all the gentlemen are laughing at you."

Aristide remained stock still, apparently contemplating one of the
flowers of the orange-coloured wall-paper. And his mother felt sudden
impatience as she saw him hesitating thus.

"Ah! well," she said, "I've come back again to my former opinion; you're
not very shrewd. And you think you ought to have had Eugene's letters
to read? Why, my poor fellow you would have spoilt everything, with
your perpetual vacillation. You never can make up your mind. You are
hesitating now."

"I hesitate?" he interrupted, giving his mother a cold, keen glance.
"Ah! well, you don't know me. I would set the whole town on fire if it
were necessary, and I wanted to warm my feet. But, understand me, I've
no desire to take the wrong road! I'm tired of eating hard bread, and I
hope to play fortune a trick. But I only play for certainties."

He spoke these words so sharply, with such a keen longing for success,
that his mother recognised the cry of her own blood.

"Your father is very brave," she whispered.

"Yes, I've seen him," he resumed with a sneer. "He's got a fine look on
him! He reminded me of Leonidas at Thermopylae. Is it you, mother, who
have made him cut this figure?"

And he added cheerfully, with a gesture of determination: "Well, so much
the worse! I'm a Bonapartist! Father is not the man to risk the chance
of being killed unless it pays him well."

"You're quite right," his mother replied; "I mustn't say anything; but
to-morrow you'll see."

He did not press her, but swore that she would soon have reason to be
proud of him; and then he took his departure, while Felicite, feeling
her old preference reviving, said to herself at the window, as she
watched him going off, that he had the devil's own wit, that she would
never have had sufficient courage to let him leave without setting him
in the right path.

And now for the third time a night full of anguish fell upon Plassans.
The unhappy town was almost at its death-rattle. The citizens hastened
home and barricaded their doors with a great clattering of iron bolts
and bars. The general feeling seemed to be that, by the morrow, Plassans
would no longer exist, that it would either be swallowed up by the earth
or would evaporate in the atmosphere. When Rougon went home to dine, he
found the streets completely deserted. This desolation made him sad and
melancholy. As a result of this, when he had finished his meal, he
felt some slight