the most monstrous and extravagant calumnies, difficult to make city-folk believe, but which passed for truth among the rustics as if they had been articles of the evangel.
Door den Berg could oppose these underhand plots only with his character, his talent, his personal worth, his warm conviction and eloquence, his frank expression; in the battle of newspapers, posters and brochures, he got the worst of it; on the other hand, in public meetings, wherever the merits of the candidates were threshed out, he had the advantage. Moreover, one had to be infeudated into the clan of Béjard to take his, or rather Dupoissy's, prose and eloquence seriously, for it was Dupoissy who manufactured his speeches and articles.
Nothing could have been more disgusting than his humanitarian and long-winded confections; collections of commonplaces worthy of the worst departmental gazette, filled with clichés, hollow aphorisms, flat and redundant phrases, rhetoric so vile and so ranting that the very words seemed to refuse to cover his lies and obscenity any longer.
The night before the eve of election a monster meeting was held at the Variétés, an immense dance hall, in which political mass-meetings alternated with shrove-tide masquerades.
For the first time during the many years that he had been regaling the gulls and his creatures with doctrinaire harangues, always delivered in the same nasal, monotonous voice, Béjard was sharply hissed. He was not even allowed to finish his speech.
The heaving crowd, electrified by a hearty phillipic from Bergmans, rushed like a furious tide to attack the speaker's table on the platform, passed over the
