dethroned queen, the only surviving power of a vanished world. No one
was unaware that the Rougons, in 1851, had saved Plassans from
anarchy, by causing the _coup d'etat_ of the 2d of December to triumph
there, and that, a few years later, they had won it again from the
legitimist and republican candidates, to give it to a Bonapartist
deputy. Up to the time of the war, the Empire had continued
all-powerful in the town, so popular that it had obtained there at the
plebiscite an overwhelming majority. But since the disasters the town
had become republican, the quarter St. Marc had returned to its secret
royalist intrigues, while the old quarter and the new town had sent to
the chamber a liberal representative, slightly tinged with Orleanism,
and ready to take sides with the republic, if it should triumph. And,
therefore, it was that Felicite, like the intelligent woman she was,
had withdrawn her attention from politics, and consented to be nothing
more than the dethroned queen of a fallen government.

But this was still an exalted position, surrounded by a melancholy
poetry. For sixteen years she had reigned. The tradition of her two
_salons_, the yellow _salon_, in which the _coup d'etat_ had matured,
and the green _salon_, later the neutral ground on which the conquest
of Plassans was completed, embellished itself with the reflection of
the vanished past, and was for her a glorious history. And besides,
she was very rich. Then, too, she had shown herself dignified in her
fall, never uttering a regret or a complaint, parading, with her
eighty years, so long a succession of fierce appetites, of abominable
maneuvers, of inordinate gratifications, that she became august
through them. Her only happiness, now, was to enjoy in peace her large
fortune and her past royalty, and she had but one passion left--to
defend her past, to extend its fame, suppressing everything that might
tarnish it later. Her pride, which lived on the double exploit of