a dog by a _gendarme_; and the first shock had paralyzed her, so that
even then she retained nothing living but her water-clear eyes in her
livid face; and she shut herself up from the world in the hut which her
lover had left her, leading there for forty years the dead existence of
a nun, broken by terrible nervous attacks. But the other shock was to
finish her, to overthrow her reason, and Pascal recalled the atrocious
scene, for he had witnessed it—a poor child whom the grandmother had
taken to live with her, her grandson Silvère, the victim of family
hatred and strife, whose head another _gendarme_ shattered with a
pistol shot, at the suppression of the insurrectionary movement of
1851. She was always to be bespattered with blood.

Félicité, meanwhile, had approached Charles, who was so engrossed with
his pictures that all these people did not disturb him.

“My darling, this gentleman is your father. Kiss him,” she said.

And then they all occupied themselves with Charles. He was very
prettily dressed in a jacket and short trousers of black velvet,
braided with gold cord. Pale as a lily, he resembled in truth one of
those king’s sons whose pictures he was cutting out, with his large,
light eyes and his shower of fair curls. But what especially struck the
attention at this moment was his resemblance to Aunt Dide; this
resemblance which had overleaped three generations, which had passed
from this withered centenarian’s countenance, from these dead features
wasted by life, to this delicate child’s face that was also as if worn,
aged, and wasted, through the wear of the race. Fronting each other,
the imbecile child of a deathlike beauty seemed the last of the race of
which she, forgotten by the world, was the ancestress.

Maxime bent over to press a kiss on the boy’s forehead; and a chill
struck to his heart—this very beauty disquieted him; his uneasiness
grew in this chamber of madness, whence, it seemed to him, breathed a
secret horror come from the far-off past.

“How beautiful you are, my pet! Don’t you love me a little?”

Charles looked at him without comprehending, and went back to his play.

But all were chilled. Without the set expression of her countenance
changing Aunt Dide wept, a flood of tears rolled from her living eyes
over her dead cheeks. Her gaze fixed immovably upon the boy, she wept
slowly, endlessly. A great thing had happened.

And now an extraordinary emotion took possession of Pascal. He caught
Clotilde by the arm and pressed it hard, trying to make her understand.
Before his eyes appeared the whole line, the legitimate branch and the
bastard branch, which had sprung from this trunk already vitiated by
neurosis. Five generations were there present—the Rougons and the
Macquarts, Adelaïde Fouqué at the root, then the scoundrelly old uncle,
then himself, then Clotilde and Maxime, and lastly, Charles. Félicité
occupied the place of her dead husband. There was no link wanting; the
chain of heredity, logical and implacable, was unbroken. And what a
world was evoked from the depths of the tragic cabin which breathed
this horror that came from the far-off past in such appalling shape
that every one, notwithstanding the oppressive heat, shivered.

“What is it, master?” whispered Clotilde, trembling.

“No, no, nothing!” murmured the doctor. “I will tell you later.”

Macquart, who alone continued to sneer, scolded the old mother. What an
idea was hers, to receive people with tears when they put themselves
out to come and make her a visit. It was scarcely polite. And then he
turned to Maxime and Charles.

“Well, nephew, you have seen your boy at last. Is it not true that he
is pretty, and that he is a credit to you, after all?”

Félicité hastened to interfere. Greatly dissatisfied with the turn
which affairs were taking, she was now anxious only to get away.

“He is certainly a handsome boy, and less backward than people think.
Just see how skilful he is with his hands. And you will see when you
have brightened him up in Paris, in a different way from what we have
been able to do at Plassans, eh?”

“No doubt,” murmured Maxime. “I do not say no; I will think about it.”

He seemed embarrassed for a moment, and then added:

“You know I came only to see him. I cannot take him with me now as I am
to spend a month at St. Gervais. But as soon as I return to Paris I
will think of it, I will write to you.”

Then, taking out his watch, he cried:

“The devil! Half-past five. You know that I would not miss the nine
o’clock train for anything in the world.”

“Yes, yes, let us go,” said Félicité brusquely. “We have nothing more
to do here.”

Macquart, whom his sister-in-law’s anger seemed still to divert,
endeavored to delay them with all sorts of stories. He told of the days
when Aunt Dide talked, and he affirmed that he had found her one
morning singing a romance of her youth. And then he had no need of the
carriage, he would take the boy back on foot, since they left him to
him.

