In the face of this defeat, which seemed to everybody the sudden crumbling of an edifice of effrontery, the astonishment and disillusionment were immense.  There was a moment of excitement on the benches, the tumult of a vote taken on the spot, which the Nabob saw vaguely through the glass doors, as the condemned man looks down from the scaffold on the howling crowd.  Then, after that terrible pause which precedes a supreme moment, the president made, amid deep silence, the simple pronouncement: 

“The election of M. Bernard Jansoulet is annulled.”

Never had a man’s life been cut off with less solemnity or disturbance.

Up there in her gallery, Jansoulet’s mother understood nothing, except that the seats were emptying near her, that people were rising and going away.  Soon there was no one else there save the fat man and the lady in the white hat, who leaned over the barrier, watching Bernard with curiosity, who seemed also to be going away, for he was putting up great bundles of papers in his portfolio quite calmly.  When they were in order, he rose and left his place.  Ah! the life of public men had sometimes cruel situations.  Gravely, slowly, under the gaze of the whole assembly, he must descend those steps which he had mounted at the cost of so much trouble and money, to whose feet an inexorable fatality was precipitating him.

The Hemerlingues were waiting for this, following to its last stage this humiliating exit, which crushes the unseated member with some of the shame and fear of a dismissal.  Then, when the Nabob had disappeared, they looked at each other with a silent laugh, and left the gallery before the old woman had dared to ask them anything, warned by her instinct of their secret hostility.  Left alone, she gave all her attention to a new speech, persuaded that her son’s affairs were still in question.  They spoke of an election, of a scrutiny, and the poor mother leaning forward in her red hood, wrinkling her great eyebrows, would have religiously listened to the whole of the report of the Sarigue election, if the attendant who had introduced her had not come to say that it was finished and she had better go away.  She seemed very much surprised.

“Indeed!  Is it over?” said she, rising almost regretfully.

And quietly, timidly: 

“Has he—­has he won?”

It was innocent, so touching that the attendant did not even dream of smiling.

“Unfortunately, no, madame.  M. Jansoulet has not won.  But why did he stop in that way?  If it is true that he never came to Paris, and that another Jansoulet did everything they accuse him of, why did he not say so?”

The old mother, turning pale, leaned on the balustrade of the staircase.  She had understood.

Bernard’s brusque interruption on seeing her, the sacrifice he had made to her so simply—­that noble glance as of a dying animal, came to her mind, and the shame of the elder, the favourite child, mingled itself with Bernard’s disaster—­a double-edged maternal sorrow, which tore her whichever way she turned.  Yes, yes, it was on her account he would not speak.  But she would not accept such a sacrifice.  He must come back at once and explain himself before the deputies.