Maniflore shone smiling and resplendent on the topmost step, anxious, like Leaena, to deserve a glorious monument, or to be given, like Epicharis, the praises of history.
The seven hundred Pyrotists disguised as lemonade sellers, utter-merchants, collectors of odds and ends, or anti-Pyrotists, wandered round the vast building.
When Colomban appeared, so great an uproar burst forth that, struck by the commotion of air and water, birds fell from the trees and fishes floated on the surface of the stream.
On all sides there were yells: "Duck Colomban, duck him, duck him!" There were some cries of "Justice and truth!" and a voice was even heard shouting: "Down with the Army!" This was the signal for a terrible struggle.

The combatants fell in thousands, and their bodies formed howling and moving mounds on top of which fresh champions gripped each other by the throats.

Women, eager, pale, and dishevelled, with clenched teeth and frantic nails, rushed on the man, in transports that, in the brilliant light of the public square, gave to their faces expressions unsurpassed even in the shade of curtains and in the hollows of pillows.

They were going to seize Colomban, to bite him, to strangle, dismember and rend him, when Maniflore, tall and dignified in her red tunic, stood forth, serene and terrible, confronting these furies who recoiled from before her in terror.

Colomban seemed to be saved; his partisans succeeded in clearing a passage for him through the Place du Palais and in putting him into a cab stationed at the corner of the Pont-Vieux.