sing her on the forehead, laughed, saying:

"Oh, the sun is my friend!"

Then, moving with short, quick steps, she crossed the room, and turned
the fastening of one of the shutters.

"Open the shutters a little! It is too gloomy to live in the dark in
this way. At my house I let the sun come in."

Through the opening a jet of hot light, a flood of dancing sparks
entered. And under the sky, of the violet blue of a conflagration, the
parched plain could be seen, stretching away in the distance, as if
asleep or dead in the overpowering, furnace-like heat, while to the
right, above the pink roofs, rose the belfry of St. Saturnin, a gilded
tower with arises that, in the blinding light, looked like whitened
bones.

"Yes," continued Felicite, "I think of going shortly to the Tulettes,
and I wished to know if Charles were here, to take him with me. He is
not here--I see that--I will take him another day."

But while she gave this pretext for her visit, her ferret-like eyes were
making the tour of the apartment. Besides, she did not insist, speaking
immediately afterward of her son Pascal, on hearing the rhythmical noise
of the pestle, which had not ceased in the adjoining chamber.

"Ah! he is still at his devil's cookery! Don't disturb him, I have
nothing to say to him."

Martine, who had resumed her work on the chair, shook her head, as if
to say that she had no mind to disturb her master, and there was silence
again, while Clotilde wiped her fingers, stained with crayon, on a
cloth, and Felicite began to walk about the room with short steps,
looking around inquisitively.

Old Mme. Rougon would soon be two years a widow. Her husband who had
grown so corpulent that he could no longer move, had succumbed to an
attack of indigestion on the 3d of September, 1870, on the night of the
day on which he had learned of the catastrophe of Sedan. The ruin of the
government of which he flattered himself with being one of the founders,
seemed to have crushed him. Thus, Felicite affected to occupy herself no
longer with politics, living, thenceforward, like a dethroned queen, the
only surviving power of a vanished world. No one was unaware that the
Rougons, in 1851, had saved Plassans from anarchy, by causing the _coup
d'etat_ of the 2d of December to triumph there, and that, a few
years later, they had won it again from the legitimist and republican
candidates, to give it to a Bonapartist deputy. Up to the time of the
war, the Em