hostile to this
multi-millionaire, powerful in both "bull" and "bear" market, like those
vessels of heavy tonnage which displace the water of a harbour, and
thus his isolation only became the more marked by the change in his
circumstances and the same enmity followed him everywhere.

His gestures, his manner, showed trace of it in a certain constraint,
a sort of hesitating distrust. He felt he was watched. If he went for a
minute into the _buffet_, that large bright room opening on the gardens
of the president's house, which he liked because there, at the broad
counter of white marble laden with bottles and provisions, the deputies
lost their big, imposing airs, the legislative haughtiness allowed
itself to become more familiar, even there he knew that the next day
there would appear in the _Messenger_ a mocking, offensive paragraph
exhibiting him to his electors as a wine-bibber of the most notorious
order.

Those terrible electors added to his embarrassments.

They arrived in crowds, invaded the Salle des Pas-Perdus, galloped all
over the place like little fiery black kids, shouting to each other from
one end to the other of the echoing room, "O Pe! O Tche!" inhaling with
delight the odour of government, of administration, pervading the air,
watching admiringly the ministers as they passed, following in their
trail with keen nose, as though from their respected pockets, from their
swollen portfolios, there might fall some appointment; but especially
surrounding "Moussiou" Jansoulet with so many exacting petitions,
reclamations, demonstrations, that, in order to free himself from the
gesticulating uproar which made everybody turn round, and turned him
as it were into the delegate of a tribe of Tuaregs in the midst of
civilized folk, he was obliged to implore with a look the help of some
attendant on duty familiar with such acts of rescue, who would come to
him with an air of urgency to say "that he was wanted immediately in
Bureau No. 8." So at last, embarrassed everywhere, driven from the
corridors, from the Pas-Perdus, from the refreshment-room, the poor
Nabob had adopted the course of never leaving his seat, where he
remained motionless and without speaking during the whole time of the
sitting.

He had, however, one friend in the Chamber, a deputy newly elected for
the Deux-Sevres, called M. Sarigue, a poor man sufficiently resembling
the inoffensive and ill-favoured animal whose name he bore, with his red
and