“Kiss your papa, my boy, for you know now that you see him, but you
don’t know whether you shall ever see him again or not.”

With the same surprised and indifferent movement Charles raised his
head, and Maxime, troubled, pressed another kiss on his forehead.

“Be very good and very pretty, my pet. And love me a little.”

“Come, come, we have no time to lose,” repeated Félicité.

But the keeper here re-entered the room. She was a stout, vigorous
girl, attached especially to the service of the madwoman. She carried
her to and from her bed, night and morning; she fed her and took care
of her like a child. And she at once entered into conversation with Dr.
Pascal, who questioned her. One of the doctor’s most cherished dreams
was to cure the mad by his treatment of hypodermic injections. Since in
their case it was the brain that was in danger, why should not
hypodermic injections of nerve substance give them strength and will,
repairing the breaches made in the organ? So that for a moment he had
dreamed of trying the treatment with the old mother; then he began to
have scruples, he felt a sort of awe, without counting that madness at
that age was total, irreparable ruin. So that he had chosen another
subject—a hatter named Sarteur, who had been for a year past in the
asylum, to which he had come himself to beg them to shut him up to
prevent him from committing a crime. In his paroxysms, so strong an
impulse to kill seized him that he would have thrown himself upon the
first passer-by. He was of small stature, very dark, with a retreating
forehead, an aquiline face with a large nose and a very short chin, and
his left cheek was noticeably larger than his right. And the doctor had
obtained miraculous results with this victim of emotional insanity, who
for a month past had had no attack. The nurse, indeed being questioned,
answered that Sarteur had become quiet and was growing better every
day.

“Do you hear, Clotilde?” cried Pascal, enchanted. “I have not the time
to see him this evening, but I will come again to-morrow. It is my
visiting day. Ah, if I only dared; if she were young still—”

His eyes turned toward Aunt Dide. But Clotilde, whom his enthusiasm
made smile, said gently:

“No, no, master, you cannot make life anew. There, come. We are the
last.”

It was true; the others had already gone. Macquart, on the threshold,
followed Félicité and Maxime with his mocking glance as they went away.
Aunt Dide, the forgotten one, sat motionless, appalling in her
leanness, her eyes again fixed upon Charles with his white, worn face
framed in his royal locks.

The drive back was full of constraint. In the heat which exhaled from
the earth, the landau rolled on heavily to the measured trot of the
horses. The stormy sky took on an ashen, copper-colored hue in the
deepening twilight. At first a few indifferent words were exchanged;
but from the moment in which they entered the gorges of the Seille all
conversation ceased, as if they felt oppressed by the menacing walls of
giant rock that seemed closing in upon them. Was not this the end of
the earth, and were they not going to roll into the unknown, over the
edge of some abyss? An eagle soared by, uttering a shrill cry.

Willows appeared again, and the carriage was rolling lightly along the
bank of the Viorne, when Félicité began without transition, as if she
were resuming a conversation already commenced.

“You have no refusal to fear from the mother. She loves Charles dearly,
but she is a very sensible woman, and she understands perfectly that it
is to the boy’s advantage that you should take him with you. And I must
tell you, too, that the poor boy is not very happy with her, since,
naturally, the husband prefers his own son and daughter. For you ought
to know everything.”

And she went on in this strain, hoping, no doubt, to persuade Maxime
and draw a formal promise from him. She talked until they reached
Plassans. Then, suddenly, as the landau rolled over the pavement of the
faubourg, she said:

“But look! there is his mother. That stout blond at the door there.”

At the threshold of a harness-maker’s shop hung round with horse
trappings and halters, Justine sat, knitting a stocking, taking the
air, while the little girl and boy were playing on the ground at her
feet. And behind them in the shadow of the shop was to be seen Thomas,
a stout, dark man, occupied in repairing a saddle.

Maxime leaned forward without emotion, simply curious. He was greatly
surprised at sight of this robust woman of thirty-two, with so sensible
and so commonplace an air, in whom there was not a trace of the wild
little girl with whom he had been in love when both of the same age
were entering their seventeenth year. Perhaps a pang shot through his
heart to see her plump and tranquil and blooming, while he was ill and
already aged.

“I should never have recognized her,” he said.

And the landau, still rolling on, turned into the Rue de Rome. Justine
had disappeared; this vision of the past—a past so different from the
present—had sunk into the shadowy twilight, with Thomas, the children,
and the shop.

At La Souleiade the table was set; Martine had an eel from the Viorne,
a _sautéd_ rabbit, and a leg of mutton. Seven o’clock was striking, and
they had plenty of time to dine quietly.

“Don’t be uneasy,” said Dr. Pascal to his nephew. “We will accompany
you to the station; it is not ten minutes’ walk from here. As you left
your trunk, you have nothing to do but to get your ticket and jump on
board the train.”

Then, meeting Clotilde in the vestibule, where she was hanging up her
hat and her umbrella, he said to her in an undertone:

“Do you know that I am uneasy about your brother?”

“Why so?”

“I have observed him attentively. I don’t like the way in which he
walks; and have you noticed what an anxious look he has at times? That
has never deceived me. In short, your brother is threatened with
ataxia.”

“Ataxia!” she repeated turning very pale.

A cruel image rose before her, that of a neighbor, a man still young,
whom for the past ten years she had seen driven about in a little
carriage by a servant. Was not this infirmity the worst of all ills,
the ax stroke that separates a living being from social and active
life?

“But,” she murmured, “he complains only of rheumatism.”

Pascal shrugged his shoulders; and putting a finger to his lip he went
into the dining-room, where Félicité and Maxime were seated.

The dinner was very friendly. The sudden disquietude which had sprung
up in Clotilde’s heart made her still more affectionate to her brother,
who sat beside her. She attended to his wants gayly, forcing him to
take the most delicate morsels. Twice she called back Martine, who was
passing the dishes too quickly. And Maxime was more and more enchanted
by this sister, who was so good, so healthy, so sensible, whose charm
enveloped him like a caress. So greatly was he captivated by her that
gradually a project, vague at first, took definite shape within him.
Since little Charles, his son, terrified him so greatly with his
deathlike beauty, his royal air of sickly imbecility, why should he not
take his sister Clotilde to live with him? The idea of having a woman
in his house alarmed him, indeed, for he was afraid of all women,
having had too much experience of them in his youth; but this one
seemed to him truly maternal. And then, too, a good woman in his house
would make a change in it, which would be a desirable thing. He would
at least be left no longer at the mercy of his father, whom he
suspected of desiring his death so that he might get possession of his
money at once. His hatred and terror of his father decided him.

“Don’t you think of marrying, then?” he asked, wishing to try the
ground.

The young girl laughed.

“Oh, there is no hurry,” she answered.

Then, suddenly, looking at Pascal, who had raised his head, she added:

“How can I tell? Oh, I shall never marry.”

But Félicité protested. When she saw her so attached to the doctor, she
often wished for a marriage that would separate her from him, that
would leave her son alone in a deserted home, where she herself might
become all powerful, mistress of everything. Therefore she appealed to
him. Was it not true that a woman ought to marry, that it was against
nature to remain an old maid?

And he gravely assented, without taking his eyes from Clotilde’s face.

“Yes, yes, she must marry. She is too sensible not to marry.”

“Bah!” interrupted Maxime, “would it be really sensible in her to
marry? In order to be unhappy, perhaps; there are so many ill-assorted
marriages!”

And coming to a resolution, he added:

“Don’t you know what you ought to do? Well, you ought to come and live
with me in Paris. I have thought the matter over. The idea of taking
charge of a child in my state of health terrifies me. Am I not a child
myself, an invalid who needs to be taken care of? You will take care of
me; you will be with me, if I should end by losing the use of my
limbs.”

There was a sound of tears in his voice, so great a pity did he feel
for himself. He saw himself, in fancy, sick; he saw his sister at his
bedside, like a Sister of Charity; if she consented to remain unmarried
he would willingly leave her his fortune, so that his father might not
have it. The dread which he had of solitude, the need in which he
should perhaps stand of having a sick-nurse, made him very pathetic.

“It would be very kind on your part, and you should have no cause to
repent it.”

Martine, who was serving the mutton, stopped short in surprise; and the
proposition caused the same surprise at the table. Félicité was the
first to approve, feeling that the girl’s departure would further her
plans. She looked at Clotilde, who was still silent and stunned, as it
were; while Dr. Pascal waited with a pale face.

“Oh, brother, brother,” stammered the young girl, unable at first to
think of anything else to say.

Then her grandmother cried:

“Is that all you have to say? Why, the proposition your brother has
just made you is a very advantageous one. If he is afraid of taking
Charles now, why, you can go with him, and later on you can send for
the child. Come, come, that can be very well arranged. Your brother
makes an appeal to your heart. Is it not true, Pascal, that she owes
him a favorable answer?”

The doctor, by an effort, recovered his self-possession. The chill that
had seized him made itself felt, however, in the slowness with which he
spoke.

“The offer, in effect, is very kind. Clotilde, as I said before, is
very sensible and she will accept it, if it is right that she should do
so.”

The young girl, greatly agitated, rebelled at this.

“Do you wish to send me away, then, master? Maxime is very good, and I
thank him from the bottom of my heart. But to leave everything, my God!
To leave all that love me, all that I have loved until now!”

She made a despairing gesture, indicating the place and the people,
taking in all La Souleiade.

“But,” responded Pascal, looking at her fixedly, “what if Maxime should
need you, what if you had a duty to fulfil toward him?”

Her eyes grew moist, and she remained for a moment trembling and
desperate; for she alone understood. The cruel vision again arose
before her—Maxime, helpless, driven, about in a little carriage by a
servant, like the neighbor whom she used to pity. Had she indeed any
duty toward a brother who for fifteen years had been a stranger to her?
Did not her duty lie where her heart was? Nevertheless, her distress of
mind continued; she still suffered in the struggle.

“Listen, Maxime,” she said at last, “give me also time to reflect. I
will see. Be assured that I am very grateful to you. And if you should
one day really have need of me, well, I should no doubt decide to go.”

This was all they could make her promise. Félicité, with her usual
vehemence, exhausted all her efforts in vain, while the doctor now
affected to say that she had given her word. Martine brought a cream,
without thinking of hiding her joy. To take away mademoiselle! what an
idea, in order that monsieur might die of grief at finding himself all
alone. And the dinner was delayed, too, by this unexpected incident.
They were still at the dessert when half-past eight struck.

Then Maxime grew restless, tapped the floor with his foot, and declared
that he must go.

At the station, whither they all accompanied him he kissed his sister a
last time, saying:

“Remember!”

“Don’t be afraid,” declared Félicité, “we are here to remind her of her
promise.”

The doctor smiled, and all three, as soon as the train was in motion,
waved their handkerchiefs.

On this day, after accompanying the grandmother to her door, Dr. Pascal
and Clotilde returned peacefully to La Souleiade, and spent a
delightful evening there. The constraint of the past few weeks, the
secret antagonism which had separated them, seemed to have vanished.
Never had it seemed so sweet to them to feel so united, inseparable.
Doubtless it was only this first pang of uneasiness suffered by their
affection, this threatened separation, the postponement of which
delighted them. It was for them like a return to health after an
illness, a new hope of life. They remained for long time in the warm
night, under the plane trees, listening to the crystal murmur of the
fountain. And they did not even speak, so profoundly did they enjoy the
happiness of being together.

IV.

Ten days later the household had fallen back into its former state of
unhappiness. Pascal and Clotilde remained entire afternoons without
exchanging a word; and there were continual outbursts of ill-humor.
Even Martine was constantly out of temper. The home of these three had
again become a hell.

Then suddenly the condition of affairs was still further aggravated. A
Capuchin monk of great sanctity, such as often pass through the towns
of the South, came to Plassans to conduct a mission. The pulpit of St.
Saturnin resounded with his bursts of eloquence. He was a sort of
apostle, a popular and fiery orator, a florid speaker, much given to
the use of metaphors. And he preached on the nothingness of modern
science with an extraordinary mystical exaltation, denying the reality
of this world, and disclosing the unknown, the mysteries of the Beyond.
All the devout women of the town were full of excitement about his
preaching.

On the very first evening on which Clotilde, accompanied by Martine,
attended the sermon, Pascal noticed her feverish excitement when she
returned. On the following day her excitement increased, and she
returned home later, having remained to pray for an hour in a dark
corner of a chapel. From this time she was never absent from the
services, returning languid, and with the luminous eyes of a seer; and
the Capuchin’s burning words haunted her; certain of his images stirred
her to ecstasy. She grew irritable, and she seemed to have conceived a
feeling of anger and contempt for every one and everything around her.

Pascal, filled with uneasiness, determined to have an explanation with
Martine. He came down early one morning as she was sweeping the
dining-room.

“You know that I leave you and Clotilde free to go to church, if that
pleases you,” he said. “I do not believe in oppressing any one’s
conscience. But I do not wish that you should make her sick.”

