Events began to hurry one upon another, the very next morning. The municipal council, responsible for the defective work upon the aqueducts, resigned under general obloquy and contempt.
“There are your electors!” said our father at table. “First rejoicing in the triumph of the mayor and council over conservatism, and now demanding the disgrace of those very men and dragging them in the mud with shame.”
In a flash I saw myself again in the Café des Navigateurs a few years before, drinking champagne with Martinod and his heelers, in honour of grandfather’s candidacy, and far from revolting me, the memory touched my heart. Then, a child, I had quaffed a sort of delicious recklessness, something like that love-languor that Nazzarena, passing out of my life, had left with me, listening to those fine theories which were not very clear to me but were preparing me for liberty nevertheless.
The excitement increased in the town with the increase in the number of deaths, which, however, were still few. The exact figures which my father gave by no means corresponded with those that were printed in the newspapers, or flew from lip to lip. He had forbidden us to go into the town, grandfather approving:
“One never knows how those things get caught—a mere nothing is enough. It’s quite enough to have so many sick persons coming here.”
I had found grandfather aging, when I came home. He was nearly eighty, of course, but he had so long kept his air of youth, the alert step due to his long walks, and even his bright eyes, their sarcastic glint only emphasised by the gathering wrinkles. Now he was growing bent, and his gaze seemed dimmed. Still he clung to life, and perhaps all the more as he felt his strength failing.
The most absurd and contradictory rumours were flying about everywhere, and political passions had free course. An individual had been caught putting poison into the river;—a priest, said the anti-clericals; a free mason, said the others. A frightful mania of suspicion began to run wild. An unlucky fellow with a pimpled face just missed of being strung up, on the pretext of spreading contagion, and was only saved by my father’s intervention:
“Pimples on the face are the only ones that mean nothing!” he had shouted, just in time.
He brought home to us all these incidents and rumours, for we went nowhere; he even carefully disinfected himself on returning from his rounds.
Next, the villages below the water-works thought the contagion had reached them, and were struck with panic, their inhabitants crowding to the town. We could see them passing with their carts, their cattle, their furniture, like fugitives before the face of war. Brawls arose from attempts to keep them out.