in himself to the
deputies.

"My son? where is my son?"

"Below, Madame, in his carriage. It was he who sent me to look for you."

She darted in front of the usher, walking rapidly, talking aloud,
jostling against little black-faced, bearded men who were gesticulating
in the corridors. After the Salle des Pas-Perdus, she passed through a
great ante-chamber, circular in shape, where servants, drawn up
respectfully in line, formed a living, bedizened dado on the high bare
wall. From there she could see, through the glass doors, the iron
gateway outside, the crowd, and among other waiting carriages the
Nabob's. The peasant woman as she passed recognized her enormous
neighbor of the gallery talking with the sallow man in spectacles who
had declaimed against her son and was receiving all sorts of
congratulations and warm grasps of the hand for his speech. Hearing the
name of Jansoulet pronounced with an accompaniment of mocking,
well-satisfied laughter, she slackened her long stride.

"At all events," said a young dandy with the face of a dissolute woman,
"he didn't prove wherein our charges are false."

At that the old woman made a jagged hole through the group and
exclaimed, taking her stand in front of Moessard:

"What he didn't tell you I will tell you. I am his mother, and it's my
duty to speak."

She interrupted herself to seize Le Merquier's sleeve as he was slinking
away.

"You, above all, you bad man, you are going to listen to me. What have
you against my child? Don't you know who he is? Wait a moment and let me
tell you."

She turned to the journalist:

"I had two sons, Monsieur--"

Moessard was no longer there. She returned to Le Merquier:

"Two sons, Monsieur--"

Le Merquier had disappeared.

"Oh! listen to me, some one, I entreat you," said the poor mother,
throwing her hands and her words about, to recall, to detain her
auditors; but they all fled, melted away, disappeared, deputies,
reporters, strange and mocking faces to whom she insisted upon telling
her story by main force, heedless of the indifference which greeted her
sorrows and her joys, her maternal pride and affection expressed in a
jargon of her own. And while she rushed about and labored thus,
intensely excited, her cap awry, at once grotesque and sublime like all
children of nature in the drama of civilization, calling to witness to
her son's uprightness and the injustice of men even the footmen whose
contemptuous impassiveness