Fatiguing him, were they? At this there was a general outburst of sympathy. In point of fact Delestang was looking rather pale again, and his eyes had a sleepy expression. But nothing tries a man like brain-work, the visitors remarked to each other with an air of commiseration, and the poor fellow had been working since five o'clock that morning! Then they gently insisted that he should go to bed. And he obeyed them with quiet docility, kissing his wife on the forehead and then quitting the room. It was now one o'clock, and the guests began to speak of retiring, whereupon Clorinde assured them that she was by no means sleepy, and that they might stay on. However, no one sat down again. The lamp in the boudoir had just gone out, and there was a strong smell of oil in the room. It was with difficulty that they could find sundry small articles, such as Madame Correur's fan, the colonel's stick, and Madame Bouchard's bonnet. Clorinde, calmly stretched on her bed, stopped Madame Correur just as the latter was going to ring for Antonia. The maid, it appeared, always went to bed at eleven o'clock. Then just as they were all going away, the colonel suddenly bethought himself of Auguste, whom he had forgotten. He found him asleep on a sofa in the boudoir, with his head resting on a dress which he had rolled up to form a pillow; and the others scolded him for not having attended to the lamp. In the gloom of the staircase, where the gas was turned very low, Madame Bouchard gave a little scream. She had twisted her foot, she said. Finally, as the visitors carefully felt their way with the aid of the balusters, loud peals of laughter were heard upstairs; Pozzo having lingered after the others had gone. Every Thursday and Sunday the friends met at Clorinde's in this way; and it was generally rumoured that Madame Delestang now held political receptions. It was said that extremely liberal proclivities were aired at them, and that Rougon's despotic administration was vigorously attacked. The whole band indeed had now begun to dream of a sort of democratic empire in which every public liberty would gradually expand. The colonel, in his leisure moments, drew up codes of rules for trades-unions. M. Béjuin spoke of building cheap workmen's houses round his cut-glass works at Saint Florent, and M. Kahn talked to Delestang for hours at a time, of the democratic part that the Bonapartes were destined to play in modern society. And every fresh act of Rougon's was hailed with indignant protests, with expressions of patriotic alarm lest France should be ruined by such a man. One day Delestang started the theory that the Emperor was the only genuine Republican of his time. The coterie put on the airs of a religious sect to which the only means of salvation had been exclusively entrusted, and its members soon openly plotted the fat man's overthrow for the good of the country.