ve confessed so
openly that he had been strolling about the Faubourg and had allowed his
cousin to be shot, had not the wine from the Hotel de Provence and the
dreams he was building upon his approaching arrival in Paris, made
him depart from his habitual cunning. The words once spoken, he
swung himself to and fro on his chair. Pierre, who had watched the
conversation between his wife and son from a distance, understood what
had passed and glanced at them like an accomplice imploring silence. It
was the last blast of terror, as it were, which blew over the Rougons,
amidst the splendour and enthusiastic merriment of the dinner. True,
Felicite, on returning to her seat, espied a taper burning behind a
window on the other side of the road. Some one sat watching Monsieur
Peirotte's corpse, which had been brought back from Sainte-Roure that
morning. She sat down, feeling as if that taper were heating her back.
But the gaiety was now increasing, and exclamations of rapture rang
through the yellow drawing-room when the dessert appeared.

At that same hour, the Faubourg was still shuddering at the tragedy
which had just stained the Aire Saint-Mittre with blood. The return of
the troops, after the carnage on the Nores plain, had been marked by the
most cruel reprisals. Men were beaten to death behind bits of wall, with
the butt-ends of muskets, others had their brains blown out in ravines
by the pistols of gendarmes. In order that terror might impose silence,
the soldiers strewed their road with corpses. One might have followed
them by the red trail which they left behind.[*] It was a long butchery.
At every halting-place, a few insurgents were massacred. Two were killed
at Sainte-Roure, three at Ocheres, one at Beage. When the troops were
encamped at Plassans, on the Nice road, it was decided that one more
prisoner, the most guilty, should be shot. The victors judged it wise
to leave this fresh corpse behind them in order to inspire the town
with respect for the new-born Empire. But the soldiers were now weary of
killing; none offered himself for the fatal task. The prisoners, thrown
on the beams in the timber-yard as though on a camp bed, and bound
together in pairs by the hands, listened and waited in a state of weary,
resigned stupor.

[*] Though M. Zola has changed his place in his account of
the insurrection, that account is strictly accurate in all
its chief particulars. What he says of the savagery both o