“Listen,” he said to his wife; “you must invite Sicardot:  he has annoyed me with that rosette of his for a long time!  Then Granoux and Roudier; I shouldn’t be at all sorry to make them feel that it isn’t their purses that will ever win them the cross.  Vuillet is a skinflint, but the triumph ought to be complete:  invite him as well as the small fry.  I was forgetting; you must go and call on the marquis in person; we will seat him on your right; he’ll look very well at our table.  You know that Monsieur Garconnet is entertaining the colonel and the prefect.  That is to make me understand that I am nobody now.  But I can afford to laugh at his mayoralty; it doesn’t bring him in a sou!  He has invited me, but I shall tell him that I also have some people coming.  The others will laugh on the wrong side of their mouths to-morrow.  And let everything be of the best.  Have everything sent from the Hotel de Provence.  We must outdo the mayor’s dinner.”

Felicite set to work.  Pierre still felt some vague uneasiness amidst his rapture.  The Coup d’Etat was going to pay his debts, his son Aristide had repented of his faults, and he was at last freeing himself from Macquart; but he feared some folly on Pascal’s part, and was especially anxious about the lot reserved for Silvere.  Not that he felt the least pity for the lad; he was simply afraid the matter of the gendarme might come before the Assize Court.  Ah! if only some discriminating bullet had managed to rid him of that young scoundrel!  As his wife had pointed out to him in the morning, all obstacles had fallen away before him; the family which had dishonoured him had, at the last moment, worked for his elevation; his sons Eugene and Aristide, those spend-thrifts, the cost of whose college life he had so bitterly regretted, were at last paying interest on the capital expended for their education.  And yet the thought of that wretched Silvere must come to mar his hour of triumph!

While Felicite was running about to prepare the dinner for the evening, Pierre heard of the arrival of the troops and determined to go and make inquiries.  Sicardot, whom he had questioned on his return, knew nothing; Pascal must have remained to look after the wounded; as for Silvere, he had not even been seen by the commander, who scarcely knew him.  Rougon therefore repaired to the Faubourg, intending to make inquiries there and at the same time pay Macquart the eight hundred francs which he had just succeeded in raising with great difficulty.  However, when he found himself in the crowded encampment, and from a distance saw the prisoners sitting in long files on the beams in the Aire Saint-Mittre, guarded by soldiers gun in hand, he felt afraid of being compromised, and so slunk off to his mother’s house, with the intention of sending the old woman out to pick up some information.

When he entered the hovel it was almost night.  At first the only person he saw there was Macquart smoking and drinking brandy.