His mother smiled at all this enthusiasm.  She did not however try to repress it.  It would vanish at the touch of years, just as the leaves of the trees fly before the winds of October.  And besides, the dear woman herself was in sympathy with his hopes, his dreams and visions, remembering that her lost Raymond had loved what his son in his turn so much adored.

The termination of the war and the fall of the empire found Sulpice a popular man at Grenoble; loved by all, by the populace who knew how generous he was, and by the middle-class who regarded him as a prudent man, hence the February elections saw him sent to Bordeaux, a member of the National Assembly.  He had just passed his thirty-fourth year.

His mother lived long enough to see this event, and to be dazzled by this brilliant launch on his career.

With what deep emotion, even to-day, Vaudrey recalled that Sunday in February, a foul, wet day, when he returned home in a closed carriage with a friend, from an electioneering tour.  The day before he had made a speech in a wineshop to an audience of peasants, who listened, open-mouthed, but withal suspicious, examining their candidate as they would have handled a beast offered at the market, and who, step by step, applauded his remarks, stretching out their rasp-like hands as he left them, and crying out:  “You are our man!”

That very morning he returned to Grenoble in the rain, passing through villages where the posters bearing his name and those of his friends, half-demolished by the rain, flapped dismally in the wind.  Before the mayor’s office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare.  But there was no excitement.  Nothing more.  Not even a quickened pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the fate of the nation.  Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France, and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in the struggle.

Moreover, at night, with what feverish transport he watched the returns of the election as they reached the Palais de Justice, black with the crowd, and filled with uproar!  With what a fearfully fast-beating heart he saw the rapidly swelling number of ballots cast for him!  Dispatches came, and pedestrians hurried in from the country, waving their bulletins above their heads, and Sulpice heard on every lip the same cry:  “Vaudrey leads!”

Some cried bravo, while others clapped their hands.  A crowd quickly gathered about Vaudrey.  It already seemed to him that he was lifted up by a great wave and carried to a new world.

A friend seized him by the arm and drew him into a corner of the hall, away from the others, and hurriedly said:  “You know I am not one to ask much of you, to ask anything of you, in fact.  I merely reckon on a receivership.  That is easily done, eh?  A mere nothing?”