The servant, without stopping in her work, said in a low voice:

“Perhaps the sick people are those who don’t think that they are sick.”

She said this with such an air of conviction that he smiled.

“Yes,” he returned; “I am the sick soul whose conversion you pray for;
while both of you are in possession of health and of perfect wisdom.
Martine, if you continue to torment me and to torment yourselves, as
you are doing, I shall grow angry.”

He spoke in so furious and so harsh a voice that the servant stopped
suddenly in her sweeping, and looked him full in the face. An infinite
tenderness, an immense desolation passed over the face of the old maid
cloistered in his service. And tears filled her eyes and she hurried
out of the room stammering:

“Ah, monsieur, you do not love us.”

Then Pascal, filled with an overwhelming sadness, gave up the contest.
His remorse increased for having shown so much tolerance, for not
having exercised his authority as master, in directing Clotilde’s
education and bringing up. In his belief that trees grew straight if
they were not interfered with, he had allowed her to grow up in her own
way, after teaching her merely to read and write. It was without any
preconceived plan, while aiding him in making his researches and
correcting his manuscripts, and simply by the force of circumstances,
that she had read everything and acquired a fondness for the natural
sciences. How bitterly he now regretted his indifference! What a
powerful impulse he might have given to this clear mind, so eager for
knowledge, instead of allowing it to go astray, and waste itself in
that desire for the Beyond, which Grandmother Félicité and the good
Martine favored. While he had occupied himself with facts, endeavoring
to keep from going beyond the phenomenon, and succeeding in doing so,
through his scientific discipline, he had seen her give all her
thoughts to the unknown, the mysterious. It was with her an obsession,
an instinctive curiosity which amounted to torture when she could not
satisfy it. There was in her a longing which nothing could appease, an
irresistible call toward the unattainable, the unknowable. Even when
she was a child, and still more, later, when she grew up, she went
straight to the why and the how of things, she demanded ultimate
causes. If he showed her a flower, she asked why this flower produced a
seed, why this seed would germinate. Then, it would be the mystery of
birth and death, and the unknown forces, and God, and all things. In
half a dozen questions she would drive him into a corner, obliging him
each time to acknowledge his fatal ignorance; and when he no longer
knew what to answer her, when he would get rid of her with a gesture of
comic fury, she would give a gay laugh of triumph, and go to lose
herself again in her dreams, in the limitless vision of all that we do
not know, and all that we may believe. Often she astounded him by her
explanations. Her mind, nourished on science, started from proved
truths, but with such an impetus that she bounded at once straight into
the heaven of the legends. All sorts of mediators passed there, angels
and saints and supernatural inspirations, modifying matter, endowing it
with life; or, again, it was only one single force, the soul of the
world, working to fuse things and beings in a final kiss of love in
fifty centuries more. She had calculated the number of them, she said.

For the rest, Pascal had never before seen her so excited. For the past
week, during which she had attended the Capuchin’s mission in the
cathedral, she had spent the days visibly in the expectation of the
sermon of the evening; and she went to hear it with the rapt exaltation
of a girl who is going to her first rendezvous of love. Then, on the
following day, everything about her declared her detachment from the
exterior life, from her accustomed existence, as if the visible world,
the necessary actions of every moment, were but a snare and a folly.
She retired within herself in the vision of what was not. Thus she had
almost completely given up her habitual occupations, abandoning herself
to a sort of unconquerable indolence, remaining for hours at a time
with her hands in her lap, her gaze lost in vacancy, rapt in the
contemplation of some far-off vision. Now she, who had been so active,
so early a riser, rose late, appearing barely in time for the second
breakfast, and it could not have been at her toilet that she spent
these long hours, for she forgot her feminine coquetry, and would come
down with her hair scarcely combed, negligently attired in a gown
buttoned awry, but even thus adorable, thanks to her triumphant youth.
The morning walks through La Souleiade that she had been so fond of,
the races from the top to the bottom of the terraces planted with olive
and almond trees, the visits to the pine grove balmy with the odor of
resin, the long sun baths in the hot threshing yard, she indulged in no
more; she preferred to remain shut up in her darkened room, from which
not a movement was to be heard. Then, in the afternoon, in the work
room, she would drag herself about languidly from chair to chair, doing
nothing, tired and disgusted with everything that had formerly
interested her.

