Surprise kept Rougon motionless for a moment at the sight of this frantic bourgeois thus belabouring the bell in the moonlight.  Then he understood the kettle-like clang which this strange ringer had disseminated over the town.  He shouted to him to stop, but Granoux did not hear.  Rougon was obliged to take hold of his frock-coat, and then the other recognising him, exclaimed in a triumphant voice:  “Ah! you’ve heard it.  At first I tried to knock the bell with my fists, but that hurt me.  Fortunately I found this hammer.  Just a few more blows, eh?”

However, Rougon dragged him away.  Granoux was radiant.  He wiped his forehead, and made his companion promise to let everybody know in the morning that he had produced all that noise with a mere hammer.  What an achievement, and what a position of importance that furious ringing would confer upon him!

Towards morning, Rougon bethought himself of reassuring Felicite.  In accordance with his orders, the national guards had shut themselves up in the town-hall.  He had forbidden them to remove the corpses, under the pretext that it was necessary to give the populace of the old quarter a lesson.  And as, while hastening to the Rue de la Banne, he passed over the square, on which the moon was no longer shining, he inadvertently stepped on the clenched hand of a corpse that lay beside the footpath.  At this he almost fell.  That soft hand, which yielded beneath his heel, brought him an indefinable sensation of disgust and horror.  And thereupon he hastened at full speed along the deserted streets, fancying that a bloody fist was pursuing him.

“There are four of them on the ground,” he said, as he entered his house.

He and his wife looked at one another as though they were astonished at their crime.

The lamplight imparted the hue of yellow wax to their pale faces.

“Have you left them there?” asked Felicite; “they must be found there.”

“Of course!  I didn’t pick them up.  They are lying on their backs.  I stepped on something soft——­”

Then he looked at his boot; its heel was covered with blood.  While he was putting on a pair of shoes, Felicite resumed: 

“Well! so much the better!  It’s over now.  People won’t be inclined to repeat that you only fire at mirrors.”

The fusillade which the Rougons had planned in order that they might be finally recognised as the saviours of Plassans, brought the whole terrified and grateful town to their feet.  The day broke mournfully with the grey melancholy of a winter-morning.  The inhabitants, hearing nothing further, ventured forth, weary of trembling beneath their sheets.  At first some ten or fifteen appeared.  Later on, when a rumour spread that the insurgents had taken flight, leaving their dead in every gutter, Plassans rose in a body and descended upon the town-hall.  Throughout the morning people strolled inquisitively round the four corpses.  They were horribly mutilated,