"We want to give France its smile back!" Ségolène Royal told the last major crowd of her campaign last night-an audience of 20,000 at the Grand Palais in Lille. The Socialist candidate might start with her campaign team. On the late night train back to the capital, it was long faces and sunken shoulders for Royal's support staff. Word had come from Paris that a new poll, the worst yet, would hit the morning papers: 54.5 percent for Nicolas Sarkozy, 45.5 percent for Royal. With less than a day left to plead for votes, and a tense debate, the prizefight, now behind her, Royal's faithful are now in a time of half-hearted hope, of creative excuses as they begin to imagine France under a President Sarkozy.

At Lille, in the shadow of Brussels, Royal had a big name on hand, former European Commission president Jacques Delors. In a rousing speech, the ever-popular Delors, 81, told the crowd, "We don't want a hard society, a renaissance of some sort of lesson-giving Bonapartism!" When he called Royal to the stage, the crowd roared. Her campaign song -- which can only be described as a sort of Red Army Choir toe-tapper set to a techno beat -- thumped up. "Ségolène, you can count on uuuuuusss, Vic-to-ry is on its waaaaaaaay...."

Royal took her time getting to the stage, but the crowd was ecstatic when a red-jacketed Royal finally waded through the crowd to tick off the greatest-hits of her campaign catchphrases. "You are the experts of what you live!" "My project is you!" Red roses rained down to her feet as she spoke. "This wave is not yet at its peak," she proclaimed, begging the crowd to go forward with her in a refrain of "Dare! Dare! Dare!" Offstage after Royal's performance, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the social-democrat who could be prime minister if Royal wins or angle for the presidency in 2012 if she loses, was, not surprisingly, upbeat. "Excellent, excellent, I've never been so confident."

Strauss-Kahn also shrugged off the latest bad-news poll. "Experience shows that... the very morning of the vote there are still 10 percent of French people who haven't decided. As they leave their homes to go to the polling place, they haven't chosen who they are going to vote for. So I think it's still very open. I think yesterday's debate will have a delayed effect -- people have to reflect on it," Strauss-Kahn argued. "Ségolène Royal gave an image of herself that was very different from the one a lot of French people might have had of her, a lot more firm, a lot more solid." Royal's son Thomas Hollande, 21, a key member of her Internet campaign team, also talked up his mother's debate performance: "It gave us a lot of hope and I'm sure she's going to win," he said.

But Royal's supporters sounded less certain. "Frankly, I'm scared. I assure you that I'm scared," says Gillène Baratte, a union leader. "I would have preferred that people throw out Sarkozy and have [Francois] Bayrou, for a Bayrou/Ségolène ballot. At least, we'd have had a democrat, we'd be less scared." But Baratte already seems resigned to defeat, blaming the "ambient machismo" that says a woman can't handle the presidency. "She is very beautiful," Baratte says of her candidate. "And the current government ministers -- the women -- are very jealous." Then there's the matter of Sarkozy's solid political and media connections. " He used his ministerial function to prepare his campaign. He muzzled certain media organizations," complains Baratte.

Jean-Marc Platteau, another supporter in the crowd, also hovered between hope and resignation. "It will be difficult. I don't think that France is ready," he says. "It's true that, Sarkozy's positions, as worrisome as they are, might seem more clear for a lot of French people. We know more where we are going with him. Personally, I don't want that France, but-." he trails off. Platteau is already allowing himself to cringe at a future with Sarkozy. "I hope we don't have a little Bush," he says. "The suburbs will explode. It's inevitable. It's such a discourse of confrontation."

The candidate herself echoed that theme as the campaign entered its final hours. Sarkozy would be a "dangerous choice" whose election would lead to renewed violence in the tense suburbs, Royal said this morning. Sarkozy's retort? "She's not in a good mood this morning. It must be the opinion polls."