to select his words; then, before the impossibility of formulating a direct accusation:  “Do not let us lower the debate, gentlemen.  You have understood me.  You know to what infamous stories I allude—­to what calumnies, I wish I could say; but truth forces me to state that when M. Jansoulet called before your committee, was asked to deny the accusations made against him, his explanations were so vague that, though convinced of his innocence, a scrupulous regard for your honour forced us to reject a candidature so besmirched.  No, this man must not sit among you.  Besides, what would he do there?  Living so long in the East, he has unlearned the laws, the manners, and the usages of his country.  He believes in rough and ready justice, in fights in the open street; he relies on the abuses of power, and worse still, on the venality and crouching baseness of all men.  He is the merchant who thinks that everything can be bought at a price—­even the votes of the electors, even the conscience of his colleagues.”

One should have seen with what naive admiration these fat deputies, enervated with good fortune, listened to this ascetic, this man of another age, like some Saint-Jerome who had left his Thebaid to overwhelm with his vigorous eloquence, in a full assembly of the Roman Empire, the shameless luxury of the prevaricators and of the concussionaires.  How well they understood now this grand surname of “My conscience” which the courts had given him.  In the galleries the enthusiasm rose higher still.  Lovely heads leaned to see him, to drink in his words.  Applause went round, bending the bouquets here and there, like the wind in a wheat-field.  A woman’s voice cried with a little foreign accent, “Bravo!  Bravo!”

And the mother?

Standing upright, immovable, concentrated in her desire to understand something of this legal phraseology, of these mysterious allusions, she was there like deaf-mutes who only understand what is said before them by the movement of the lips and the expression of the faces.  But it was enough for her to watch her son and Le Merquier to understand what harm one was doing to the other, what perfidious and poisoned meaning fell from this long discourse on the unfortunate man whom one might have believed asleep, except for the trembling of his strong shoulders and the clinching of his hands in his hair, while hiding his face.  Oh, if she could have said to him:  “Don’t be afraid, my son.  If they all misconstrue you, your mother loves you.  Let us come away together.  What need have we of them?” And for one moment she could believe that what she was saying to him thus in her heart he had understood by some mysterious intuition.  He had just raised and shaken his grizzled head, where the childish curve of his lips quivered under a possibility of tears.  But instead of leaving his seat, he spoke from it, his great hands pounded the wood of the desk.  The other had finished, now it was his time to answer: