"Then they seized the most respectable people by the throat; and the mayor, the brave commander of the national guard, the postmaster, that kindly functionary, were--even like the Divinity--crowned with thorns by those wretches, who spat in their faces." The passage devoted to Miette and her red pelisse was quite a flight of imagination.

Vuillet had seen ten, twenty girls steeped in blood: "and who," he wrote, "did not behold among those monsters some infamous creatures clothed in red, who must have bathed themselves in the blood of the martyrs murdered by the brigands along the high roads?
They were brandishing banners, and openly receiving the vile caresses of the entire horde." And Vuillet added, with Biblical magniloquence, "The Republic ever marches on amidst debauchery and murder." That, however, was only the first part of the article; the narrative being ended, the editor asked if the country would any longer tolerate "the shamelessness of those wild beasts, who respected neither property nor persons." He made an appeal to all valorous citizens, declaring that to tolerate such things any longer would be to encourage them, and that the insurgents would then come and snatch "the daughter from her mother's arms, the wife from her husband's embraces." And at last, after a pious sentence in which he declared that Heaven willed the extermination of the wicked, he concluded with this trumpet blast: "It is asserted that these wretches are once more at our gates; well then let each one of us take a gun and shoot them down like dogs.

I for my part shall be seen in the front rank, happy to rid the earth of such vermin." This article, in which periphrastic abuse was strung together with all the heaviness of touch which characterises French provincial journalism, quite terrified Rougon, who muttered, as Felicite replaced the "Gazette" on the table: "Ah! the wretch! he is giving us the last blow; people will believe that I inspired this diatribe." "But," his wife remarked, pensively, "did you not this morning tell me that he absolutely refused to write against the Republicans?
The news that circulated had terrified him, and he was as pale as death, you said." "Yes! yes! I can't understand it at all.

When I insisted, he went so far as to reproach me for not having killed all the insurgents.

It was yesterday that he ought to have written that article; to-day he'll get us all butchered!" Felicite was lost in amazement.