yawn, betrayed, accordingly, the general impatience provoked by this untimely story.  Yet he himself seemed not to weary of it.  He found pleasure in the recital of his sufferings past, even as the mariner safe in port, remembering his voyagings over distant seas, and the perils and the great shipwrecks.  There followed the story of his good luck, the prodigious chance that had placed him suddenly upon the road to fortune.  “I was wandering about the quays of Marseilles with a comrade as poverty-stricken as myself, who is become rich, he also, in the service of the Bey, and, after having been my chum, my partner, is now my most cruel enemy.  I may mention his name, pardi!  It is sufficiently well known—­Hemerlingue.  Yes, gentlemen, the head of the great banking house.  ’Hemerlingue & Co.’ had not in those days even the wherewithal to buy a pennyworth of clauvisses on the quay.  Intoxicated by the atmosphere of travel that one breathes down there, the idea came into our minds of starting out, of going to seek our livelihood in some country where the sun shines, since the lands of mist were so inhospitable to us.  But where to go?  We did what sailors sometimes do in order to decide in what low hole they will squander their pay.  You fix a scrap of paper on the brim of your hat.  You make the hat spin on a walking-stick; when it stops spinning you follow the pointer.  In our case the paper needle pointed towards Tunis.  A week later I landed at Tunis with half a louis in my pocket, and I came back to-day with twenty-five millions!”

An electric shock passed round the table; there was a gleam in every eye, even in those of the servants.  Cardailhac said, “Phew!” Monpavon’s nose descended to common humanity.

“Yes, my boys, twenty-five millions in liquidated cash, without speaking of all that I have left in Tunis, of my two palaces at the Bardo, of my vessels in the harbour of La Goulette, of my diamonds, of my precious stones, which are worth certainly more than the double.  And you know,” he added, with his kindly smile and in his hoarse, plebeian voice, “when that is done there will still be more.”

The whole company rose to its feet, galvanized.

“Bravo!  Ah, bravo!”

“Splendid!”

“Deuced clever—­deuced clever!”

“Now, that is something worth talking about.”

“A man like him ought to be in the Chamber.”

“He will be, per Bacco!  I answer for it,” said the governor in a piercing voice; and in the transport of admiration, not knowing how to express his enthusiasm, he seized the fat, hairy hand of the Nabob and on an unreflective impulse raised it to his lips.  They are demonstrative in his country.  Everybody was standing up; no one sat down again.

Jansoulet, beaming, had risen in his turn, and, throwing down his serviette:  “Let us go and have some coffee,” he said.