This insult pierced Felicite to the heart.  The ingratitude of the people was heartrending to her, for she herself was at last beginning to believe in the mission of the Rougons.  She called for her husband.  She wanted him to learn how fickle was the multitude.

“It’s all a piece with their mirror,” continued the lawyer.  “What a fuss they made about that broken glass!  You know that Rougon is quite capable of having fired his gun at it just to make believe there had been a battle.”

Pierre restrained a cry of pain.  What! they did not even believe in his mirror now!  They would soon assert that he had not heard a bullet whiz past his ear.  The legend of the Rougons would be blotted out; nothing would remain of their glory.  But his torture was not at an end yet.  The groups manifested their hostility as heartily as they had displayed their approval on the previous evening.  A retired hatter, an old man seventy years of age, whose factory had formerly been in the Faubourg, ferreted out the Rougons’ past history.  He spoke vaguely, with the hesitation of a wandering memory, about the Fouques’ property, and Adelaide, and her amours with a smuggler.  He said just enough to give a fresh start to the gossip.  The tattlers drew closer together and such words as “rogues,” “thieves,” and “shameless intriguers,” ascended to the shutter behind which Pierre and Felicite were perspiring with fear and indignation.  The people on the square even went so far as to pity Macquart.  This was the final blow.  On the previous day Rougon had been a Brutus, a stoic soul sacrificing his own affections to his country; now he was nothing but an ambitious villain, who felled his brother to the ground and made use of him as a stepping-stone to fortune.

“You hear, you hear them?” Pierre murmured in a stifled voice.  “Ah! the scoundrels, they are killing us; we shall never retrieve ourselves.”

Felicite, enraged, was beating a tattoo on the shutter with her impatient fingers.

“Let them talk,” she answered.  “If we get the upper hand again they shall see what stuff I’m made of.  I know where the blow comes from.  The new town hates us.”

She guessed rightly.  The sudden unpopularity of the Rougons was the work of a group of lawyers who were very much annoyed at the importance acquired by an old illiterate oil-dealer, whose house had been on the verge of bankruptcy.  The Saint-Marc quarter had shown no sign of life for the last two days.  The inhabitants of the old quarter and the new town alone remained in presence, and the latter had taken advantage of the panic to injure the yellow drawing-room in the minds of the tradespeople and working-classes.  Roudier and Granoux were said to be excellent men, honourable citizens, who had been led away by the Rougons’ intrigues.  Their eyes ought to be opened to it.  Ought not Monsieur Isidore Granoux to be seated in the mayor’s arm-chair, in the place of that big portly beggar who had not a copper