A long uproar woke me from my revery. The speech was finished, and the orator, having descended from the rostrum, was receiving congratulations. They were about to vote: the urns were being passed around, but the result was certain, and the crowd of tribunes was already dispersing.
As I went across the vestibule I saw an elderly lady dressed in black. She was dressed like a wealthy bourgeoise and appeared radiant. I stopped one of the well-groomed little chaps whom one sees trotting around in the Ministerial corridors. I knew him slightly, and I asked him who that lady was.
"The mother of the orator," he replied, with official emotion. "She must be very proud."
Very proud! The old mother who wept so bitterly in the market-place was not that; and if the mother of his future Excellency had reflected, she would have regretted--she too--the time when her boy was very small, and rolled naked on her knee, holding his little foot in his hand.
But, bah! everything is relative, even shame.
I knew the poet Louis Miraz very well, in the old times in the Latin Quarter, where we used to take our meals together at a crémerie on the Rue de Seine, kept by an old Polish woman whom we nicknamed the Princess Chocolawska, on account of the enormous bowl of créme and chocolate which she exposed daily in the show-window of her shop. It was possible to dine there for ten sous, with "two breads," an "ordinaire for thirty centimes," and a "small coffee."
Some who were very nice spent a sou more for a napkin.
Besides some young men who were destined to become geniuses, the ordinary guests of the crémerie were some poor compatriots of the proprietress, who had all to some extent commanded armies. There was, above all, an imposing and melancholy old fellow with a white beard, whose old befrogged cloak, shabby boots, and old hat, which looked as if snails had crawled over it, presented a poem of misery, and whom the other Poles treated with a marked respect, for he had been a dictator for three days.
It was, moreover, at the Princess Chocolawska's that I knew a singular fool, who gained his bread by giving German lessons, and declared himself a convert to Buddhism. On the mantle of the miserable room, where he lived with a milliner of Saint-Germain, was enthroned an ugly little Buddha in jade, fixing his hypnotized eyes on his navel, and holding his great toes in his hands. The German professor accorded to the idol the most profound veneration, but on the epoch of quarter-day he was sometimes forced to carry him to the Mont-de-piété, upon which he fell into a state of sombre chagrin, and did not recover his serenity until he was able to make amends for his impious act. He never failed, moreover, to renew his avowals in prosperous times, and finally to take his god out of pawn.