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.