ge; he listened to the dull roar of Paris, rumbling and
tramping beneath his windows, with the unspoken thought that he was
about to become a great wheel in that ever-active, complicated
mechanism. And thereupon, while he sat, enjoying the sense of
well-being that follows a substantial meal, between the lines of that
triumphant apology he evoked, by way of contrast, the panorama of his
own life, his wretched childhood, his haphazard youth, no less
distressing to recall, the days without food, the nights without a
place to lay his head. And suddenly, when the reading was at an end, in
the midst of a veritable overflow of joy, of one of those outbursts of
Southern effusiveness which compel one to think aloud, he cried,
protruding his thick lips toward the guests in his genial smile:

"Ah! my friends, my dear friends, if you knew how happy I am, how proud
I feel!"

It was barely six weeks since he landed in France. With the exception
of two or three compatriots, he had known these men whom he called his
friends hardly more than a day, and only from having loaned them money.
Wherefore that sudden expansiveness seemed decidedly strange; but
Jansoulet, too deeply moved to notice anything, continued:

"After what I have just heard, when I see myself here in this great
city of Paris, surrounded by all the illustrious names and
distinguished minds within its limits, and then recall my father's
peddler's stall! For I was born in a peddler's stall. My father sold
old iron at a street corner in Bourg-Saint-Andeol! It was as much as
ever if we had bread to eat every day, and stew every Sunday. Ask
Cabassu. He knew me in those days. He can tell you if I am lying. Oh!
yes, I have known what poverty is." He raised his head in an outburst
of pride, breathing in the odor of truffles with which the heavy
atmosphere was impregnated. "I have known poverty, genuine poverty too,
and for a long time. I have been cold, I have been hungry, and horribly
hungry, you know, the kind of hunger that makes you stupid, that twists
your stomach, makes your head go round, and prevents you from seeing,
just as if some one had dug out the inside of your eyes with an
oyster-knife. I have passed whole days in bed for lack of a coat to
wear; lucky when I had a bed, which I sometimes hadn't. I have tried to
earn my bread at every trade; and the bread cost me so much suffering,
it was so hard and tough that I still have the bitter, mouldy taste of
it in my mo