This goes on for quite two minutes. The slender repast is finished. It is time to fetch some coal. Pailloux and Bouquet, the head cook, take up the coal-box, open the door, and say firmly: “Make way for us, by thunder!” They pass out. But through the door, which is left ajar, fists are shaken, and vociferations rain in. “Food snatchers!” Durupt, shrugging his shoulders, shuts the door in the shouters’ faces. The demonstration becomes still more lively. The noise must be heard a long way off, for suddenly there comes a terrible growling, raucous and determined: “_Zurück mit dem Pöbel!_”[23] In an instant the crowd, numbering about fifty, disperses like a flight of sparrows. A single man, Georg, the commandant’s boot-polisher, has broken the back of the riot. He disappears. The corridors relapse into silence, the mournful silence of a cellar.… * * * * * We are invited to No. 41, to visit Juramy and Roy, chasseurs alpins, together with Foch, d’Arnoult, and Brissot. We go out. A man of the guard, with fixed bayonet, slowly walks by the kitchen. He smiles and greets us. “_Grüss Gott!_” “_Gute Nacht!_” On the staircases and in the upper corridors the “ministers” encounter glances of anger and surprise. At No. 41 the comrades, seated upon the twin straw piles of Roy and Juramy, receive them with marked friendliness. “Well!” says Sergeant Foch, the sturdiest soldier in the fort, chief of the second kitchen, “so it’s your turn this time. You have had your revolt! It seems to have been better organized than mine. But it means nothing. We business men, Brissot and I, know all about the caprices of the crowd. Suddenly, without knowing why, it rages against friends or against foes, haphazard. These good fellows are governed by pure instinct. In my opinion this particular revolt has been mainly the work of the exploiters whose usurious traffic was relentlessly suppressed by Dutrex and Durupt. It’s bad policy to be savage with the strong and gentle with the weak, for the strong avenge themselves. Now they are posing as defenders of the collective stomach. If you only knew all that they are saying, and all that they are leading others to say! I’ve had my eye on them for a long time. This evening they really believed they were going to do something—that to-morrow they would usurp your places. They were already licking their chops. It was a case of trust against trust. I shall laugh if the trust of virtue proves, for once in a way, victorious.” Dutrex is taciturn. “Before the roll is called,” he says, “I shall hand in my resignation to M. Langlois.” “That’s right,” says Brissot approvingly. “Otherwise you will seem to be clinging to a fat position.”