misgivings, and asked his wife if it were necessary to
follow up the insurrection that Macquart was preparing.

"Nobody will run us down now," said he. "You should have seen those
gentlemen of the new town, how they bowed to me! It seems to me quite
unnecessary now to kill anybody--eh? What do you think? We shall feather
our nest without that."

"Ah! what a nerveless fellow you are!" Felicite cried angrily. "It was
your own idea to do it, and now you back out! I tell you that you'll
never do anything without me! Go then, go your own way. Do you think the
Republicans would spare you if they got hold of you?"

Rougon went back to the town-hall, and prepared for the ambush. Granoux
was very useful to him. He despatched him with orders to the different
posts guarding the ramparts. The national guards were to repair to the
town-hall in small detachments, as secretly as possible. Roudier, that
bourgeois who was quite out of his element in the provinces, and who
would have spoilt the whole affair with his humanitarian preaching, was
not even informed of it. Towards eleven o'clock, the court-yard of the
town-hall was full of national guards. Then Rougon frightened them; he
told them that the Republicans still remaining in Plassans were about
to attempt a desperate _coup de main_, and plumed himself on having been
warned in time by his secret police. When he had pictured the bloody
massacre which would overtake the town, should these wretches get the
upper hand, he ordered his men to cease speaking, and extinguish all
lights. He took a gun himself. Ever since the morning he had been living
as in a dream; he no longer knew himself; he felt Felicite behind him.
The crisis of the previous night had thrown him into her hands, and he
would have allowed himself to be hanged, thinking: "It does not matter,
my wife will come and cut me down." To augment the tumult, and prolong
the terror of the slumbering town, he begged Granoux to repair to the
cathedral and have the tocsin rung at the first shots he might hear. The
marquis's name would open the beadle's door. And then, in darkness and
dismal silence, the national guards waited in the yard, in a terrible
state of anxiety, their eyes fixed on the porch, eager to fire, as
though they were lying in wait for a pack of wolves.

In the meantime, Macquart had spent the day at aunt Dide's house.
Stretching himself on the old coffer, and lamenting the loss of Monsieur
Garconnet's sofa, he h