Pascal was obliged to renounce her assistance; a paper which he gave
her to copy remained three days untouched on her desk. She no longer
classified anything; she would not have stooped down to pick up a paper
from the floor. More than all, she abandoned the pastels, copies of
flowers from nature that she had been making, to serve as plates to a
work on artificial fecundations. Some large red mallows, of a new and
singular coloring, faded in their vase before she had finished copying
them. And yet for a whole afternoon she worked enthusiastically at a
fantastic design of dream flowers, an extraordinary efflorescence
blooming in the light of a miraculous sun, a burst of golden
spike-shaped rays in the center of large purple corollas, resembling
open hearts, whence shot, for pistils, a shower of stars, myriads of
worlds streaming into the sky, like a milky way.

“Ah, my poor girl,” said the doctor to her on this day, “how can you
lose your time in such conceits! And I waiting for the copy of those
mallows that you have left to die there. And you will make yourself
ill. There is no health, nor beauty, even, possible outside reality.”

Often now she did not answer, intrenching herself behind her fierce
convictions, not wishing to dispute. But doubtless he had this time
touched her beliefs to the quick.

“There is no reality,” she answered sharply.

The doctor, amused by this bold philosophy from this big child,
laughed.

“Yes, I know,” he said; “our senses are fallible. We know this world
only through our senses, consequently it is possible that the world
does not exist. Let us open the door to madness, then; let us accept as
possible the most absurd chimeras, let us live in the realm of
nightmare, outside of laws and facts. For do you not see that there is
no longer any law if you suppress nature, and that the only thing that
gives life any interest is to believe in life, to love it, and to put
all the forces of our intelligence to the better understanding of it?”

She made a gesture of mingled indifference and bravado, and the
conversation dropped. Now she was laying large strokes of blue crayon
on the pastel, bringing out its flaming splendor in strong relief on
the background of a clear summer night.

But two days later, in consequence of a fresh discussion, matters went
still further amiss. In the evening, on leaving the table, Pascal went
up to the study to write, while she remained out of doors, sitting on
the terrace. Hours passed by, and he was surprised and uneasy, when
midnight struck, that he had not yet heard her return to her room. She
would have had to pass through the study, and he was very certain that
she had not passed unnoticed by him. Going downstairs, he found that
Martine was asleep; the vestibule door was not locked, and Clotilde
must have remained outside, oblivious of the flight of time. This often
happened to her on these warm nights, but she had never before remained
out so late.

The doctor’s uneasiness increased when he perceived on the terrace the
chair, now vacant, in which the young girl had been sitting. He had
expected to find her asleep in it. Since she was not there, why had she
not come in. Where could she have gone at such an hour? The night was
beautiful: a September night, still warm, with a wide sky whose dark,
velvety expanse was studded with stars; and from the depths of this
moonless sky the stars shone so large and bright that they lighted the
earth with a pale, mysterious radiance. He leaned over the balustrade
of the terrace, and examined the slope and the stone steps which led
down to the railroad; but there was not a movement. He saw nothing but
the round motionless tops of the little olive trees. The idea then
occurred to him that she must certainly be under the plane trees beside
the fountain, whose murmuring waters made perpetual coolness around. He
hurried there, and found himself enveloped in such thick darkness that
he, who knew every tree, was obliged to walk with outstretched hands to
avoid stumbling. Then he groped his way through the dark pine grove,
still without meeting any one. And at last he called in a muffled
voice:

“Clotilde! Clotilde!”

The darkness remained silent and impenetrable.

“Clotilde! Clotilde!” he cried again, in a louder voice. Not a sound,
not a breath. The very echoes seemed asleep. His cry was drowned in the
infinitely soft lake of blue shadows. And then he called her with all
the force of his lungs. He returned to the plane trees. He went back to
the pine grove, beside himself with fright, scouring the entire domain.
Then, suddenly, he found himself in the threshing yard.

At this cool and tranquil hour, the immense yard, the vast circular
paved court, slept too. It was so many years since grain had been
threshed here that grass had sprung up among the stones, quickly
scorched a russet brown by the sun, resembling the long threads of a
woolen carpet. And, under the tufts of this feeble vegetation, the
ancient pavement did not cool during the whole summer, smoking from
sunset, exhaling in the night the heat stored up from so many sultry
noons.

The yard stretched around, bare and deserted, in the cooling
atmosphere, under the infinite calm of the sky, and Pascal was crossing
it to hurry to the orchard, when he almost fell over a form that he had
not before observed, extended at full length upon the ground. He
uttered a frightened cry.

