lips and the expression of the faces. But it was
enough for her to watch her son and Le Merquier to understand what harm
one was doing to the other, what perfidious and poisoned meaning fell
from this long discourse on the unfortunate man whom one might have
believed asleep, except for the trembling of his strong shoulders and
the clinching of his hands in his hair, while hiding his face. Oh,
if she could have said to him: "Don't be afraid, my son. If they all
misconstrue you, your mother loves you. Let us come away together. What
need have we of them?" And for one moment she could believe that what
she was saying to him thus in her heart he had understood by some
mysterious intuition. He had just raised and shaken his grizzled head,
where the childish curve of his lips quivered under a possibility of
tears. But instead of leaving his seat, he spoke from it, his great
hands pounded the wood of the desk. The other had finished, now it was
his time to answer:

"Gentlemen," said he.

He stopped at once, frightened by the sound of his voice, hoarse,
frightfully low and vulgar, which he heard for the first time in public.
He must find the words for his defence, tormented as he was by the