of bullets,
full in the face; and blood oozed from his torn and riddled countenance.
The crowd feasted their eyes upon this horror, with the avidity for
revolting spectacles which is so characteristic of cowards. The national
guard was freely recognised; he was the pork-butcher Dubruel, the man
whom Roudier had accused on the Monday morning of having fired with
culpable eagerness. Of the three other corpses, two were journeymen
hatters; the third was not identified. For a long while gaping groups
remained shuddering in front of the red pools which stained the
pavement, often looking behind them with an air of mistrust, as though
that summary justice which had restored order during the night by force
of arms, were, even now, watching and listening to them, ready to shoot
them down in their turn, unless they kissed with enthusiasm the hand
that had just rescued them from the demagogy.

The panic of the night further augmented the terrible effect produced
in the morning by the sight of the four corpses. The true history of
the fusillade was never known. The firing of the combatants, Granoux's
hammering, the helter-skelter rush of the national guards through the
streets, had filled people's ears with such terrifying sounds that most
of them dreamed of a gigantic battle waged against countless enemies.
When the victors, magnifying the number of their adversaries with
instinctive braggardism, spoke of about five hundred men, everybody
protested against such a low estimate. Some citizens asserted that they
had looked out of their windows and seen an immense stream of fugitives
passing by for more than an hour. Moreover everybody had heard the
bandits running about. Five hundred men would never have been able to
rouse a whole town. It must have been an army, and a fine big army too,
which the brave militia of Plassans had "driven back into the ground."
This phrase of their having been "driven back into the ground," first
used by Rougon, struck people as being singularly appropriate, for the
guards who were charged with the defence of the ramparts swore by all
that was holy that not a single man had entered or quitted the town,
a circumstance which tinged what had happened with mystery, even
suggesting the idea of horned demons who had vanished amidst flames, and
thus fairly upsetting the minds of the multitude. It is true the guards
avoided all mention of their mad gallops; and so the more rational
citizens were inclined to bel