She crossed a magnificent square, immense, dazzling, two fountains throwing up their water in a silvery spray, then a great stone bridge, and at the end was a square building with statues on its front, a railing with carriages drawn up before it, people going on, numbers of policemen. It was there. She pushed through the crowd bravely and came up to the high gla.s.s doors.
"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 pa.s.sages, 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 pa.s.sed, marking his royal progress, had not opened all the roads to her. She went behind the attendant in this tangle of pa.s.sages, 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 G.o.d"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 s.p.a.ce, 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 a.s.sembly 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 cla.s.s about to begin, with all the chatter and movement of thoughtless schoolboys.
One thing struck her--the way in which all looks turned to one side, to the same point of attraction; and as she followed this current of curiosity which carried away the entire a.s.sembly, hall as well as galleries, she saw that what they were all looking at--was her son.
In the Jansoulet"s country there is still, in some old churches, at the end of the choir, half-way up the crypt, a stone cell where lepers were admitted to hear ma.s.s, showing their dark profiles to the curious and fearful crowd, like wild beasts crouched against the loopholes in the wall. Francoise well remembered having seen in the village where she had been brought up the leper, the bugbear of her infancy, hearing ma.s.s from his stone cage, lost in the shade and in isolation. Now, seeing her son seated, his head in his hands, alone, up there away from the others, this memory came to her mind. "One might think it was a leper," murmured the peasant. And, in fact, this poor Nabob was a leper, his millions from the East weighing on him like some terrible and mysterious disease.
It happened that the bench on which he had chosen to sit had several recent vacancies on account of holidays or deaths; so that while the other deputies were talking to each other, laughing, making signs, he sat silent, alone, the object of attention to all the Chamber; an attention which his mother felt to be malevolent, ironic, which burned into her heart. How was she to let him know that she was there, near him, that one faithful heart beat not far from his? He would not turn to the gallery. One would have said that he felt it hostile, that he feared to look there. Suddenly, at the sound of the bell from the presidential platform, a rustle ran through the a.s.sembly, every head leaned forward with that fixed attention which makes the features unmovable, and a thin man in spectacles, whose sudden rise among so many seated figures gave him the authority of att.i.tude at once, said, opening the paper he held in his hand:
"Gentlemen, in the name of your third committee, I beg to move that the election of the second division of the department of Corsica be annulled."
In the deep silence following this phrase, which Mme. Jansoulet did not understand, the giant seated before her began to puff vigorously, and all at once, in the front row of the gallery, a lovely face turned round to address him a rapid sign of intelligence and approval. Forehead pale, lips thin, eyebrows too black for the white framing of her hat, it all produced in the eyes of the good old lady, without her knowing why, the effect of the first flash of lightning in a storm and the apprehension of the thunderbolt following the lightning.
Le Merquier was reading his report. The slow, dull monotonous voice, the drawling, weak Lyonnese accent, while the long form of the lawyer balanced itself in an almost animal movement of the head and shoulders, made a singular contrast to the ferocious clearness of the brief. First, a rapid account of the electoral irregularities. Never had universal suffrage been treated with such primitive and barbarous contempt. At Sarlazaccio, where Jansoulet"s rival seemed to have a majority, the ballot-box was destroyed the night before it was counted. The same thing almost happened at Levia, at Saint-Andre, at Avabessa. And it was the mayors themselves who committed these crimes, who carried the urns home with them, broke the seals, tore up the voting papers, under cover of their munic.i.p.al authority. There had been no respect for the law.
Everywhere fraud, intrigue, even violence. At Calcatoggio an armed man sat during the election at the window of a tavern in front of the _mairie_, holding a blunderbuss, and whenever one of Sebastiani"s electors (Sebastiani was Jansoulet"s opponent) showed himself, the man took aim: "If you come in, I will blow out your brains." And when one saw the inspectors of police, justices, inspectors of weights and measures, not afraid to turn into canva.s.sing agents, to frighten or cajole a population too submissive before all these little tyrannical local influences, was that not proof of a terrible state of things? Even priests, saintly pastors, led astray by their zeal for the poor-box and the restoration of an impoverished building, had preached a mission in favour of Jansoulet"s election. But an influence still more powerful, though less respectable, had been called into play for the good cause--the influence of the banditti. "Yes, banditti, gentlemen; I am not joking." And then came a sketch in outline of Corsican banditti in general, and of the Piedigriggio family in particular.
