Chapter 32

Jansoulet’s mother was doubly wounded. The half-rustic artisan in her was outraged in the tenderness, the respect, the sweet unreasonableness the woman of the provinces feels towards a full linen cupboard--a cupboard filled piece by piece, full of relics of past struggles, whose contents grow finer little by little, the first token of comfort, of wealth, in the house. Besides, she had held the distaff from morning till night, and if the housewife in her was angry, the spinner could have wept at the profanation. At last, unable to contain herself longer, she rose, and actively, her little shawl displaced at each movement, she set herself to pick up, straighten, and carefully fold this magnificent linen, as she used to do in the fields of Saint-Romans, when she gave herself the treat of a grand washing-day, with twenty washerwomen, the clothes-baskets flowing over with floating whiteness, and the sheets flapping in the morning wind on the clothes-lines. She was in the midst of this occupation, forgetting her journey, forgetting Paris, even the place where she was, when a stout, thick-set, bearded man, with varnished boots and a velvet jacket, over the torso of a bull, came into the linen-room.

“What! Cabassu!”

“You here, Mme. Francoise! What a surprise!” said the _masseur_, staring like a bronze figure.

“Yes, my brave Cabassu, it is I. I have just arrived; and as you see, I am at work already. It made my heart bleed to see all this muddle.”

“You came up for the sitting, then?”

“What sitting?”

“Why, the grand sitting of the legislative body. It’s do-day.”

“Dear me, no. What has that got to do with me? I should understand nothing at all about it. No, I came because I wanted to know my little Jansoulets, and then, I was beginning to feel uneasy. I have written several times without getting an answer. I was afraid that there was a child sick, that Bernard’s business was going wrong--all sorts of ideas. At last I got seriously worried, and came away at once. They are well here, they tell me.”

“Yes, Mme. Francoise. Thank God, every one is quite well.”

“And Bernard. His business--is that going on as he wants it to?”

“Well, you know one has always one’s little worries in life--still, I don’t think he should complain. But, now I think of it, you must be hungry. I will go and make them bring you something.”

He was going to ring, more at home and at ease than the old mother herself. She stopped him.

“No, no, I don’t want anything. I have still something left in my basket.” And she put two figs and a crust of bread on the edge of the table. Then, while she was eating: “And you, lad, your business? You look very much sprucer than you did the last time you were at Bourg. How smart you are! What do you do in the house?”

“Professor of massage,” said Aristide gravely.

“Professor--you?” said she with respectful astonishment; but she did not dare ask him what he taught, and Cabassu, who felt such questions a little embarrassing, hastened to change the subject.

“Shall I go and find the children? Haven’t they told them that their grandmother is here?”

“I didn’t want to disturb them at their work. But I believe it must be over now--listen!”

Behind the door they could hear the shuffling impatience of the children anxious to be out in the open air, and the old woman enjoyed this state of things, doubling her maternal desire, and hindering her from doing anything to hasten its pleasure. At last the door opened. The tutor came out first--a priest with a pointed nose and great cheek-bones, whom we have met before at the great _dejeuners_. On bad terms with his bishop, he had left the diocese where he had been engaged, and in the precarious position of an unattached priest--for the clergy have their Bohemians too--he was glad to teach the little Jansoulets, recently turned out of the Bourdaloue College. With his arrogant, solemn air, overweighted with responsibilities, which would have become the prelates charged with the education of the dauphins of France, he preceded three curled and gloved little gentlemen in short jackets, with leather knapsacks, and great red stockings reaching half-way up their little thin legs, in complete suits of cyclist dress, ready to mount.

“My children,” said Cabassu, “that is Mme. Jansoulet, your grandmother, who has come to Paris expressly to see you.”

They stopped in a row, astonished, examining this old wrinkled visage between the folds of her cap, this strange dress of a simplicity unknown to them; and their grandmother’s astonishment answered theirs, complicated with a heart-breaking discomfiture and constraint in dealing with these little gentlemen, as stiff and disdainful as any of the nobles or ministers whom her son had brought to Saint-Romans. On the bidding of their tutor “to salute their venerable grandmother,” they came in turn to give her one of those little half-hearted shakes of the hand of which they had distributed so many in the garrets they had visited. The fact is that this good woman, with her agricultural appearance and clean but very simple clothes, reminded them of the charity visits of the College Bourdaloue. They felt between them the same unknown quality, the same distance, which no remembrance, no word of their parents had ever helped to bridge. The abbe felt this constraint, and tried to dispel it--speaking with the tone of voice and gestures customary to those who always think they are in the pulpit.

