"Ah! my friends, my dear friends, if you knew how happy I am, how proud I feel!"
It was barely six weeks since he landed in France. With the exception of two or three compatriots, he had known these men whom he called his friends hardly more than a day, and only from having loaned them money. Wherefore that sudden expansiveness seemed decidedly strange; but Jansoulet, too deeply moved to notice anything, continued:
"After what I have just heard, when I see myself here in this great city of Paris, surrounded by all the illustrious names and distinguished minds within its limits, and then recall my father's peddler's stall! For I was born in a peddler's stall. My father sold old iron at a street corner in Bourg-Saint-Andéol! It was as much as ever if we had bread to eat every day, and stew every Sunday. Ask Cabassu. He knew me in those days. He can tell you if I am lying. Oh! yes, I have known what poverty is." He raised his head in an outburst of pride, breathing in the odor of truffles with which the heavy atmosphere was impregnated. "I have known poverty, genuine poverty too, and for a long time. I have been cold, I have been hungry, and horribly hungry, you know, the kind of hunger that makes you stupid, that twists your stomach, makes your head go round, and prevents you from seeing, just as if some one had dug out the inside of your eyes with an oyster-knife. I have passed whole days in bed for lack of a coat to wear; lucky when I had a bed, which I sometimes hadn't. I have tried to earn my bread at every trade; and the bread cost me so much suffering, it was so hard and tough that I still have the bitter, mouldy taste of it in my mouth. And that's the way it was till I was thirty years old. Yes, my friends, at thirty—and I'm not fifty yet—I was still a beggar, without a sou, with no future, with my heart full of remorse for my poor mother who was dying of hunger in her hovel down in the provinces, and to whom I could give nothing."
The faces of the people who surrounded that strange host as he told the story of his evil days were a curious spectacle. Some seemed disgusted, especially Monpavon. That display of old rags seemed to him in execrable taste, and to denote utter lack of breeding. Cardailhac, that sceptic and man of refined taste, a foe to all emotional scenes, sat with staring eyes and as if hypnotized, cutting a piece of fruit with the end of his fork into strips as thin as cigarette papers. The Governor, on the contrary, went through a pantomime expressive of perfunctory admiration, with exclamations of horror and compassion; while, in striking contrast to him, and not far away, Brahim Bey, the thunderbolt of war, in whom the reading of the article, followed by discussion after a substantial repast, had induced a refreshing nap, was sleeping soundly, with his mouth like a round O in his white moustache, and with the blood congested in his face as a result of the creeping up of his gorget. But the general expression was indifference and ennui. What interest had they, I ask you, in Jansoulet's childhood at Bourg-Saint-Andéol, in what he had suffered, and how he had been driven from pillar to post? They had not come there for such stuff as that. So it was that expressions of feigned interest, eyes that counted the eggs in the ceiling or the crumbs of bread on the table-cloth, lips tightly compressed to restrain a yawn, betrayed the general impatience caused by that untimely narrative. But he did not grow weary. He took pleasure in the recital of his past suffering, as the sailor in a safe haven delights in recalling his voyages in distant seas, and the dangers, and the terrible shipwrecks. Next came the tale of his good luck, the extraordinary accident that suddenly started him on the road to fortune. "I was wandering about the harbor of Marseille, with a comrade as out-at-elbows as myself, who also made his fortune in the Bey's service, and, after being my chum, my partner, became my bitterest enemy. I can safely tell you his name, pardi! He is well enough known, Hemerlingue. Yes, messieurs, the head of the great banking-house of Hemerlingue and Son hadn't at that time the money to buy two sous' worth of crabs on the quay. Intoxicated by the air of travel that you breathe in those parts, it occurred to us to go and seek a living in some sunny country, as the foggy countries were so cruel to us. But where should we go? We did what sailors sometimes do to decide what den they shall squander their wages in. They stick a bit of paper on the rim of a hat. Then they twirl the hat on a cane, and when it stops, they go in the direction in which the paper points. For us the paper needle pointed to Tunis. A week later I landed at Tunis with half a louis in my pocket, and I return to-day with twenty-five millions."
There was a sort of electric shock around the table, a gleam in every eye, even in those of the servants. Cardailhac exclaimed: "Mazette!" Monpavon's nose subsided.
"Yes, my children, twenty-five millions in available funds, to say nothing of all that I've left in Tunis, my two palaces on the Bardo, my vessels in the harbor of La Goulette, my diamonds and my jewels, which are certainly worth more than twice that. And you know," he added, with his genial smile, in his hoarse, unmusical voice, "when it's all gone, there will still be some left."
The whole table rose, electrified.
"Bravo! Ah! bravo!"
"Superb."
"Very chic—very chic."