Two months later Florent was again sentenced to transportation. The affair caused a great stir. The newspapers published all possible details, and gave portraits of the accused, sketches of the banners and scarves, and plans of the places where the conspirators had met. For a fortnight nothing but the great plot of the central markets was talked of in Paris. The police kept on launching more and more alarming reports, and it was at last even declared that the whole of the Montmartre Quarter was undermined. The excitement in the Corps Législatif was so intense that the members of the Centre and the Right forgot their temporary disagreement over the Imperial Grant Bill, and became reconciled. And then by an overwhelming majority they voted the unpopular tax, of which even the lower classes, in the panic which was sweeping over the city, dared no longer complain. The trial lasted a week. Florent was very much surprised at the number of accomplices with which he found himself credited. Out of the twenty and more who were placed in the dock with him, he knew only some six or seven. After the sentence of the court had been read, he fancied he could see Robine’s innocent-looking hat and back going off quietly through the crowd. Logre was acquitted, as was also Lacaille; Alexandre was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for his child-like complicity in the conspiracy; while as for Gavard, he, like Florent, was condemned to transportation. This was a heavy blow, which quite crushed him amidst the final enjoyment that he derived from those lengthy proceedings in which he had managed to make himself so conspicuous. He was paying very dearly for the way in which he had vented the spirit of perpetual opposition peculiar to the Paris shopkeeping classes. Two big tears coursed down his scared face—the face of a white-haired child. And then one morning in August, amidst the busy awakening of the markets, Claude Lantier, sauntering about in the thick of the arriving vegetables, with his waist tightly girded by his red sash, came to grasp Madame Francois’s hand close by Saint Eustache. She was sitting on her carrots and turnips, and her long face looked very sad. The artist, too, was gloomy, notwithstanding the bright sun which was already softening the deep-green velvet of the mountains of cabbages. “Well, it’s all over now,” he said. “They are sending him back again. He’s already on his way to Brest, I believe.” Madame Francois made a gesture of mute grief. Then she gently waved her hand around, and murmured in a low voice; “Ah, it is all Paris’s doing, this villainous Paris!”