“Well, madame, the day has come, the great day when Jansoulet will confound his enemies--_confundantur hostes mei, quia injuste iniquitatem fecerunt in me_--because they have unjustly persecuted me.”

The old lady bent religiously before the Latin of the Church, but her face expressed a vague expression of uneasiness at this idea of enemies and of persecutions.

“These enemies are powerful and numerous, my noble lady, but let us not be alarmed beyond measure. Let us have confidence in the decrees of Heaven and in the justice of our cause. God is in the midst of it, it shall not be overthrown--_in medio ejus non commovebitur_.”

A gigantic negro, resplendent with gold braid, interrupted him by announcing that the bicycles were ready for the daily lesson on the terrace of the Tuileries. Before setting out, the children again shook solemnly their grandmother’s wrinkled and hardened hand. She was watching them go, stupefied and oppressed, when all at once, by an adorable spontaneous movement, the youngest turned back when he had got to the door and, pushing the great negro aside, came to throw himself head foremost, like a little buffalo, into Mme. Jansoulet’s skirts, squeezing her to him, while holding out his smooth forehead, covered with brown curls, with the grace of a child offering its kiss like a flower. Perhaps this one, nearer the warmth of the nest, the cradling knees of the nurses with their peasant songs, had felt the maternal influence, of which the Levantine had deprived him, reach his heart. The old woman trembled all over with the surprise of this instinctive embrace.

“Oh! little one, little one,” said she, seizing the little silky, curly head which reminded her so much of another and she kissed it wildly. Then the child unloosed himself, and ran off without saying anything, his head moist with hot tears.

Left alone with Cabassu, the mother, comforted by this embrace, asked some explanation of the priest’s words. Had her son many enemies?

“Oh!” said Cabassu, “it is not astonishing, in his position.”

“But what is this great day--this sitting of which you all speak?”

“Well, then, it is to-day that we shall know whether Bernard will be deputy or no.”

“What? He is not one now, then? And I have told them everywhere in the country. I illuminated Saint-Romans a month ago. Then they have made me tell a lie.”

The _masseur_ had a great deal of trouble in explaining to her the parliamentary formalities of the verification of elections. She only listened with one ear, walking up and down the linen-room feverishly.

“That’s where my Bernard is now, then?”

“Yes, madame.”

“And can women go to the Chamber? Then why is his wife not there? For one does not need telling that it is an important matter for him. On a day like this he needs to feel all those whom he loves at his side. See, my lad, you must take me there, to this sitting. Is it far?”

“No, quite near. Only, it must have begun already. And then,” added he, a little disconcerted, “it is the hour when madame wants me.”

“Ah! Do you teach her this thing you are professor of? What do you call it?”

“Massage. We have learned it from the ancients. Yes, there she is ringing for me, and some one will come to fetch me. Shall I tell her you are here?”

“No, no; I prefer to go there at once.”

“But you have no admission ticket.”

“Bah! I will tell them I am Jansoulet’s mother, come to hear him judged.” Poor mother, she spoke truer than she knew.

“Wait, Mme. Francoise. I will give you some one to show you the way, at least.”

“Oh, you know, I have never been able to put up with servants. I have a tongue. There are people in the streets. I shall find my way.”

He made a last attempt, without letting her see all his thought. “Take care; his enemies are going to speak against him in the Chamber. You will hear things to hurt you.”

Oh, the beautiful smile of belief and maternal pride with which she answered: “Don’t I know better than them all what my child is worth? Could anything make me mistaken in him? I should have to be very ungrateful then. Get along with you!”

And shaking her head with its flapping cap wings, she set off fiercely indignant.

With head erect and upright bearing the old woman strode along under the great arcades which they had told her to follow, a little troubled by the incessant noise of the carriages, and by the idleness of this walk, unaccompanied by the faithful distaff which had never quitted her for fifty years. All these ideas of enmities and persecutions, the mysterious words of the priest, the guarded talk of Cabassu, frightened and agitated her. She found in them the meaning of the presentiments which had so overpowered her as to snatch her from her habits, her duties, the care of the house and of her invalid. Besides, since Fortune had thrown on her and her son this golden mantle with its heavy folds, Mme. Jansoulet had never become accustomed to it, and was always waiting for the sudden disappearance of these splendours. Who knows if the break-up was not going to begin this time? And suddenly, through these sombre thoughts, the remembrance of the scene that had just passed, of the little one rubbing himself on her woollen gown, brought on her wrinkled lips a tender smile, and she murmured in her peasant tongue:

“Oh, for the little one, at any rate.”

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 glass 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 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.

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 assembly, 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 mass, 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 mass 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 assembly, 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 attitude 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 municipal 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 canvassing 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.

Impassable 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.”