“Your card, my good woman?”

The “good woman” had no card, but she said quite simply to one of the porters in red who were keeping the door: 

“I am Bernard Jansoulet’s mother.  I have come for the sitting of my boy.”

It was indeed the sitting of her boy; for everywhere in this crowd besieging the doors, filling the passages, the hall, the tribune, the whole palace, the same name was repeated, accompanied with smiles and anecdotes.  A great scandal was expected, terrible revelations from the chairman, which would no doubt lead to some violence from the barbarian brought to bay, and they hurried to the spot as to a first night or a celebrated trial.  The old mother would hardly have been heard in the middle of this crowd, if the stream of gold left by the Nabob wherever he had passed, marking his royal progress, had not opened all the roads to her.  She went behind the attendant in this tangle of passages, of folding-doors, of empty resounding halls, filled with a hum which circulated with the air of the building, as if the walls, themselves soaked with babble, were joining to the sound of all these voices the echoes of the past.  While crossing a corridor she saw a little dark man gesticulating and crying to the servants: 

“You will tell Moussiou Jansoulet that it is I, that I am the Mayor of Sarlazaccio, that I have been condemned to five months’ imprisonment for him.  In God’s name, surely that is worth a card for the sitting.”

Five months’ imprisonment for her son!  Why?  Very much disturbed, she arrived at last, her ears singing, at the top of the staircase, where different inscriptions—­“Tribune of the Senate, of the Diplomatic Body, of the Deputies”—­stood above little doors like boxes in a theatre.  She entered, and without seeing anything at first except four or five rows of seats filled with people, and opposite, very far off, separated from her by a vast clear space, other galleries similarly filled.  She leaned up against the wall, astonished to be there, exhausted, almost ashamed.  A current of hot air which came to her face, a chatter of rising voices, drew her towards the slope of the gallery, towards the kind of gulf open in the middle where her son must be.  Oh! how she would like to see him.  So squeezing herself in, and using her elbows, pointed and hard as her spindle, she glided and slipped between the wall and the seats, taking no notice of the anger she aroused or the contempt of the well-dressed women whose lace and fresh toilettes she crushed; for the assembly was elegant and fashionable.  Mme. Jansoulet recognised, by his stiff shirt-front and aristocratic nose, the marquis who had visited them at Saint-Romans, who so well suited his name, but he did not look at her.  She was stopped farther progress by the back of a man sitting down, an enormous back which barred everything and forbade her go farther.  Happily, she could see nearly all the hall from here by leaning forward a little; and these semi-circular benches filled with deputies, the green hanging of the walls, the chair at the end, occupied by a bald man with a severe air, gave her the idea, under the studious and gray light from the roof, of a class about to begin, with all the chatter and movement of thoughtless schoolboys.