thusiasm was even greater. Pretty faces
leaned forward to see him, to drink in his words. Murmurs of approval
ran along the benches, waving bouquets of all shades of color, like the
wind blowing through a field of grain in flower. A woman's voice
exclaimed in a slight foreign accent: "Bravo! bravo!"

And the mother?

Standing motionless, absorbed by her eager desire to understand
something of that courtroom phraseology, of those mysterious allusions,
she was like the deaf-mutes who detect what is said in their presence
only by the movement of the lips, by the expression of the face. Now,
one had only to look at her son and Le Merquier to understand what
injury one was inflicting upon the other, what treacherous poisoned
meaning fell from that long harangue upon the poor devil who might have
been thought to be asleep, save for the quivering of his broad shoulders
and the clenching of his hands in his hair, in which they rioted madly,
while concealing his face. Oh! if she could have called to him from
where she stood: "Don't be afraid, my son! If they all despise you, your
mother loves you. Let us go away together. What do we care for them?"
And for a moment she could almost believe that what she said to him thus
in the depths of her heart reached him by virtue of some mysterious
intuition. He had risen, shaken his curly head, with its flushed cheeks,
and its thick lips quivering nervously with a childish longing to burst
into tears. But, instead of leaving his bench, he clung to it, his great
hands crushing the wooden rail. The other had finished; now it was his
turn to reply.

"Messieurs--" he said.

He stopped instantly, dismayed by the hoarse, horribly dull and vulgar
sound of his voice, which he heard for the first time in public. And in
that pause, tormented by twitchings of the face, by fruitless efforts to
find the intonation he sought, he must needs summon strength to make his
defence. And if the poor man's agony was touching to behold, the old
mother up yonder, leaning forward, breathing hard, moving her lips
nervously as if to assist him to find his words, sent back to him a
faithful imitation of his torture. Although he could not see her, having
his face turned away from that gallery which he intentionally avoided,
that maternal breath, the ardent magnetism of those black eyes gave him
life at last, and the fetters suddenly dropped from his speech and his
gestures.

"First of all, Messieurs, let me say t