Rougon went home looking very downcast, and creeping along under the shadows of the houses. He felt that Plassans was becoming hostile to him. He heard his name bandied about amongst the groups, with expressions of anger and contempt. He walked upstairs, reeling and perspiring. Félicité received him with speechless consternation. She, also, was beginning to despair. Their dreams were being completely shattered. They stood silent, face to face, in the yellow drawing-room. The day was drawing to a close, a murky winter day which imparted a muddy tint to the orange-coloured wall-paper with its large flower pattern; never had the room looked more faded, more mean, more shabby. And at this hour they were alone; they no longer had a crowd of courtiers congratulating them, as on the previous evening. A single day had sufficed to topple them over, at the very moment when they were singing victory. If the situation did not change on the morrow their game would be lost.
Félicité who, when gazing on the previous evening at the ruins of the yellow drawing-room, had thought of the plains of Austerlitz, now recalled the accursed field of Waterloo as she observed how mournful and deserted the place was. Then, as her husband said nothing, she mechanically went to the window—that window where she had inhaled with delight the incense of the entire town. She perceived numerous groups below on the square, but she closed the blinds upon seeing some heads turn towards their house, for she feared that she might be hooted. She felt quite sure that those people were speaking about them.
Indeed, voices rose through the twilight. A lawyer was clamouring in the tone of a triumphant pleader. “That’s just what I said; the insurgents left of their own accord, and they won’t ask the permission of the forty-one to come back. The forty-one indeed! a fine farce! Why, I believe there were at least two hundred.”
“No, indeed,” said a burly trader, an oil-dealer and a great politician, “there were probably not even ten. There was no fighting or else we should have seen some blood in the morning. I went to the town-hall myself to look; the courtyard was as clean as my hand.”
Then a workman, who stepped timidly up to the group, added: “There was no need of any violence to seize the building; the door wasn’t even shut.”
This remark was received with laughter, and the workman, thus encouraged, continued: “As for those Rougons, everybody knows that they are a bad lot.”
This insult pierced Félicité to the heart. The ingratitude of the people was heartrending to her, for she herself was at last beginning to believe in the mission of the Rougons. She called for her husband. She wanted him to learn how fickle was the multitude.
“It’s all a piece with their mirror,” continued the lawyer. “What a fuss they made about that broken glass! You know that Rougon is quite capable of having fired his gun at it just to make believe there had been a battle.”
Pierre restrained a cry of pain. What! they did not even believe in his mirror now! They would soon assert that he had not heard a bullet whiz past his ear. The legend of the Rougons would be blotted out; nothing would remain of their glory. But his torture was not at an end yet. The groups manifested their hostility as heartily as they had displayed their approval on the previous evening. A retired hatter, an old man seventy years of age, whose factory had formerly been in the Faubourg, ferreted out the Rougons’ past history. He spoke vaguely, with the hesitation of a wandering memory, about the Fouques’ property, and Adélaïde, and her amours with a smuggler. He said just enough to give a fresh start to the gossip. The tattlers drew closer together and such words as “rogues,” “thieves,” and “shameless intriguers,” ascended to the shutter behind which Pierre and Félicité were perspiring with fear and indignation. The people on the square even went so far as to pity Macquart. This was the final blow. On the previous day Rougon had been a Brutus, a stoic soul sacrificing his own affections to his country; now he was nothing but an ambitious villain, who felled his brother to the ground and made use of him as a stepping-stone to fortune.
“You hear, you hear them?” Pierre murmured in a stifled voice. “Ah! the scoundrels, they are killing us; we shall never retrieve ourselves.”