Then Lisa, expostulating still more gently, assured him that he had nothing to blame himself for, and even expressed some pity for Florent. But he was really very culpable, she said, and if he had had more money he would probably have perpetrated greater follies. Gradually she gave her husband to understand that it was impossible matters could have had any other termination, and that now everything would go on much better. Quenu was still weeping, wiping his cheeks with his apron, trying to suppress his sobs to listen to her, and then breaking into a wilder fit of tears than before. His fingers had mechanically sought a heap of sausage-meat lying on the block, and he was digging holes in it, and roughly kneading it together.
“And how unwell you were feeling, you know,” Lisa continued. “It was all because our life had got so shifted out of its usual course. I was very anxious, though I didn’t tell you so, at seeing you getting so low.”
“Yes, wasn’t I?” he murmured, ceasing to sob for a moment.
“And the business has been quite under a cloud this year. It was as though a spell had been cast on it. Come, now, don’t take on so; you’ll see that everything will look up again now. You must take care of yourself, you know, for my sake and your daughter’s. You have duties to us as well as to others, remember.”
Quenu was now kneading the sausage-meat more gently. Another burst of emotion was thrilling him, but it was a softer emotion, which was already bringing a vague smile to his grief-stricken face. Lisa felt that she had convinced him, and she turned and called to Pauline, who was playing in the shop, and sat her on Quenu’s knee.
“Tell your father, Pauline, that he ought not to give way like this. Ask him nicely not to go on distressing us so.”
The child did as she was told, and their fat, sleek forms united in a general embrace. They all three looked at one another, already feeling cured of that twelve months’ depression from which they had but just emerged. Their big, round faces smiled, and Lisa softly repeated, “And after all, my dear, there are only we three, you know, only we three.”
Two months later Florent was again sentenced to transportation. The affair caused a great stir. The newspapers published all possible details, and gave portraits of the accused, sketches of the banners and scarves, and plans of the places where the conspirators had met. For a fortnight nothing but the great plot of the central markets was talked of in Paris. The police kept on launching more and more alarming reports, and it was at last even declared that the whole of the Montmartre Quarter was undermined. The excitement in the Corps Législatif was so intense that the members of the Centre and the Right forgot their temporary disagreement over the Imperial Grant Bill, and became reconciled. And then by an overwhelming majority they voted the unpopular tax, of which even the lower classes, in the panic which was sweeping over the city, dared no longer complain.
The trial lasted a week. Florent was very much surprised at the number of accomplices with which he found himself credited. Out of the twenty and more who were placed in the dock with him, he knew only some six or seven. After the sentence of the court had been read, he fancied he could see Robine’s innocent-looking hat and back going off quietly through the crowd. Logre was acquitted, as was also Lacaille; Alexandre was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for his child-like complicity in the conspiracy; while as for Gavard, he, like Florent, was condemned to transportation. This was a heavy blow, which quite crushed him amidst the final enjoyment that he derived from those lengthy proceedings in which he had managed to make himself so conspicuous. He was paying very dearly for the way in which he had vented the spirit of perpetual opposition peculiar to the Paris shopkeeping classes. Two big tears coursed down his scared face—the face of a white-haired child.
And then one morning in August, amidst the busy awakening of the markets, Claude Lantier, sauntering about in the thick of the arriving vegetables, with his waist tightly girded by his red sash, came to grasp Madame Francois’s hand close by Saint Eustache. She was sitting on her carrots and turnips, and her long face looked very sad. The artist, too, was gloomy, notwithstanding the bright sun which was already softening the deep-green velvet of the mountains of cabbages.