You should have seen the artless admiration with which those estimable portly deputies, torpid with good living, listened to that ascetic, that man of another epoch, as if some Saint-Jerome had come forth from the depths of his thebaid to overwhelm with his burning eloquence, in the Senate of the Empire of the East, the unblushing profligacy of prevaricators and extortioners. How fully they understood the noble sobriquet of "My Conscience," which the Palais de Justice bestowed upon him, and which suited him so well with his great height and his wooden gestures! In the galleries the enthusiasm was even greater. Pretty faces leaned forward to see him, to drink in his words. Murmurs of approval ran along the benches, waving bouquets of all shades of color, like the wind blowing through a field of grain in flower. A woman's voice exclaimed in a slight foreign accent: "Bravo! bravo!" And the mother? Standing motionless, absorbed by her eager desire to understand something of that courtroom phraseology, of those mysterious allusions, she was like the deaf-mutes who detect what is said in their presence only by the movement of the lips, by the expression of the face. Now, one had only to look at her son and Le Merquier to understand what injury one was inflicting upon the other, what treacherous poisoned meaning fell from that long harangue upon the poor devil who might have been thought to be asleep, save for the quivering of his broad shoulders and the clenching of his hands in his hair, in which they rioted madly, while concealing his face. Oh! if she could have called to him from where she stood: "Don't be afraid, my son! If they all despise you, your mother loves you. Let us go away together. What do we care for them?" And for a moment she could almost believe that what she said to him thus in the depths of her heart reached him by virtue of some mysterious intuition. He had risen, shaken his curly head, with its flushed cheeks, and its thick lips quivering nervously with a childish longing to burst into tears. But, instead of leaving his bench, he clung to it, his great hands crushing the wooden rail. The other had finished; now it was his turn to reply. "Messieurs--" he said.