And now for the third time a night full of anguish fell upon Plassans.  The unhappy town was almost at its death-rattle.  The citizens hastened home and barricaded their doors with a great clattering of iron bolts and bars.  The general feeling seemed to be that, by the morrow, Plassans would no longer exist, that it would either be swallowed up by the earth or would evaporate in the atmosphere.  When Rougon went home to dine, he found the streets completely deserted.  This desolation made him sad and melancholy.  As a result of this, when he had finished his meal, he felt some slight misgivings, and asked his wife if it were necessary to follow up the insurrection that Macquart was preparing.

“Nobody will run us down now,” said he.  “You should have seen those gentlemen of the new town, how they bowed to me!  It seems to me quite unnecessary now to kill anybody—­eh?  What do you think?  We shall feather our nest without that.”

“Ah! what a nerveless fellow you are!” Felicite cried angrily.  “It was your own idea to do it, and now you back out!  I tell you that you’ll never do anything without me!  Go then, go your own way.  Do you think the Republicans would spare you if they got hold of you?”

Rougon went back to the town-hall, and prepared for the ambush.  Granoux was very useful to him.  He despatched him with orders to the different posts guarding the ramparts.  The national guards were to repair to the town-hall in small detachments, as secretly as possible.  Roudier, that bourgeois who was quite out of his element in the provinces, and who would have spoilt the whole affair with his humanitarian preaching, was not even informed of it.  Towards eleven o’clock, the court-yard of the town-hall was full of national guards.  Then Rougon frightened them; he told them that the Republicans still remaining in Plassans were about to attempt a desperate coup de main, and plumed himself on having been warned in time by his secret police.  When he had pictured the bloody massacre which would overtake the town, should these wretches get the upper hand, he ordered his men to cease speaking, and extinguish all lights.  He took a gun himself.  Ever since the morning he had been living as in a dream; he no longer knew himself; he felt Felicite behind him.  The crisis of the previous night had thrown him into her hands, and he would have allowed himself to be hanged, thinking:  “It does not matter, my wife will come and cut me down.”  To augment the tumult, and prolong the terror of the slumbering town, he begged Granoux to repair to the cathedral and have the tocsin rung at the first shots he might hear.  The marquis’s name would open the beadle’s door.  And then, in darkness and dismal silence, the national guards waited in the yard, in a terrible state of anxiety, their eyes fixed on the porch, eager to fire, as though they were lying in wait for a pack of wolves.