Pierre sat up in bed, very pale.  His bull neck, which his unbuttoned night-shirt exposed to view, all his soft, flabby flesh seemed to swell with terror.  At last he sank back, pale and tearful, looking like some grotesque Chinese figure in the middle of the untidy bed.

“The marquis,” continued Felicite, “thinks that Prince Louis has succumbed.  We are ruined; we shall never get a sou.”

Thereupon, as often happens with cowards, Pierre flew into a passion.  It was the marquis’s fault, it was his wife’s fault, the fault of all his family.  Had he ever thought of politics at all, until Monsieur de Carnavant and Felicite had driven him to that tomfoolery?

“I wash my hands of it altogether,” he cried.  “It’s you two who are responsible for the blunder.  Wasn’t it better to go on living on our little savings in peace and quietness?  But then, you were always determined to have your own way!  You see what it has brought us to.”

He was losing his head completely, and forgot that he had shown himself as eager as his wife.  However, his only desire now was to vent his anger, by laying the blame of his ruin upon others.

“And, moreover,” he continued, “could we ever have succeeded with children like ours?  Eugene abandons us just at the critical moment; Aristide has dragged us through the mire, and even that big simpleton Pascal is compromising us by his philanthropic practising among the insurgents.  And to think that we brought ourselves to poverty simply to give them a university education!”

Then, as he drew breath, Felicite said to him softly:  “You are forgetting Macquart.”

“Ah! yes; I was forgetting him,” he resumed more violently than ever; “there’s another whom I can’t think of without losing all patience!  But that’s not all; you know little Silvere.  Well, I saw him at my mother’s the other evening with his hands covered with blood.  He has put some gendarme’s eye out.  I did not tell you of it, as I didn’t want to frighten you.  But you’ll see one of my nephews in the Assize Court.  Ah! what a family!  As for Macquart, he has annoyed us to such an extent that I felt inclined to break his head for him the other day when I had a gun in my hand.  Yes, I had a mind to do it.”

Felicite let the storm pass over.  She had received her husband’s reproaches with angelic sweetness, bowing her head like a culprit, whereby she was able to smile in her sleeve.  Her demeanour provoked and maddened Pierre.  When speech failed the poor man, she heaved deep sighs, feigning repentance; and then she repeated, in a disconsolate voice:  “Whatever shall we do!  Whatever shall we do!  We are over head and ears in debt.”

“It’s your fault!” Pierre cried, with all his remaining strength.

The Rougons, in fact, owed money on every side.  The hope of approaching success had made them forget all prudence.  Since the beginning of 1851 they had gone so far as to entertain the frequenters of the yellow drawing-room every evening with syrup and punch, and cakes—­providing, in fact, complete collations, at which they one and all drank to the death of the Republic.  Besides this, Pierre had placed a quarter of his capital at the disposal of the reactionary party, as a contribution towards the purchase of guns and cartridges.