s, Mere Jansoulet had
never become accustomed to it, and was always expecting the sudden
disappearance of their splendor. Who could say that the final crash was
not really beginning now? And suddenly, amid these gloomy thoughts, the
remembrance of the childish scene of a moment before, of the little one
rubbing against her drugget skirt, caused her wrinkled lips to swell in
a loving smile, and, in her joy, she murmured in her _patois_:

"Oh! that little fellow!"

A vast, magnificent, dazzling square, two sheaves of water flying upward
in silver dust, then a great stone bridge, and at the further end a
square building with statues in front of it, and an iron gateway where
carriages were standing, people passing through and a knot of police
officers. That was the place. She made her way bravely through the crowd
as far as a high glass door.

"Your card, my good woman?"

The good woman had no card, but she said simply to one of the ushers
with red lapels who were acting as doorkeepers:

"I am Bernard Jansoulet's mother; I have come to attend my boy's
sitting."

It was in very truth her boy's sitting; for in that crowd besieging the
doors, in the crowd that filled the corridors, the hall, the galleries,
the whole palace, the same name was whispered everywhere, accompanied by
smiles and muttered comments. A great scandal was expected, shocking
revelations by the spokesman of the committee which would doubtless lead
to some violent outburst on the part of the savage thus brought to bay;
and people crowded thither as to a first performance or the argument of
a famous cause. The old mother certainly could not have made herself
heard in the midst of that throng, if the train of gold left by the
Nabob wherever he passed, and marking his royal progress, had not made
everything smooth for her. She followed an usher through that labyrinth
of corridors, folding doors, empty, echoing rooms, filled with a buzzing
noise which circulated through the air in the building and passed out
through its walls, as if the very stones were impregnated with that
verbosity and added the echoes of bygone days to those of all the voices
of to-day. Passing through a corridor, she spied a little dark man
shouting and gesticulating to the attendants:

"Tell Moussiou Jansoulet zat I am ze deputy-mayor of Sarlazaccio, zat I
have been sentenced to five month in prison for him. Zat deserves a card
for ze sitting, _Corps de Dieu_!"

Five months in pr