The 4th day of the month proved comparatively quiet at Plassans.  In the evening there was a public demonstration which the mere appearance of the gendarmes sufficed to disperse.  A band of working-men came to request Monsieur Garconnet to communicate the despatches he had received from Paris, which the latter haughtily refused to do; as it retired the band shouted:  “Long live the Republic!  Long live the Constitution!” After this, order was restored.  The yellow drawing-room, after commenting at some length on this innocent parade, concluded that affairs were going on excellently.

The 5th and 6th were, however, more disquieting.  Intelligence was received of successive risings in small neighbouring towns; the whole southern part of the department had taken up arms; La Palud and Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx had been the first to rise, drawing after them the villages of Chavanos, Nazeres, Poujols, Valqueyras and Vernoux.  The yellow drawing-room party was now becoming seriously alarmed.  It felt particularly uneasy at seeing Plassans isolated in the very midst of the revolt.  Bands of insurgents would certainly scour the country and cut off all communications.  Granoux announced, with a terrified look, that the mayor was without any news.  Some people even asserted that blood had been shed at Marseilles, and that a formidable revolution had broken out in Paris.  Commander Sicardot, enraged at the cowardice of the bourgeois, vowed he would die at the head of his men.

On Sunday the 7th the terror reached a climax.  Already at six o’clock the yellow drawing-room, where a sort of reactionary committee sat en permanence, was crowded with pale, trembling men, who conversed in undertones, as though they were in a chamber of death.  It had been ascertained during the day that a column of insurgents, about three thousand strong, had assembled at Alboise, a big village not more than three leagues away.  It was true that this column had been ordered to make for the chief town of the department, leaving Plassans on its left; but the plan of campaign might at any time be altered; moreover, it sufficed for these cowardly cits to know that there were insurgents a few miles off, to make them feel the horny hands of the toilers already tightened round their throats.  They had had a foretaste of the revolt in the morning; the few Republicans at Plassans, seeing that they would be unable to make any determined move in the town, had resolved to join their brethren of La Palud and Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx; the first group had left at about eleven o’clock, by the Porte de Rome, shouting the “Marseillaise” and smashing a few windows.  Granoux had had one broken.  He mentioned the circumstance with stammerings of terror.