To spring upon the horrible hag, seize her by her yellow hair with irresistible hand, drag her backwards, and then with one cuff, stretch her full length upon the ground, was for Agricola an achievement as rapid as thought.  Furious with rage, Ciboule rose again almost instantly; but at this moment, several workmen, who had followed close upon Agricola, were able to attack with advantage, and whilst the smith lifted the fainting form of Angela, and carried her into the next room, Ciboule and her band were driven from that part of the house.

After the first fire of the assault, the small number of real Wolves, who, as Agricola said, were in the main honest fellows, but had the weakness to let themselves be drawn into this enterprise, under the pretext of a quarrel between rival unions, seeing the excesses committed by the rabble who accompanied them, turned suddenly round, and ranged themselves on the side of the Devourers.

“There are no longer here either Wolves or Devourers,” said one of the most determined Wolves to Olivier, with whom he had been fighting roughly and fairly; “there are none here but honest workmen, who must unite to drive out a set of scoundrels, that have come only to break and pillage.”

“Yes,” added another; “it was against our will that they began by breaking your windows.”

“The big blaster did it all,” said another; “the true Wolves wash their hands of him.  We shall soon settle his account.”

“We may fight every day—­but we ought to esteem each other."[35]

This defection of a portion of the assailants (unfortunately but a small portion) gave new spirit to the workmen of the factory, and all together, Wolves and Devourers, though very inferior in number, opposed themselves to the band of vagabonds, who were proceeding to new excesses.  Some of these wretches, still further excited by the little man with the ferret’s face, a secret emissary of Baron Tripeaud, now rushed in a mass towards the workshops of M. Hardy.  Then began a lamentable devastation.  These people, seized with the mania of destruction, broke without remorse machines of the greatest value, and most delicate construction; half manufactured articles were pitilessly destroyed; a savage emulation seemed to inspire these barbarians, and those workshops, so lately the model of order and well-regulated economy, were soon nothing but a wreck; the courts were strewed with fragments of all kinds of wares, which were thrown from the windows with ferocious outcries, or savage bursts of laughter.  Then, still thanks to the incitements of the little man with the ferret’s face, the books of M. Hardy, archives of commercial industry, so indispensable to the trader, were scattered to the wind, torn, trampled under foot, in a sort of infernal dance, composed of all that was most impure in this assembly of low, filthy, and ragged men and women, who held each other by the hand, and whirled round and round with horrible clamor.  Strange and painful