“Gentlemen,” said he.

He stopped at once, frightened by the sound of his voice, hoarse, frightfully low and vulgar, which he heard for the first time in public.  He must find the words for his defence, tormented as he was by the twitchings of his face, the intonations which he could not express.  And if the anguish of the poor man was touching, the old mother up there, leaning, gasping, moving her lips nervously as if to help him find words, reflected the picture of his torture.  Though he could not see her, intentionally turned away from her gallery, as he evidently was, this maternal inspiration, the ardent magnetism of those black eyes, ended by giving him life, and suddenly his words and gestures flowed freely: 

“First of all, gentlemen, I must say that I do not defend the methods of my election.  If you believe that electoral morals have not been always the same in Corsica, that all the irregularities committed are due to the corrupting influence of my gold and not to the uncultivated and passionate temperament of its people, reject me—­it will be justice and I will not murmur.  But in this debate other matters have been dealt with, accusations have been made which involve my personal honour, and those, and those alone, I wish to answer.”  His voice was growing firmer, always broken, veiled, but with some soft cadences.  He spoke rapidly of his life, his first steps, his departure for the East.  It sounded like an eighteenth century tale of the Barbary corsairs sailing the Latin seas, of Beys and of bold Provencals, as sunburned as crickets, who used to end by marrying some sultana and “taking the turban,” in the old expression of the Marseillais.  “As for me,” said the Nabob, with his good-humoured smile.  “I had no need of taking the turban to grow rich.  I had only to take into this land of idleness the activity and flexibility of a southern Frenchman; and in a few years I made one of those fortunes which can only be made in those hot countries, where everything is gigantic, prodigious, disproportionate, where flowers grow in a night, and one tree produces a forest.  The excuse of such fortunes is the manner in which they are used; and I make bold to say that never has any favourite of fortune tried harder to justify his wealth.  I have not been successful.”  No! he had not succeeded.  From all the gold he had scattered he had only gathered contempt and hatred.  Hatred!  Who could boast more of it than he? like a great ship in the dock when its keel touches the bottom.  He was too rich, and that stood for every vice, and every crime pointed him out for anonymous vengeances, cruel and incessant enmities.

“Ah, gentlemen,” cried the poor Nabob, lifting his clinched hands, “I have known poverty, I have struggled face to face with it, and it is a dreadful struggle, I swear.  But to struggle against wealth, to defend one’s happiness, honour—­rest—­to have no shelter but piles of gold which fall and crush you, is something more hideous, more heart-breaking still.  Never, in the darkest days of my distress, have I had the pains, the anguish, the sleepless nights with which fortune has loaded me—­this horrible fortune which I hate and which stifles me.  They call me the Nabob, in Paris.  It is not the Nabob they should say, but the Pariah—­a social pariah holding out wide arms to a society which will have none of him.”