“You forget yourself, Jansoulet, you forget yourself.”  You guess who it was that uttered those words, and, taking the Nabob’s arm, tried to pull him together, to make him hold his head as high as his own, conducted him to the carriage through the rows of stupefied people in uniform, and made him get in, exhausted and broken, like a near relation of the deceased that one hoists into a mourning-coach after the funeral.  The rain began to fall, peals of thunder followed one another.  Every one now hurried into the carriages, which quickly took the homeward road.  Then there occurred a heart-rending yet comical thing, one of the cruel farces played by that cowardly destiny which kicks its victims after they are down.  In the falling day and the growing darkness of the cyclone, the crowd, squeezed round the approaches of the station, thought they saw his Highness somewhere amid the gorgeous trappings, and as soon as the wheels started an immense clamour, a frightful bawling, which had been hatching for an hour in all those breasts, burst out, rose, rolled, rebounded from side to side and prolonged itself in the valley.  “Hurrah, hurrah for the Bey!” This was the signal for the first bands to begin, the choral societies started in their turn, and the noise growing step by step, the road from Giffas to Saint-Romans was nothing but an uninterrupted bellow.  Cardailhac and all the gentlemen, Jansoulet himself, leant in vain out of the windows making desperate signs, “That will do!  That’s enough!” Their gestures were lost in the tumult and the darkness; what the crowd did see seemed to act only as an excitant.  And I promise you there was no need of that.  All these meridionals, whose enthusiasm had been carefully led since early morning, excited the more by the long wait and the storm, shouted with all the force of their voices and the strength of their lungs, mingling with the song of Provence the cry of “Hurrah for the Bey!” till it seemed a perpetual chorus.  Most of them had no idea what a Bey was, did not even think about it.  They accentuated the appellation in an extraordinary manner as though it had three b’s and ten y’s.  But it made no difference, they excited themselves with the cry, holding up their hands, waving their hats, becoming agitated as a result of their own activity.  Women wept and rubbed their eyes.  Suddenly, from the top of an elm, the shrill voice of a child made itself heard:  “Mamma, mamma—­I see him!” He saw him!  They all saw him, for that matter!  Now even, they will all swear to you they saw him!

Confronted by such a delirium, in the impossibility of imposing silence and calm on such a crowd, there was only one thing for the people in the carriages to do:  to leave them alone, pull up the windows and dash along at full speed.  It would at least shorten a bitter martyrdom.  But this was even worse.  Seeing the procession hurrying, all the road began to gallop with it.  To the dull booming of their tambourines the dancers from Barbantane,