Pascal did not mention his name. But it was not absolutely necessary he should do so, and besides, he remembered Marguerite’s entreaty respecting the son.
However, while the young lawyer was speaking, the marquis had summoned all his energy and assurance to his aid. Desperate as his plight might be, he would not surrender. “This is an infamous conspiracy,” he exclaimed. “Baron, you shall atone for this. The man’s an impostor!—he lies!—all that he says is false!”
“Yes, it is false!” echoed M. de Coralth.
But a clamor arose, drowning these protestations, and the most opprobrious epithets could be heard on every side.
“How will you prove your assertion?” cried M. de Valorsay.
“Don’t try that dodge on us!” shouted Chupin. “Vantrasson and mother Leon have confessed everything.”
“Who defrauded us all with Domingo?” cried several people; and, loud above all the others, Kami-Bey bawled out: “To say nothing of the fact that the sale of your racing stud was a complete swindle!”
Meanwhile, Pascal’s former friends and associates, his brother advocates and the magistrates who had listened to his first efforts at the bar, crowded round him, pressing his hands, embracing him almost to suffocation, censuring themselves for having suspected him, the very soul of honor, and pleading in self-justification the degenerate age in which we live—an age in which we daily see those whom we had considered immaculate suddenly yield to temptation. And a murmur of respectful admiration rose from the throng when the excitement had subsided a little, and the guests had an opportunity to observe Mademoiselle Marguerite, whose eyes sparkled more brightly than ever through her happy tears; and whose beauty acquired an almost sublime expression from her deep emotion.
The wretched Valorsay felt that all was over—that he was irretrievably lost. Seized by a blind fury like that which impels a hunted animal to turn and face the hounds that pursue him, and bid them defiance, he confronted the throng with his face distorted with passion, his eyes bloodshot, and foam upon his lips; he was absolutely frightful in his cynicism, hatred, and scorn. “Ah! well, yes!” he exclaimed—“yes, all that you have just heard is true. I was sinking, and I tried to save myself as best I could. Beggars cannot be choosers; I staked my all upon a single die. If I had won, you would have been at my feet; but I have lost and you spurn me. Cowards! hypocrites! that you are, insult me if you like, but tell me how many among you all are sufficiently pure and upright to have a right to despise me! Are there a hundred among you? are there even fifty?”
A tempest of hisses momentarily drowned his voice, but as soon as the uproar had ceased, he resumed, sneeringly: “Ah! the truth wounds you, my dear friends. Pray, don’t pretend to be so distressingly virtuous! I was ruined—that is the long and short of it. But what man of you is not embarrassed? Who among you finds his income sufficient? Which one of you is not encroaching upon his capital? And when you have come to your last louis, you will do what I have done, or something worse. Do not deny it, for not one among you has a more uncompromising conscience, more moral firmness, or more generous aspirations than I once possessed. You are pursuing what I pursued. You desire what I desired—a life of luxury, brief if it must be, but happy—a life of gayety, wild excitement, and dissipation. You, too, have a passion for pleasure and gambling, race-horses, and notorious women, a table always bountifully spread, glasses ever overflowing with wine, all the delights of luxury, and everything that gratifies your vanity! But an abyss of shame awaits you at the end of it all. I am in it now. I await you there, for there you will surely, necessarily, inevitably come. Ah, ha! you will not then think my downfall so very strange. Let me pass! make way! if you please.”