Rougon gravely declared that as the situation of affairs was unchanged, there was no need for them to continue to remain there en permanence.  If anything serious should occur information would be sent to them.  And, by a decision duly taken in council, he deputed to Roudier the carrying on of the administration.  Poor Roudier, who remembered that he had served as a national guard in Paris under Louis-Philippe, was meantime conscientiously keeping watch at the Grand’-Porte.

Rougon went home looking very downcast, and creeping along under the shadows of the houses.  He felt that Plassans was becoming hostile to him.  He heard his name bandied about amongst the groups, with expressions of anger and contempt.  He walked upstairs, reeling and perspiring.  Felicite received him with speechless consternation.  She, also, was beginning to despair.  Their dreams were being completely shattered.  They stood silent, face to face, in the yellow drawing-room.  The day was drawing to a close, a murky winter day which imparted a muddy tint to the orange-coloured wall-paper with its large flower pattern; never had the room looked more faded, more mean, more shabby.  And at this hour they were alone; they no longer had a crowd of courtiers congratulating them, as on the previous evening.  A single day had sufficed to topple them over, at the very moment when they were singing victory.  If the situation did not change on the morrow their game would be lost.

Felicite who, when gazing on the previous evening at the ruins of the yellow drawing-room, had thought of the plains of Austerlitz, now recalled the accursed field of Waterloo as she observed how mournful and deserted the place was.  Then, as her husband said nothing, she mechanically went to the window—­that window where she had inhaled with delight the incense of the entire town.  She perceived numerous groups below on the square, but she closed the blinds upon seeing some heads turn towards their house, for she feared that she might be hooted.  She felt quite sure that those people were speaking about them.

Indeed, voices rose through the twilight.  A lawyer was clamouring in the tone of a triumphant pleader.  “That’s just what I said; the insurgents left of their own accord, and they won’t ask the permission of the forty-one to come back.  The forty-one indeed! a fine farce!  Why, I believe there were at least two hundred.”

“No, indeed,” said a burly trader, an oil-dealer and a great politician, “there were probably not even ten.  There was no fighting or else we should have seen some blood in the morning.  I went to the town-hall myself to look; the courtyard was as clean as my hand.”

Then a workman, who stepped timidly up to the group, added:  “There was no need of any violence to seize the building; the door wasn’t even shut.”

This remark was received with laughter, and the workman, thus encouraged, continued:  “As for those Rougons, everybody knows that they are a bad lot.”