The Chamber listened attentively, with a certain uneasiness. For, after all, it was an official candidate whose doings were thus described, and these strange doings belonged to that privileged land, cradle of the imperial family, so closely attached to the fortunes of the dynasty, that an attack on Corsica seemed to strike at the sovereign. But when people saw the new minister, successor and enemy of Mora, glad of the blow to a _protege_ of his predecessor, smile complacently from the Government bench at Le Merquier"s cruel banter, all constraint disappeared at once, and the ministerial smile repeated on three hundred mouths, grew into a scarcely restrained laugh--the laugh of crowds under the rod which bursts out at the least approbation of the master. In the galleries, not usually treated to the picturesque, but amused by these stories of brigands, there was general joy, a radiant animation on all these faces, pleased to look pretty without insulting the solemnity of the spot. Little bright bonnets shook with all their flowers and plumes, round gold-encircled arms leaned forward the better to hear. The grave Le Merquier had imported into the sitting the distraction of a show, the little spice of humour allowed in a charity concert to bribe the uninitiated.
Impa.s.sable and cold in the midst of his success, he continued to read in his gloomy voice, penetrating like the rain of Lyons:
"Now, gentlemen, one asks how a stranger, a Provencial returned from the East, ignorant of the interests and needs of this island where he had never been seen before the election, a true type of what the Corsican disdainfully calls a "continental"--how has this man been able to excite such an enthusiasm, such devotion carried to crime, to profanity.
His wealth will answer us, his fatal gold thrown in the face of the electors, thrust by force into their pockets with a barefaced cynicism of which we have a thousand proofs." Then the interminable series of denunciations: "I, the undersigned, Croce (Antoine), declare in the interests of truth, that the Commissary of Police Nardi, calling on us one evening, said: "Listen, Croce (Antoine), I swear by the fire of this lamp that if you vote for Jansoulet you will have fifty francs to-morrow morning."" And this other: "I, the undersigned, Lavezzi (Jacques-Alphonse), declare that I refused with contempt seventeen francs offered me by the Mayor of Pozzonegro to vote against my cousin Sebastiani." It is probably that for three francs more Lavezzi (Jacques-Alphonse) would have swallowed his contempt in silence. But the Chamber did not look into things so closely.
Indignation seized on this incorruptible Chamber. It murmured, it fidgeted on its padded seats of red velvet, it raised a positive clamour. There were "Oh"s" of amazement, eyes lifted in astonishment, brusque movements on the benches, as if in disgust at this spectacle of human degradation. And remark that the greater part of these deputies had used the same electoral methods, that these were the heroes of those famous orgies when whole oxen were carried in triumph, ribanded and decorated as at Gargantuan feasts. Just these men cried louder than others, turned furiously towards the solitary seat where the poor leper listened, still and downcast. Yet in the midst of the general uproar, one voice was raised in his favour, but low, unpractised, less a voice than a sympathetic murmur, through which was distinguished vaguely: "Great services to the Corsican population--Considerable works--Territorial Bank."
He who mumbled thus was a little man in white gaiters, an albino head, and thin hair in scattered locks. But the interruption of this unfortunate friend only furnished Le Merquier with a rapid and natural transition. A hideous smile parted his flabby lips. "The honourable M.
Sarigue mentions the Territorial Bank. We shall be able to answer him."
