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By Root 1681 0

a large stick and scream at them to take their filthy coupling elsewhere? It was their mingled breath and their pleasured sighs that had made the air so heavy in this warm, clammy room; the pungent odour that had taken his breath away was the scent of musk from his wife’s skin, this bodily need for very strong perfume being yet another of her perverse tastes; and for him it was the warm smell of fornication, of real flesh-and-blood adultery, which rose from the scattered chamberpots and the unemptied basins, from the unmade bed and the untidy furniture, from every inch of this room that reeked of vice. In his impotent fury he threw himself on the bed and pounded it with his fists, savaging it, pummelling the places where he could identify the imprint of their bodies, and driven wilder still when the discarded blankets and the crumpled sheets remained soft and unresponsive beneath his fists, as though they too were exhausted after a night of passion.

But suddenly he thought he heard Hippolyte coming back upstairs again. Ashamed of himself, he stopped. He remained motionless for a moment, panting and mopping his forehead as he waited for his pulse to slow. Having stood to look at himself in the mirror, he gazed at his face, its features so distorted that he no longer recognized it. He observed them slowly resume an air of calm and then, by a supreme act of will, he went downstairs.

Below, five messengers were standing waiting, in addition to M. Dansaert. Each brought increasingly worrying news about the strikers’ march through the pits; and the overman gave him a long account of the events at Mirou, which had been saved by the stout action of old Quandieu. He listened, nodded, but took nothing in; his thoughts were still on the bedroom upstairs. Eventually he bid them good day, saying that he would take the appropriate measures. When he was alone again, seated at his desk, he seemed to doze off, with his head buried in his hands and his eyes covered. His post was lying there, and he roused himself to look for the expected letter of reply from the Board. But the words swam before his eyes. At length, however, he grasped that these gentlemen were hoping for violent incidents: not that they were instructing him to aggravate the situation, of course, but they did imply that disturbances would hasten the end of the strike by provoking firm action to contain them. With that he ceased to hesitate and sent telegrams off in all directions, to the Prefect in Lille, to the garrison at Douai, to the gendarmerie at Marchiennes. It was a great relief, and now all he had to do was lie low, indeed he let it be thought that he was suffering from an attack of gout. And throughout the afternoon he hid himself away in his study, refusing to see anyone and content merely to read the telegrams and letters that continued to arrive by the dozen. In this manner he followed the mob at a distance as they proceeded from Madeleine to Crèvecœur, from Crèvecœur to La Victoire, and from La Victoire to Gaston-Marie. At the same time he received news of the disarray of the gendarmes and the dragoons as they were misled by false information and kept finding themselves heading in the opposite direction from the pits that were being attacked. But they could all kill each other and destroy what they pleased, for he had put his head back in his hands, his fingers over his eyes, and now lost himself in the great silence of the empty house, hearing only the occasional clatter of a saucepan as the cook busied herself mightily for the dinner party ahead.

It was five o’clock and dusk was already filling the room when a loud noise made M. Hennebeau jump, and he sat there dazed and motionless, his elbows on his papers. He thought that the wretched pair must have returned. But the commotion grew louder, and a terrible shout went up just as he approached the window:

‘We want bread! We want bread!’

It was the strikers invading Montsou, just as the gendarmes, thinking they were headed for Le Voreux, were racing off in the opposite direction to occupy it.

At that very