They took the train at the station of Villaines, and, on the way home, Patissot loudly mentioned the names of the famous painter and of the great novelist as though they were his friends.  He even allowed people to think that he had taken luncheon with one and dinner with the other.

Before the celebration

The celebration is approaching and preliminary quivers are already running through the streets, just as the ripples disturb the water preparatory to a storm.  The shops, draped with flags, display a variety of gay-colored bunting materials, and the dry-goods people deceive one about the three colors as grocers do about the weight of candles.  Little by little, hearts warm up to the matter; people speak about it in the street after dinner; ideas are exchanged: 

“What a celebration it will be, my friend; what a celebration!”

“Have you heard the news?  All the rulers are coming incognito, as bourgeois, in order to see it.”

“I hear that the Emperor of Russia has arrived; he expects to go about everywhere with the Prince of Wales.”

“It certainly will be a fine celebration!”

It is going to a celebration; what Monsieur Patissot, Parisian bourgeois, calls a celebration; one of these nameless tumults which, for fifteen hours, roll from one end of the city to the other, every ugly specimen togged out in its finest, a mob of perspiring bodies, where side by side are tossed about the stout gossip bedecked in red, white and blue ribbons, grown fat behind her counter and panting from lack of breath, the rickety clerk with his wife and brat in tow, the laborer carrying his youngster astride his neck, the bewildered provincial with his foolish, dazed expression, the groom, barely shaved and still spreading the perfume of the stable.  And the foreigners dressed like monkeys, English women like giraffes, the water-carrier, cleaned up for the occasion, and the innumerable phalanx of little bourgeois, inoffensive little people, amused at everything.  All this crowding and pressing, the sweat and dust, and the turmoil, all these eddies of human flesh, trampling of corns beneath the feet of your neighbors, this city all topsy-turvy, these vile odors, these frantic efforts toward nothing, the breath of millions of people, all redolent of garlic, give to Monsieur Patissot all the joy which it is possible for his heart to hold.

After reading the proclamation of the mayor on the walls of his district he had made his preparations.

This bit of prose said: 

I wish to call your attention particularly to the part of individuals in this celebration.  Decorate your homes, illuminate your windows.  Get together, open up a subscription in order to give to your houses and to your street a more brilliant and more artistic appearance than the neighboring houses and streets.

Then Monsieur Patissot tried to imagine how he could give to his home an artistic appearance.