“What! Are you here?”

Clotilde did not deign even to answer. She was lying on her back, her
hands clasped under the back of her neck, her face turned toward the
sky; and in her pale countenance, only her large shining eyes were
visible.

“And here I have been tormenting myself and calling you for an hour
past! Did you not hear me shouting?”

She at last unclosed her lips.

“Yes.”

“Then that is very senseless! Why did you not answer me?”

But she fell back into her former silence, refusing all explanation,
and with a stubborn brow kept her gaze fixed steadily on the sky.

“There, come in and go to bed, naughty child. You will tell me
to-morrow.”

She did not stir, however; he begged her ten times over to go into the
house, but she would not move. He ended by sitting down beside her on
the short grass, through which penetrated the warmth of the pavement
beneath.

“But you cannot sleep out of doors. At least answer me. What are you
doing here?”

“I am looking.”

And from her large eyes, fixed and motionless, her gaze seemed to mount
up among the stars. She seemed wholly absorbed in the contemplation of
the pure starry depths of the summer sky.

“Ah, master!” she continued, in a low monotone; “how narrow and limited
is all that you know compared to what there is surely up there. Yes, if
I did not answer you it was because I was thinking of you, and I was
filled with grief. You must not think me bad.”

In her voice there was a thrill of such tenderness that it moved him
profoundly. He stretched himself on the grass beside her, so that their
elbows touched, and they went on talking.

“I greatly fear, my dear, that your griefs are not rational. It gives
you pain to think of me. Why so?”

“Oh, because of things that I should find it hard to explain to you; I
am not a _savante_. You have taught me much, however, and I have
learned more myself, being with you. Besides, they are things that I
feel. Perhaps I might try to tell them to you, as we are all alone
here, and the night is so beautiful.”

Her full heart overflowed, after hours of meditation, in the peaceful
confidence of the beautiful night. He did not speak, fearing to disturb
her, but awaited her confidences in silence.

“When I was a little girl and you used to talk to me about science, it
seemed to me that you were speaking to me of God, your words burned so
with faith and hope. Nothing seemed impossible to you. With science you
were going to penetrate the secret of the world, and make the perfect
happiness of humanity a reality. According to you, we were progressing
with giant strides. Each day brought its discovery, its certainty. Ten,
fifty, a hundred years more, perhaps, and the heavens would open and we
should see truth face to face. Well, the years pass, and nothing opens,
and truth recedes.”

“You are an impatient girl,” he answered simply. “If ten centuries more
be necessary we must only wait for them to pass.”

“It is true. I cannot wait. I need to know; I need to be happy at once,
and to know everything at once, and to be perfectly and forever happy.
Oh, that is what makes me suffer, not to be able to reach at a bound
complete knowledge, not to be able to rest in perfect felicity, freed
from scruples and doubts. Is it living to advance with tortoiselike
pace in the darkness, not to be able to enjoy an hour’s tranquillity,
without trembling at the thought of the coming anguish? No, no! All
knowledge and all happiness in a single day? Science has promised them
to us, and if she does not give them to us, then she fails in her
engagements.”

Then he, too, began to grow heated.

“But what you are saying is folly, little girl. Science is not
revelation. It marches at its human pace, its very effort is its glory.
And then it is not true that science has promised happiness.”

She interrupted him hastily.

“How, not true! Open your books up there, then. You know that I have
read them. Do they not overflow with promises? To read them one would
think we were marching on to the conquest of earth and heaven. They
demolish everything, and they swear to replace everything—and that by
pure reason, with stability and wisdom. Doubtless I am like the
children. When I am promised anything I wish that it shall be given me
at once. My imagination sets to work, and the object must be very
beautiful to satisfy me. But it would have been easy not to have
promised anything. And above all, at this hour, in view of my eager and
painful longing, it would be very ill done to tell me that nothing has
been promised me.”

He made a gesture, a simple gesture of protestation and impatience, in
the serene and silent night.

