Germinal - Emile Zola [197]
‘We want bread! We want bread!’
Lucie and Jeanne clung to Mme Hennebeau, who had nearly passed out, while Négrel stood in front of them as though to protect them with his body. Was this the night when the old order would finally crumble? What they saw next rendered them quite speechless. The main body of the mob was moving away, leaving only some stragglers, when La Mouquette emerged on to the road. She had been taking her time, watching out for any bourgeois at a window or a garden gate; and when she spotted one, being unable to spit in their face, she would treat them to what was for her the supreme expression of her contempt. Now, having presumably just seen one, she suddenly lifted her skirts and showed them her buttocks, proffering her enormous naked bottom in the dying rays of the sun. And there was nothing at all obscene about this bottom nor anything comic in its uncompromising display.
Everyone vanished, and the mob flowed on towards Montsou, following each bend in the road and passing between the squat, gaily-coloured houses. The carriage was brought out of the yard, but the coachman refused to take responsibility for conveying Madame and the young ladies safely home as long as the strikers were blocking the road. The worst of it was that there was no other way back.
‘But we simply must get home. Dinner will be waiting for us,’ said Mme Hennebeau, quite beside herself and maddened by fear. ‘On top of everything these beastly workers have chosen the very day that I am entertaining guests. Really! And then they expect to be treated better!’
Lucie and Jeanne were busy trying to drag Cécile from the hay but she kept refusing to move, believing that the wild savages were still going past and insisting that she had no desire to watch. But eventually they all resumed their seats in the carriage, and it now occurred to Négrel, who had remounted, that they could go round by the back lanes of Réquillart.
‘Go carefully,’ he told the coachman, ‘the road is atrocious. If there are gangs preventing you rejoining the main highway afterwards, then stop behind the old pit. We’ll walk home from there – we can use the side-gate – and then you can go and find somewhere to put the carriage and horses, an inn with a coach-shed perhaps.’
Off they set. In the distance the mob was now streaming through Montsou. Having twice seen gendarmes and dragoons go by, the local inhabitants were in a terrible panic. Appalling stories were going the rounds, and there was talk of handwritten posters telling the bourgeois that they were about to get a knife in their bellies; nobody had seen them, but this did not stop anyone from quoting them verbatim. At the notary’s house the panic was at its height, for he had just received an anonymous letter through the post warning him that a barrel of gunpowder had been hidden in his cellar ready to blow him up if he did not immediately declare himself on the side of the people.
The Grégoires, whose visit had been prolonged by the arrival of this letter, were just in the middle of discussing it and deciding that it must be a practical joke when the arrival of the invading mob finally reduced the household to a state of blind terror. They themselves, however, remained smiling. Lifting a corner of the curtain they looked outside, but they refused to concede that there was any danger, certain as they were that everything would end amicably. Five o’clock struck, there was still time for them to wait for the coast to clear before proceeding across the road to have dinner at the Hennebeaus’, where Cécile would no doubt already be waiting for them following her safe return. But nobody else in Montsou seemed to share their confidence: people were running about madly, doors and windows were being slammed shut. On the opposite side of the road they caught sight of Maigrat busy barricading his shop with a great array of iron bars, and he was so pale and shaken that his slip of a wife had to tighten the nuts herself.
The mob had come to a halt outside the manager’s house, and the cry went up once more:
‘We want