He was personally uneasy about the lighted window which they
had seen from the square. He still scented Macquart's hand in the
business, and, as he felt that he would first have to make prisoners of
those who were watching upstairs, he was not sorry to be able to adopt
surprise tactics before the noise of a conflict should impel them to
barricade themselves in the first-floor rooms. So he went up quietly,
followed by the twenty heroes whom he still had at his disposal. Roudier
commanded the detachment remaining in the courtyard.
As Rougon had surmised, it was Macquart who was comfortably installed
upstairs in the mayor's office. He sat in the mayor's arm-chair,
with his elbows on the mayor's writing-table. With the characteristic
confidence of a man of coarse intellect, who is absorbed by a fixed idea
and bent upon his own triumph, he had imagined after the departure of
the insurgents that Plassans was now at his complete disposal, and that
he would be able to act there like a conqueror. In his opinion that
body of three thousand men who had just passed through the town was
an invincible army, whose mere proximity would suffice to keep the
bourgeois humble and docile in his hands. The insurgents had imprisoned
the gendarmes in their barracks, the National Guard was already
dismembered, the nobility must be quaking with terror, and the retired
citizens of the new town had certainly never handled a gun in their
lives. Moreover, there were no arms any more than there were soldiers.
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