And now, getting only a back view of him, Pierre hesitated, and ended by thinking that he must have been mistaken.
III.

RANTERS AND RULERS WHEN Abbe Froment was about to enter the Palais-Bourbon he remembered that he had no card, and he was making up his mind that he would simply ask for Fonsegue, though he was not known to him, when, on reaching the vestibule, he perceived Mege, the Collectivist deputy, with whom he had become acquainted in his days of militant charity in the poverty-stricken Charonne district.
"What, you here?
You surely have not come to evangelise us ?" said Mege.
"No, I've come to see Monsieur Fonsegue on an urgent matter, about a poor fellow who cannot wait." "Fonsegue?
I don't know if he has arrived.

Wait a moment." And stopping a short, dark young fellow with a ferreting, mouse-like air, Mege said to him: "Massot, here's Monsieur l'Abbe Froment, who wants to speak to your governor at once." "The governor?
But he isn't here.

I left him at the office of the paper, where he'll be detained for another quarter of an hour.

However, if Monsieur l'Abbe likes to wait he will surely see him here." Thereupon Mege ushered Pierre into the large waiting-hall, the Salle des Pas Perdus, which in other moments looked so vast and cold with its bronze Minerva and Laocoon, and its bare walls on which the pale mournful winter light fell from the glass doors communicating with the garden.
Just then, however, it was crowded, and warmed, as it were, by the feverish agitation of the many groups of men that had gathered here and there, and the constant coming and going of those who hastened through the throng.