He seemed in fact to be very familiar with the Paganetti den. In a few neat and lively phrases he threw the light on to the depths of the gloomy cave, showed all the traps, the gulfs, the windings, the snares, like a guide waving his torch above the _oubliettes_ of some sinister dungeon. He spoke of the fict.i.tious quarries, of the railways on paper, of the chimeric liners disappearing in their own steam. The frightful desert of the Taverna was not forgotten, nor the old Genoese castle, the office of the steamship agency. But what amused the Chamber most was the story of a swindling ceremony organized by the governor for the piercing of a tunnel through Monte Rotondo, a gigantic undertaking always in project, put off from year to year, demanding millions of money and thousands of workmen, and which was begun in great pomp a week before the election. His report gave the thing a comic air--the first blow of the pickaxe given by the candidate in the enormous mountain covered by ancient forests, the speech of the Prefect, the benediction of the flags with the cries of "Long live Bernard Jansoulet!" and the two hundred workmen beginning the task at once, working day and night for a week; then, when the election was over, leaving the fragments of rock heaped round the abandoned excavation for a laughing-stock--another asylum for the terrible banditti. The game was over. After having extorted the shareholders" money for so long, the Territorial Bank this time was used as a means to swindle the electors of their votes. "Furthermore, gentlemen, another detail, with which perhaps I should have begun and spared you the recital of this electoral pasquinade. I learn that a judicial inquiry has been opened to-day into the affairs of the Corsican Bank, and that a serious examination of its books will very probably reveal one of those financial scandals--too frequent, alas! in our days--and in which, for the honour of the Chamber, we would wish that none of our members were concerned."
With this sudden revelation, the speaker stopped a moment, like an actor making his point; and in the heavy silence weighing on the a.s.sembly, the noise of a closing door was heard. It was the Governor Paganetti leaving the tribune, his face white, the eyes wide open, his mouth half opened, like some Pierrot scenting in the air a formidable blow. Monpavon, motionless, expanded his shirtfront. The big man puffed violently into the flowers of his wife"s little white hat.
Jansoulet"s mother looked at her son.
"I have spoken of the honour of the Chamber, gentlemen. On that point I have more to say." Now Le Merquier was reading no longer. After the chairman of the committees, the orator came on the scene, or rather the judge. His face was expressionless, his eyes hidden; nothing lived, nothing moved in all his body save the right arm--the long angular arm with short sleeves--which rose and fell automatically, like a sword of justice, making at the end of each sentence the cruel and inexorable gesture of beheading. And truly it was an execution at which they were present. The orator would leave on one side scandalous legends, the mystery which brooded over this colossal fortune acquired in distant lands, far from all control. But there were in the life of the candidate certain points difficult to clear up, certain details. He hesitated, seemed 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 a.s.sembly 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:
"Gentlemen," said he.
He stopped at once, frightened by the sound of his voice, hoa.r.s.e, frightfully low and vulgar, which he heard for the first time in public.
He must find the words for his defence, tormented as he was by the twitchings of his face, the intonations which he could not express. And if the anguish of the poor man was touching, the old mother up there, leaning, gasping, moving her lips nervously as if to help him find words, reflected the picture of his torture. Though he could not see her, intentionally turned away from her gallery, as he evidently was, this maternal inspiration, the ardent magnetism of those black eyes, ended by giving him life, and suddenly his words and gestures flowed freely:
"First of all, gentlemen, I must say that I do not defend the methods of my election. If you believe that electoral morals have not been always the same in Corsica, that all the irregularities committed are due to the corrupting influence of my gold and not to the uncultivated and pa.s.sionate temperament of its people, reject me--it will be justice and I will not murmur. But in this debate other matters have been dealt with, accusations have been made which involve my personal honour, and those, and those alone, I wish to answer." His voice was growing firmer, always broken, veiled, but with some soft cadences. He spoke rapidly of his life, his first steps, his departure for the East. It sounded like an eighteenth century tale of the Barbary corsairs sailing the Latin seas, of Beys and of bold Provencals, as sunburned as crickets, who used to end by marrying some sultana and "taking the turban," in the old expression of the Ma.r.s.eillais. "As for me," said the Nabob, with his good-humoured smile. "I had no need of taking the turban to grow rich. I had only to take into this land of idleness the activity and flexibility of a southern Frenchman; and in a few years I made one of those fortunes which can only be made in those hot countries, where everything is gigantic, prodigious, disproportionate, where flowers grow in a night, and one tree produces a forest. The excuse of such fortunes is the manner in which they are used; and I make bold to say that never has any favourite of fortune tried harder to justify his wealth. I have not been successful." No! he had not succeeded. From all the gold he had scattered he had only gathered contempt and hatred. Hatred! Who could boast more of it than he? like a great ship in the dock when its keel touches the bottom. He was too rich, and that stood for every vice, and every crime pointed him out for anonymous vengeances, cruel and incessant enmities.
