d never
really stopped, seemed to stretch itself, making all its iron muscles
crack, to take a bound and start off at full speed, the flags fluttering
in the storm-wind, and the black smoke meeting the lightning flashes.

Jansoulet, left standing on the track, staggering, stunned, ruined,
watched his fortune fly away and disappear, oblivious of the large
drops of rain which were falling on his bare head. Then, when the others
rushed upon him, surrounded him, rained questions upon him, he stuttered
some disconnected words: "Court intrigues--infamous plot." And suddenly,
shaking his fist after the train, with eyes that were bloodshot, and a
foam of rage upon his lips, he roared like a wild beast, "Blackguards!"

"You forget yourself, Jansoulet, you forget yourself." You guess who it
was that uttered those words, and, taking the Nabob's arm, tried to pull
him together, to make him hold his head as high as his own, conducted
him to the carriage through the rows of stupefied people in uniform,
and made him get in, exhausted and broken, like a near relation of the
deceased that one hoists into a mourning-coach after the funeral. The
rain began to fall, peals of thunder followed one another. Every one now
hurried into the carriages, which quickly took the homeward road. Then
there occurred a heart-rending yet comical thing, one of the cruel
farces played by that cowardly destiny which kicks its victims after
they are down. In the falling day and the growing darkness of the
cyclone, the crowd, squeezed round the approaches of the station,
thought they saw his Highness somewhere amid the gorgeous trappings, and
as soon as the wheels started an immense clamour, a frightful bawling,
which had been hatching for an hour in all those breasts, burst out,
rose, rolled, rebounded from side to side and prolonged itself in the
valley. "Hurrah, hurrah for the Bey!" This was the signal for the first
bands to begin, the choral societies started in their turn, and the
noise growing step by step, the road from Giffas to Saint-Romans was
nothing but an uninterrupted bellow. Cardailhac and all the gentlemen,
Jansoulet himself, leant in vain out of the windows making desperate
signs, "That will do! That's enough!" Their gestures were lost in the
tumult and the darkness; what the crowd did see seemed to act only as
an excitant. And I promise you there was no need of that. All these
meridionals, whose enthusiasm had been carefully led since early