The latter remark went off with a loud guffaw and many a ribald joke.

Mole, despite his great height, succeeded in getting through
unperceived. He was of no account, and he knew his way inside the house.
It was full of people: journalists, gaffers, women and men--the usual
crowd that come to gape. The citizen Marat was a great personage. The
Friend of the People. An Incorruptible, if ever there was one. Just look
at the simplicity, almost the poverty, in which he lived! Only the
aristos hated him, and the fat bourgeois who battened on the people.
Citizen Marat had sent hundreds of them to the guillotine with a stroke
of his pen or a denunciation from his fearless tongue.

Mole did not pause to listen to these comments. He pushed his way
through the throng up the stairs, to his late employer's lodgings on the
first floor.

The anteroom was crowded, so were the other rooms; but the greatest
pressure was around the door immediately facing him, the one which gave
on the bathroom. In the kitchen on his right, where awhile ago he had
been chopping wood under a flood of abuse from Jeannette Marechal, he
caught sight of this woman, cowering by the hearth, her filthy apron
thrown over her head, and crying--yes! crying for the loathsome
creature, who had expiated some of his abominable crimes at the hands of
a poor, misguided girl, whom an infuriated mob was even now threatening
to tear to pieces in its rage.

The parlour and even Simonne's room were also filled with people: men,
most of whom Mole knew by sight; friends or enemies of the ranting
demagogue who lay murdered in the very bath which his casual servant had
prepared for him. Every one was discussing the details of the murder,