overflowing in one of those southern effusions which force thought
into speech, he cried, beaming upon his guests with that frank and
thick-lipped smile of his:

"Ah, my friends, my dear friends, if you could know how happy I am! What
pride I feel!"

Scarce six weeks had passed since he had landed in France. Excepting two
or three compatriots, those whom he thus addressed as his friends were
but the acquaintances of a day, and that through his having lent
them money. This sudden expansion, therefore, appeared sufficiently
extraordinary; but Jansoulet, too much under the sway of emotion to
notice anything, continued:

"After what I have just heard, when I behold myself here in this
great Paris, surrounded by all its wealth of illustrious names, of
distinguished intellects, and then call up the remembrance of my
father's booth! For I was born in a booth. My father used to sell old
nails at the corner of a boundary stone in the Bourg-Saint-Andeol. If we
had bread in the house every day and stew every Sunday it was the most
we had to expect. Ask Cabassu whether it was not so. He knew me in those
days. He can tell you whether I am not speaking the truth. Oh, yes, I
have known what poverty is." He threw back his head with an impulse
of pride as he savoured the odour of truffles diffused through the
suffocating atmosphere. "I have known it, and the real thing too, and
for a long time. I have been cold. I have known hunger--genuine hunger,
remember--the hunger that intoxicates, that wrings the stomach, sets
circles dancing in your head, deprives you of sight as if the inside of
your eyes was being gouged out with an oyster-knife. I have passed days
in bed for want of an overcoat to go out in; fortunate at that when