iamentary
parlance--the verification of his credentials. It bears some resemblance
to the plight of a husband during the twenty-four hours between the
marriage at the mayor's office and its consecration by the Church.
Rights one cannot use, a semi-happiness, semi-privileges, the annoyance
of having to hold oneself in check in one direction or another, the lack
of a definite standing. You are married without being married, a deputy
without being sure of it; but, in the case of the deputy, that
uncertainty is prolonged for days and weeks, and the longer it lasts the
more problematical the result becomes; and it is downright torture for
the unfortunate representative on trial to be obliged to go to the
Chamber, to occupy a seat which he may not keep, to listen to debates
whose conclusion he is likely not to hear, to implant in his eyes and
ears the delightful memory of parliamentary sessions, with their ocean
of bald or apoplectic heads, the endless noise of crumpled paper, the
shouts of the pages, the drumming of paper knives on the tables, and the
hum of private conversations, above which the orator's voice soars in a
timid or vociferous solo with a continuous accompaniment.

That situation, disheartening enough at best, was made worse for the
Nabob by the calumnious stones, whispered at first, now printed and put
in circulation by thousands of copies, which resulted in his being
tacitly quarantined by his colleagues. At first he went about in the
corridors, to the library, to the restaurant, to the Salle des
Conferences, like the others, overjoyed to leave his footprints in every
corner of that majestic labyrinth; but, being a stranger to the
majority, cut by some members of the club on Rue Royale, who avoided
him, detested by the whole clerical coterie, of which Le Merquier was
the leader, and by the financial clique, naturally hostile to that
billionaire, with his power to cause a rise or fall in stocks, like the
vessels of large tonnage which divert the channel in a harbor, his
isolation was simply emphasized by change of locality, and the same
hostility accompanied him everywhere.

His movements, his bearing were marked by a sort of constraint, of
hesitating distrust. He felt that he was watched. If he entered the
restaurant for a moment, that great light room looking on the gardens
of the presidency, which he liked because there, at the broad white
marble counter laden with food and drink, the deputies laid aside