Indeed, Mere Jansoulet recognized by his inflexible shirtfront and aristocratic nose the dandified marquis who had visited at Saint-Romans, and who bore so felicitously the name of a gorgeous bird; but he did not look at her. Having thus advanced a few rows, she was checked by the back of a man sitting, an enormous back which completely blocked her path, prevented her from going farther. Luckily, however, by leaning forward a little, she could see almost the whole hall; and those semi-circular rows of desks where the deputies stood in groups, the green hangings on the walls, that pulpit at the rear occupied by a man with a bald head and stern features, all in the quiet gray light falling from above, made her think of a recitation about to commence, preceded by the moving about and chattering of restless pupils. One thing attracted her attention, the persistence with which all eyes seemed to be turned in the same direction, to be fixed upon the same point of attraction; and as she followed that current of curiosity which magnetized the whole assemblage, the floor as well as the galleries, she saw what everybody was staring at so earnestly; it was her son. In the Jansoulets' province there still exists in some old churches, at the back of the choir, half-way up from the crypt, a little stone box, to which lepers were admitted to listen to the services, exhibiting to the curious and fearful throng their pitiable brute-like figures cowering against the holes cut in the wall. Francoise well remembered having seen, in the village in which she was brought up, the leper, the terror of her childhood, listening to the mass in his stone cage, lost in the shadow and in reprobation. When she saw her son sitting alone, far back, with his face in his hands, that picture came to her mind. "One would say he was a leper," muttered the peasant woman. And in very truth the poor Nabob was a moral leper, upon whom his millions brought from the Orient were at that moment imposing the torments of a terrible and mysterious exotic disease. As it happened, the bench upon which he had chosen his seat showed several gaps due to leaves of absence or recent deaths; and while the other deputies talked and laughed together, making signs to one another, he sat silent, apart, the object of the earnest scrutiny of the whole Chamber,--a scrutiny which Mere Jansoulet felt to be ironical, ill-disposed, and which burned her as it passed. How could she let him know that she was there, close at hand, that one faithful heart was beating not far from his? for he avoided turning toward that gallery. One would have said that he felt that it was hostile, that he was afraid of seeing discouraging things there. Suddenly, at the ringing of a bell on the president's desk, a thrill ran through the assemblage, every head was bent forward in the attentive attitude that immobilizes the features, and a thin man with spectacles, suddenly rising to his feet amid that multitude of seated men--a