Granoux announced, with a terrified look, that
the mayor was without any news. Some people even asserted that blood had
been shed at Marseilles, and that a formidable revolution had broken out
in Paris. Commander Sicardot, enraged at the cowardice of the bourgeois,
vowed he would die at the head of his men.
On Sunday the 7th the terror reached a climax. Already at six o'clock
the yellow drawing-room, where a sort of reactionary committee sat _en
permanence_, was crowded with pale, trembling men, who conversed in
undertones, as though they were in a chamber of death. It had been
ascertained during the day that a column of insurgents, about three
thousand strong, had assembled at Alboise, a big village not more than
three leagues away. It was true that this column had been ordered to
make for the chief town of the department, leaving Plassans on its left;
but the plan of campaign might at any time be altered; moreover, it
sufficed for these cowardly cits to know that there were insurgents a
few miles off, to make them feel the horny hands of the toilers already
tightened round their throats. They had had a foretaste of the revolt in
the morning; the few Republicans at Plassans, seeing that they would
be unable to make any determined move in the town, had resolved to join
their brethren of La Palud and Saint-Martin-de-Vaulx; the first group
had left at about eleven o'clock, by the Porte de Rome, shouting the
"Marseillaise" and smashing a few windows.
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