But Felicite pretended not to have heard.  Her husband’s exclamation had profoundly affected her.  Why, indeed, did not Eugene write to his father?  After keeping him so accurately informed of the progress of the Bonapartist cause, he ought at least to have announced the triumph or defeat of Prince Louis.  Mere prudence would have counselled the despatch of such information.  If he remained silent, it must be that the victorious Republic had sent him to join the pretender in the dungeons of Vincennes.  At this thought Felicite felt chilled to the marrow; her son’s silence destroyed her last hopes.

At that moment somebody brought up the “Gazette,” which had only just appeared.

“Ah!” said Pierre, with surprise.  “Vuillet has issued his paper!”

Thereupon he tore off the wrapper, read the leading article, and finished it looking as white as a sheet, and swaying on his chair.

“Here, read,” he resumed, handing the paper to Felicite.

It was a magnificent article, attacking the insurgents with unheard of violence.  Never had so much stinging bitterness, so many falsehoods, such bigoted abuse flowed from pen before.  Vuillet commenced by narrating the entry of the insurgents into Plassans.  The description was a perfect masterpiece.  He spoke of “those bandits, those villainous-looking countenances, that scum of the galleys,” invading the town, “intoxicated with brandy, lust, and pillage.”  Then he exhibited them “parading their cynicism in the streets, terrifying the inhabitants with their savage cries and seeking only violence and murder.”  Further on, the scene at the town-hall and the arrest of the authorities became a most horrible drama.  “Then they seized the most respectable people by the throat; and the mayor, the brave commander of the national guard, the postmaster, that kindly functionary, were—­even like the Divinity—­crowned with thorns by those wretches, who spat in their faces.”  The passage devoted to Miette and her red pelisse was quite a flight of imagination.  Vuillet had seen ten, twenty girls steeped in blood:  “and who,” he wrote, “did not behold among those monsters some infamous creatures clothed in red, who must have bathed themselves in the blood of the martyrs murdered by the brigands along the high roads?  They were brandishing banners, and openly receiving the vile caresses of the entire horde.”  And Vuillet added, with Biblical magniloquence, “The Republic ever marches on amidst debauchery and murder.”

That, however, was only the first part of the article; the narrative being ended, the editor asked if the country would any longer tolerate “the shamelessness of those wild beasts, who respected neither property nor persons.”  He made an appeal to all valorous citizens, declaring that to tolerate such things any longer would be to encourage them, and that the insurgents would then come and snatch “the daughter from her mother’s arms, the wife from her husband’s embraces.”  And at last, after a pious sentence in which he declared that Heaven willed the extermination of the wicked, he concluded with this trumpet blast:  “It is asserted that these wretches are once more at our gates; well then let each one of us take a gun and shoot them down like dogs.  I for my part shall be seen in the front rank, happy to rid the earth of such vermin.”