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By Root 1705 0

with every day that passed; and at Saint-Thomas, which had previously remained unaffected, there were absentees. Faced with this show of military might, which offended their pride, the miners’ mood was now one of mute obstinacy. Amid the beetfields the villages lay seemingly deserted. Not a worker stirred from his house, and if the occasional person was to be seen, he would be walking alone, his eyes averted and his head lowered as he passed the men in uniform. And beneath this bleak tranquillity, this passive refusal to register the presence of all these rifles, there lay a deceptive docility, the patient, enforced obedience of wild animals in a cage, never taking their eyes off the trainer and just waiting to sink their teeth into his neck the moment he turns his back. For the Company the halt in production was ruinous, and it was talking of taking on miners from Le Borinage, on the Belgian border. But it did not dare do so, which meant that the confrontation had now reached an impasse, with the miners staying at home while the troops guarded idle pits.

This period of calm had set in, all of a sudden, on the morning following those terrible events, and it concealed a sense of panic so great that as little as possible was said about the damage and atrocities which had been committed. The public inquest established that Maigrat had died as the result of his fall, and the circumstances surrounding the dreadful mutilation of his body, already the subject of legend, were left vague. For its part the Company did not publicly acknowledge the damage that had been incurred, no more than the Grégoires were eager to expose their daughter to the scandal of a lawsuit in which she would have had to give evidence. Nevertheless a number of arrests had been made, mere bystanders as usual, witless, gawping folk who had no idea what was going on. Pierron had been taken to Marchiennes in handcuffs by mistake, which was still a source of great amusement to the comrades. Rasseneur, too, had almost been marched off by two gendarmes. Management was content to draw up lists of those to be dismised, and whole batches of people were being handed their cards: Maheu had been given his, and Levaque also, along with thirty-four of their comrades from Village Two Hundred and Forty alone. And the harshest penalties were in store for Étienne, who had vanished without trace since the evening of the riot. Chaval in his hatred had denounced him, though he refused to name the others, having been implored not to by Catherine, who wanted to protect her parents. As the days went by, there was a sense of unfinished business, and people waited tensely to see how things would turn out.

In Montsou thenceforth the bourgeois woke up every night with a start, their ears ringing with the sound of imaginary alarm bells and their nostrils filled with the smell of gunpowder. But the final straw was a sermon given by their new priest, Father Ranvier, the scrawny cleric with the blazing red eyes who had taken over from Father Joire. What a change from the diplomatic smiles of that plump and inoffensive man whose sole aim in life had been to get on with everyone! Had not Father Ranvier had the effrontery to defend these frightful criminals who were bringing dishonour on the region? He had made excuses for the strikers’ villainies and launched a violent attack on the bourgeoisie, whom he held entirely responsible. It was the bourgeois themselves who, in robbing the Church of its age-old rights and freedoms only then to abuse them, had turned the world into an accursed place of suffering and injustice; it was they who stood in the way of the strike being settled, and it was they who would precipitate a terrible catastrophe by their godlessness and their refusal to return to the beliefs and brotherly traditions of the early Christians. And Ranvier had even dared to threaten the rich, warning them that if they continued not to listen to the voice of God, God would surely side with the poor: He would take back the fortunes of these self-indulgent heathens and distribute them