his clinched hands, "I
have known poverty, I have struggled face to face with it, and it is a
dreadful struggle, I swear. But to struggle against wealth, to defend
one's happiness, honour--rest--to have no shelter but piles of gold
which fall and crush you, is something more hideous, more heart-breaking
still. Never, in the darkest days of my distress, have I had the pains,
the anguish, the sleepless nights with which fortune has loaded me--this
horrible fortune which I hate and which stifles me. They call me the
Nabob, in Paris. It is not the Nabob they should say, but the Pariah--a
social pariah holding out wide arms to a society which will have none of
him."

Written down, the words may appear cold; but there, before the assembly,
the defence of this man was stamped with an eloquent and grandiose
sincerity, which at first, coming from this rustic, this upstart,
without culture or education, with the voice of a boatman, first
astonished and then singularly moved his hearers just on account of
its wild, uncultivated style, foreign to every notion of parliamentary
etiquette. Already marks of favour had agitated members, used to the
flood of gray and monotonous administrative speech. But at this cry
of rage and despair against wealth, uttered by the wretch whom it
was enfolding, rolling, drowning in its floods of gold, while he was
struggling and calling for help from the depths of his Pactolus, the
whole Chamber rose with loud applause, and outstretched hands, as if to
give the unfortunate Nabob more testimonies of esteem, of which he was
so desirous, and at the same time to save him from shipwreck. Jansoulet
felt it; and warmed by this sympathy, he went on, with head erect and
confident look:

"You have just been told, gentlemen, that I was unworthy of sitting
among you. And he who said it was the last from whom I should have
expected it, for he alone knew the sad secret of my life, he alone could
speak for me, justify me, and convince you. He has not done it. Well,
I will try, whatever it may cost me. Outrageously calumniated before my
country, I owe it to myself and my children this public justification,
and I will make it."

With a brusque movement he turned towards the tribune where he knew his
enemy was watching him, and suddenly stopped, full of fear. There,
in front of him, behind the pale, malignant head of the baroness, his
mother, his mother whom he believed to be two hundred leagues away
from the terribl