A deputy is in a very singular situation during the period which follows his election and precedes--as they say in parliamentary jargon--the verification of its validity. It is a little like the position of the newly married man during the twenty-four hours separating the civil marriage from its consecration by the Church. Rights of which he cannot avail himself, a half-happiness, a semi-authority, the embarrassment of keeping the balance a little on this side or on that, the lack of a defined footing. One is married and yet not married, a deputy and yet not perfectly sure of being it; only, for the deputy, this uncertainty is prolonged over days and weeks, and since the longer it lasts the more problematical does the validation become, it is like torture for the unfortunate representative on probation to be obliged to attend the Chamber, to occupy a place which he will perhaps not keep, to listen to discussions of which it is possible that he will never hear the end, to fix in his eyes and ears the delicious memory of parliamentary sittings with their sea of bald or apoplectic foreheads, their confused noise of rustling papers, the cries of attendants, wooden knives beating a tattoo on the tables, private conversations from amid which the voice of the orator issues, a thundering or timid solo with a continuous accompaniment. This situation, at best so trying to the nerves, was complicated in the Nabob’s case by these calumnies, at first whispered, now printed, circulated in thousands of copies by the newspapers, with the consequence that he found himself tacitly put in quarantine by his colleagues. The first days he went and came in the corridors, the library, the dining-room, the lecture-hall, like the rest, delighted to roam through all the corners of that majestic labyrinth; but he was unknown to most of his associates, unacknowledged by a few members of the Rue Royale Club, who avoided him, detested by all the clerical party of which Le Merquier was the head. The financial set was 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.