Verlaque, who, with a tearful voice, though there was not a tear in her eyes, kept following him and speaking to him about the coffin, which was not paid for, and of the cost of the funeral, which she was quite at a loss about, as she had not a copper in the place, for the druggist, on hearing of her husband’s death on the previous day, had insisted upon his bill being paid.  So Florent had been obliged to advance the money for the coffin and other funeral expenses, and had even given the gratuities to the mutes.  Just as he was going away, Madame Verlaque looked at him with such a heartbroken expression that he left her twenty francs.

And now Monsieur Verlaque’s death worried him very much.  It affected his situation in the markets.  He might lose his berth, or perhaps be formally appointed inspector.  In either case he foresaw vexatious complications which might arouse the suspicions of the police.  He would have been delighted if the insurrection could have broken out the very next day, so that he might at once have tossed the laced cap of his inspectorship into the streets.  With his mind full of harassing thoughts like these, he stepped out upon the balcony, as though soliciting of the warm night some whiff of air to cool his fevered brow.  The rain had laid the wind, and a stormy heat still reigned beneath the deep blue, cloudless heavens.  The markets, washed by the downpour, spread out below him, similar in hue to the sky, and, like the sky, studded with the yellow stars of their gas lamps.

Leaning on the iron balustrade, Florent recollected that sooner or later he would certainly be punished for having accepted the inspectorship.  It seemed to lie like a stain on his life.  He had become an official of the Prefecture, forswearing himself, serving the Empire in spite of all the oaths he had taken in his exile.  His anxiety to please Lisa, the charitable purpose to which he had devoted the salary he received, the just and scrupulous manner in which he had always struggled to carry out his duties, no longer seemed to him valid excuses for his base abandonment of principle.  If he had suffered in the midst of all that sleek fatness, he had deserved to suffer.  And before him arose a vision of the evil year which he had just spent, his persecution by the fish-wives, the sickening sensations he had felt on close, damp days, the continuous indigestion which had afflicted his delicate stomach, and the latent hostility which was gathering strength against him.  All these things he now accepted as chastisement.  That dull rumbling of hostility and spite, the cause of which he could not divine, must forebode some coming catastrophe before whose approach he already stooped, with the shame of one who knows there is a transgression that he must expiate.  Then he felt furious with himself as he thought of the popular rising he was preparing; and reflected that he was no longer unsullied enough to achieve success.