"Get down, or, by God, I will overturn the whole thing!"
In a confused mass of carriages, standing still because movement was impossible or slowly skirting the obstacle, with thousands of curious eyes, amid the shouts of drivers and clashing of bits, two iron wrists shook the whole phaeton.
"Jump down—jump, I say—don't you see he's going to tip us over? What a grip!"
And the girl gazed at the Hercules with interest.
Moëssard had hardly put his foot to the ground, when, before he could take refuge on the sidewalk, where black képis were hastening to the scene, Jansoulet threw himself upon him, lifted him by the nape of the neck like a rabbit, and exclaimed, heedless of his protestations, his terrified, stammering entreaties:
"Yes, yes, I'll give you satisfaction, you miserable scoundrel. But first I propose to do to you what we do to dirty beasts so that they sha'n't come back again."
And he began to rub him, to scrub his face mercilessly with his newspaper, which he held like a tampon and with which he choked and blinded him and made great raw spots where the paint bled. They dragged him from his hands, purple and breathless. If he had worked himself up a little more, he would have killed him.
The scuffle at an end, the Nabob pulled down his sleeves, which had risen to his elbows, smoothed his rumpled linen, picked up his satchel from which the papers relating to the Sarigue election had scattered as far as the gutter, and replied to the police officers, who asked him his name in order to prepare their report: "Bernard Jansoulet, Deputy for Corsica."
A public man!
Not until then did he remember that he was one. Who would have suspected it, to see him thus, out of breath and bareheaded, like a porter after a street fight, under the inquisitive, coldly contemptuous glances of the slowly dispersing crowd?