Rougon had spoken. From one section of the gallery to another Colonel Jobelin exchanged glances with the Charbonnels, while Madame Correur made ready to leave her place, just as she would have quitted her box at the theatre before the fall of the curtain, if the hero of the play had delivered his last speech. M. d'Escorailles and Madame Bouchard had already taken their departure. Clorinde stood by the velvet-covered balustrade, her majestic figure showing conspicuously as she slowly wrapped her lace shawl about her, glancing round the deputies' seats as she did so. The rain was no longer beating down upon the window, but the sky remained overcast. The mahogany desks looked quite black in that sombre light, and a shadowy mist streamed over the seats, which the bald heads of some of the deputies lighted up here and there with patches of white. Against the marble-work below the vague, pale allegorical figures, the President and the clerks and ushers, all in black and ranged in a line, showed like the stiff silhouettes of a shadow-pantomime. The whole Chamber became blurred in the suddenly waning light. 'Oh, come along!' exclaimed Clorinde, pushing her mother out of the gallery; 'it is enough to kill one in here!' She quite startled the drowsy ushers in the corridor by the strange fashion in which she had twisted her shawl round her hips. When they got downstairs into the hall the ladies met Colonel Jobelin and Madame Correur. 'We are waiting for him here,' said the colonel. 'Perhaps he will come out this way. But in any case I have signalled to Kahn and Béjuin to come and give me some information.' Madame Correur stepped up to the Countess Balbi. 'Ah! it would be a great misfortune,' she said in a disconsolate voice without attempting to explain her meaning. The colonel raised his eyes to heaven. 'The country has need of men like Rougon,' he resumed after a short pause. 'The Emperor would make a great mistake.' Then there was another pause. Clorinde tried to peep into the 'Salle des Pas Perdus,' but an usher promptly closed the door. So she came back to her mother, who was standing silent in her black veil. 'What a bore it is having to wait like this!' she muttered. Some soldiers now made their appearance, and Colonel Jobelin thereupon announced that the sitting was over. Next the Charbonnels came into sight at the top of the staircase, and made their way down very carefully one after the other and each clinging to the balustrade. As soon as M. Charbonnel saw the colonel he called out: 'He didn't say much, but he completely shut them up.' 'He hadn't a proper chance,' the colonel whispered when the other reached him, 'otherwise you would have heard something fine. He wants warming up.'