to lose not a single word of the discussions, which seemed to him to be very brilliant, though he was not always able to follow them.  The beautiful Lisa did not fail to notice his hurry to be gone, but as yet she refrained from saying anything.  When Florent took him off, she simply went to the door-step, and watched them enter Monsieur Lebigre’s, her face paling somewhat, and a severe expression coming into her eyes.

One evening, as Mademoiselle Saget was peering out of her garret casement, she recognised Quenu’s shadow on the frosted glass of the “cabinet” window facing the Rue Pirouette.  She had found her casement an excellent post of observation, as it overlooked that milky transparency, on which the gaslight threw silhouettes of the politicians, with noses suddenly appearing and disappearing, gaping jaws abruptly springing into sight and then vanishing, and huge arms, apparently destitute of bodies, waving hither and thither.  This extraordinary jumble of detached limbs, these silent but frantic profiles, bore witness to the heated discussions that went on in the little room, and kept the old maid peering from behind her muslin curtains until the transparency turned black.  She shrewdly suspected some “bit of trickery,” as she phrased it.  By continual watching she had come to recognise the different shadows by their hands and hair and clothes.  As she gazed upon the chaos of clenched fists, angry heads, and swaying shoulders, which seemed to have become detached from their trunks and to roll about one atop of the other, she would exclaim unhesitatingly, “Ah, there’s that big booby of a cousin; there’s that miserly old Gavard; and there’s the hunchback; and there’s that maypole of a Clemence!” Then, when the action of the shadow-play became more pronounced, and they all seemed to have lost control over themselves, she felt an irresistible impulse to go downstairs to try to find out what was happening.  Thus she now made a point of buying her black-currant syrup at nights, pretending that she felt out-of-sorts in the morning, and was obliged to take a sip as soon as ever she was out of bed.  On the evening when she noticed Quenu’s massive head shadowed on the transparency in close proximity to Charvet’s fist, she made her appearance at Monsieur Lebigre’s in a breathless condition.  To gain more time, she made Rose rinse out her little bottle for her; however, she was about to return to her room when she heard the pork butcher exclaim with a sort of childish candour: 

“No, indeed, we’ll stand for it no longer!  We’ll make a clean sweep of all those humbugging Deputies and Ministers!  Yes, we’ll send the whole lot packing.”