Come, take a place on that seat and wait for Fonsegue." Then he himself plunged into all the turmoil, and Pierre realised that his best course was to sit down and wait quietly.

His surroundings began to influence and interest him, and he gradually forgot Laveuve for the passion of the Parliamentary crisis amidst which he found himself cast.
The frightful Panama adventure was scarcely over; he had followed the progress of that tragedy with the anguish of a man who every night expects to hear the tocsin sound the last hour of olden, agonising society.

And now a little Panama was beginning, a fresh cracking of the social edifice, an affair such as had been frequent in all parliaments in connection with big financial questions, but one which acquired mortal gravity from the circumstances in which it came to the front.

That story of the African Railway Lines, that little patch of mud, stirred up and exhaling a perturbing odour, and suddenly fomenting all that emotion, fear, and anger in the Chamber, was after all but an opportunity for political strife, a field on which the voracious appetites of the various "groups" would take exercise and sharpen; and, at bottom, the sole question was that of overthrowing the ministry and replacing it by another.

Only, behind all that lust of power, that continuous onslaught of ambition, what a distressful prey was stirring--the whole people with all its poverty and its sufferings! Pierre noticed that Massot, "little Massot," as he was generally called, had just seated himself on the bench beside him.