With these words she reached the door.

“But give me some explanations,” he implored.  “I can’t strike a bargain with you in perfect ignorance of everything.  For two days past I have been quite in the dark as to what’s going on.  How do I know that you are not cheating me?”

“Bah! you’re a simpleton,” replied Felicite, who had retraced her steps at Antoine’s doleful appeal.  “You are very foolish not to trust yourself implicitly to us.  A thousand francs!  That’s a fine sum, a sum that one would only risk in a winning cause.  I advise you to accept.”

He still hesitated.

“But when we want to seize the place, shall we be allowed to enter quietly?”

“Ah!  I don’t know,” she said, with a smile.  “There will perhaps be a shot or two fired.”

He looked at her fixedly.

“Well, but I say, little woman,” he resumed in a hoarse voice, “you don’t intend, do you, to have a bullet lodged in my head?”

Felicite blushed.  She was, in fact, just thinking that they would be rendered a great service, if, during the attack on the town-hall, a bullet should rid them of Antoine.  It would be a gain of a thousand francs, besides all the rest.  So she muttered with irritation:  “What an idea!  Really, it’s abominable to think such things!”

Then, suddenly calming down, she added: 

“Do you accept?  You understand now, don’t you?”

Macquart had understood perfectly.  It was an ambush that they were proposing to him.  He did not perceive the reasons or the consequences of it, and this was what induced him to haggle.  After speaking of the Republic as though it were a mistress whom, to his great grief, he could no longer love, he recapitulated the risks which he would have to run, and finished by asking for two thousand francs.  But Felicite abided by her original offer.  They debated the matter until she promised to procure him, on his return to France, some post in which he would have nothing to do, and which would pay him well.  The bargain was then concluded.  She made him don the uniform she had brought with her.  He was to betake himself quietly to aunt Dide’s, and afterwards, towards midnight, assemble all the Republicans he could in the neighbourhood of the town-hall, telling them that the municipal offices were unguarded, and that they had only to push open the door to take possession of them.  Antoine then asked for earnest money, and received two hundred francs.  Felicite undertook to pay the remaining eight hundred on the following day.  The Rougons were risking the last sum they had at their disposal.

When Felicite had gone downstairs, she remained on the square for a moment to watch Macquart go out.  He passed the guard-house, quietly blowing his nose.  He had previously broken the skylight in the dressing-room, to make it appear that he had escaped that way.

“It’s all arranged,” Felicite said to her husband, when she returned home.  “It will be at midnight.  It doesn’t matter to me at all now.  I should like to see them all shot.  How they slandered us yesterday in the street!”