alth,
to defend one's happiness, one's honor, one's peace of mind, feebly
protected by piles of gold pieces which topple over and crush one, is a
far more ghastly, more heart-sickening task. Never, in the gloomiest of
my days of destitution, did I suffer the torture, the agony, the
sleeplessness with which fortune has overwhelmed me, this horrible
fortune which I abhor and which suffocates me! I am known as the Nabob
in Paris. Nabob is not the proper name for me, but Pariah, a social
pariah stretching out his arms, wide open, to a society that will have
none of him."

Printed upon paper these words may seem cold; but there, before the
whole Chamber, that man's defence seemed to be instinct with an eloquent
and imposing serenity, which aroused astonishment at first, coming from
that clown, that upstart, unread, uneducated, with his Rhone boatman's
voice and his street porter's bearing, and afterward moved his auditors
strangely by its unrefined, uncivilized character, utterly at variance
with all parliamentary traditions. Already tokens of approval had
manifested themselves among the benches, accustomed to submit to the
colorless, monotonous downpour of administrative language. But at that
cry of frenzy and despair hurled at wealth by the unfortunate man whom
it held in its toils, whom it drenched and drowned in its floods of
gold, and who struggled against it, calling for help from the depths of
his Pactolus, the whole Chamber rose with fervent applause, with hands
outstretched as if to give the unhappy Nabob those tokens of esteem
which he seemed to covet so earnestly, and at the same time to save him
from shipwreck. Jansoulet was conscious of it, and, warmed by that
manifestation of sympathy, he continued, with head erect and assured
glance:

"You have just been told, Messieurs, that I am not worthy to sit among
you. And the man who told you that was the very last man from whom I
should have expected it, for he alone knows the painful secret of my
life; he alone was able to speak for me, to justify me and convince you.
He did not choose to do it. Very good! I will make the attempt, whatever
it may cost me. Outrageously calumniated as I have been before the whole
country, I owe to myself, I owe to my children this public
justification, and I have decided to make it."

With that he turned abruptly toward the gallery where he knew that the
enemy was watching him, and stopped suddenly, horror-stricken. Directly
in fro