e at the
work-table.

"PAUL DE GERY."

The electoral cyclone in which they had been enveloped in Corsica
crossed the sea in their wake like the blast of a sirocco, followed
them to Paris and blew madly through the apartments on Place Vendome,
which were thronged from morning till night by the usual crowd,
increased by the constant arrival of little men as dark as carob-beans,
with regular, bearded faces, some noisy, buzzing and chattering, others
silent, self-contained and dogmatic, the two types of the race in which
the same climate produces different results. All those famished
islanders made appointments, in the wilds of their uncivilized
fatherland, to meet one another at the Nabob's table, and his house had
become a tavern, a restaurant, a market-place. In the dining-room,
where the table was always set, there was always some Corsican, newly
arrived, in the act of taking a bite, with the bewildered and greedy
expression of a relation from the country.

The noisy, blatant breed of election agents is the same everywhere; but
these men were distinguished by something more of ardor, a more
impassioned zeal, a turkey-cock vanity heated white-hot. The most
insignificant clerk, inspector, mayor's secretary, or village
schoolmaster talked as if he had a whole canton behind him and the
pockets of his threadbare coat stuffed full of ballots. And it is a
fact, which Jansoulet had had abundant opportunity to verify, that in
the Corsican villages the families are so ancient, of such humble
origin, with so many ramifications, that a poor devil who breaks stones
on the high road finds some way to work out his relationship to the
greatest personages on the island, and in that way wields a serious
influence. As the national temperament, proud, cunning, intriguing,
revengeful, intensifies these complications, the result is that great
care must be taken as to where one puts his foot among the snares that
are spread from one end of the island to the other.

The most dangerous part of it was that all those people were jealous of
one another, detested one another, quarrelled openly at the table on
the subject of the election, exchanging black glances, grasping the
hilts of their knives at the slightest dispute, talking very loud and
all together, some in the harsh, resonant Genoese patois, others in the
most comical French, choking with restrained insults, throwing at one
another's heads the names of unknown villages, dates