"Ah, gentlemen," cried the poor Nabob, lifting his clinched hands, "I have known poverty, I have struggled face to face with it, and it is a dreadful struggle, I swear. But to struggle against wealth, to defend one"s happiness, honour--rest--to have no shelter but piles of gold which fall and crush you, is something more hideous, more heart-breaking still. Never, in the darkest days of my distress, have I had the pains, the anguish, the sleepless nights with which fortune has loaded me--this horrible fortune which I hate and which stifles me. They call me the Nabob, in Paris. It is not the Nabob they should say, but the Pariah--a social pariah holding out wide arms to a society which will have none of him."
Written down, the words may appear cold; but there, before the a.s.sembly, the defence of this man was stamped with an eloquent and grandiose sincerity, which at first, coming from this rustic, this upstart, without culture or education, with the voice of a boatman, first astonished and then singularly moved his hearers just on account of its wild, uncultivated style, foreign to every notion of parliamentary etiquette. Already marks of favour had agitated members, used to the flood of gray and monotonous administrative speech. But at this cry of rage and despair against wealth, uttered by the wretch whom it was enfolding, rolling, drowning in its floods of gold, while he was struggling and calling for help from the depths of his Pactolus, the whole Chamber rose with loud applause, and outstretched hands, as if to give the unfortunate Nabob more testimonies of esteem, of which he was so desirous, and at the same time to save him from shipwreck. Jansoulet felt it; and warmed by this sympathy, he went on, with head erect and confident look:
"You have just been told, gentlemen, that I was unworthy of sitting among you. And he who said it was the last from whom I should have expected it, for he alone knew the sad secret of my life, he alone could speak for me, justify me, and convince you. He has not done it. Well, I will try, whatever it may cost me. Outrageously calumniated before my country, I owe it to myself and my children this public justification, and I will make it."
With a brusque movement he turned towards the tribune where he knew his enemy was watching him, and suddenly stopped, full of fear. There, in front of him, behind the pale, malignant head of the baroness, his mother, his mother whom he believed to be two hundred leagues away from the terrible storm, was looking at him, leaning against the wall, bending down her saintly face, flooded with tears, but proud and beaming nevertheless with her Bernard"s great success. For it was really a success of sincere human emotion, which a few more words would change into a triumph. Cries of "Go on, go on!" came from all sides of the Chamber to rea.s.sure and encourage him. But Jansoulet did not speak. He had only to say: "Calumny has wilfully confused two names. I am called Bernard Jansoulet, the other Jansoulet Louis." Not a word more was needed.
But in the presence of his mother, still ignorant of his brother"s dishonour, he could not say it. Respect--family ties forbade it. He could hear his father"s voice: "I die of shame, my child." Would not she die of shame too, if he spoke? He turned from the maternal smile with a sublime look of renunciation, then in a low voice, utterly discouraged, he said:
"Excuse me, gentlemen; this explanation is beyond my power. Order an investigation of my whole life, open as it is to all, alas! since any one can interpret all my actions. I swear to you that you will find nothing there which unfits me to sit among the representatives of my country."
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 gla.s.s 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 p.r.o.nouncement:
"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 a.s.sembly, 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 bal.u.s.trade of the staircase.
She had understood.
Bernard"s brusque interruption on seeing her, the sacrifice he had made to her so simply--that n.o.ble 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.