“In any case,” she continued, “science has swept away all our past
beliefs. The earth is bare, the heavens are empty, and what do you wish
that I should become, even if you acquit science of having inspired the
hopes I have conceived? For I cannot live without belief and without
happiness. On what solid ground shall I build my house when science
shall have demolished the old world, and while she is waiting to
construct the new? All the ancient city has fallen to pieces in this
catastrophe of examination and analysis; and all that remains of it is
a mad population vainly seeking a shelter among its ruins, while
anxiously looking for a solid and permanent refuge where they may begin
life anew. You must not be surprised, then, at our discouragement and
our impatience. We can wait no longer. Since tardy science has failed
in her promises, we prefer to fall back on the old beliefs, which for
centuries have sufficed for the happiness of the world.”

“Ah! that is just it,” he responded in a low voice; “we are just at the
turning point, at the end of the century, fatigued and exhausted with
the appalling accumulation of knowledge which it has set moving. And it
is the eternal need for falsehood, the eternal need for illusion which
distracts humanity, and throws it back upon the delusive charm of the
unknown. Since we can never know all, what is the use of trying to know
more than we know already? Since the truth, when we have attained it,
does not confer immediate and certain happiness, why not be satisfied
with ignorance, the darkened cradle in which humanity slept the deep
sleep of infancy? Yes, this is the aggressive return of the mysterious,
it is the reaction against a century of experimental research. And this
had to be; desertions were to be expected, since every need could not
be satisfied at once. But this is only a halt; the onward march will
continue, up there, beyond our view, in the illimitable fields of
space.”

For a moment they remained silent, still motionless on their backs,
their gaze lost among the myriads of worlds shining in the dark sky. A
falling star shot across the constellation of Cassiopeia, like a
flaming arrow. And the luminous universe above turned slowly on its
axis, in solemn splendor, while from the dark earth around them arose
only a faint breath, like the soft, warm breath of a sleeping woman.

“Tell me,” he said, in his good-natured voice, “did your Capuchin turn
your head this evening, then?”

“Yes,” she answered frankly; “he says from the pulpit things that
disturb me. He preaches against everything you have taught me, and it
is as if the knowledge which I owe to you, transformed into a poison,
were consuming me. My God! What is going to become of me?”

“My poor child! It is terrible that you should torture yourself in this
way! And yet I had been quite tranquil about you, for you have a
well-balanced mind—you have a good, little, round, clear, solid
headpiece, as I have often told you. You will soon calm down. But what
confusion in the brains of others, at the end of the century, if you,
who are so sane, are troubled! Have you not faith, then?”

She answered only by a heavy sigh.

“Assuredly, viewed from the standpoint of happiness, faith is a strong
staff for the traveler to lean upon, and the march becomes easy and
tranquil when one is fortunate enough to possess it.”

“Oh, I no longer know whether I believe or not!” she cried. “There are
days when I believe, and there are other days when I side with you and
with your books. It is you who have disturbed me; it is through you I
suffer. And perhaps all my suffering springs from this, from my revolt
against you whom I love. No, no! tell me nothing; do not tell me that I
shall soon calm down. At this moment that would only irritate me still
more. I know well that you deny the supernatural. The mysterious for
you is only the inexplicable. Even you concede that we shall never know
all; and therefore you consider that the only interest life can have is
the continual conquest over the unknown, the eternal effort to know
more. Ah, I know too much already to believe. You have already
succeeded but too well in shaking my faith, and there are times when it
seems to me that this will kill me.”

He took her hand that lay on the still warm grass, and pressed it hard.

“No, no; it is life that frightens you, little girl. And how right you
are in saying that happiness consists in continual effort. For from
this time forward tranquil ignorance is impossible. There is no halt to
be looked for, no tranquillity in renunciation and wilful blindness. We
must go on, go on in any case with life, which goes on always.
Everything that is proposed, a return to the past, to dead religions,
patched up religions arranged to suit new wants, is a snare. Learn to
know life, then; to love it, live it as it ought to be lived—that is
the only wisdom.”

But she shook off his hand angrily. And her voice trembled with
vexation.

“Life is horrible. How do you wish me to live it tranquil and happy? It
is a terrible light that your science throws upon the world. Your
analysis opens up all the wounds of humanity to display their horror.
You tell everything; you speak too plainly; you leave us nothing but
disgust for people and for things, without any possible consolation.”

He interrupted her with a cry of ardent conviction.

“We tell everything. Ah, yes; in order to know everything and to remedy
everything!”

Her anger rose, and she sat erect.

“If even equality and justice existed in your nature—but you
acknowledge it yourself, life is for the strongest, the weak infallibly
perishes because he is weak—there are no two beings equal, either in
health, in beauty, or intelligence; everything is left to haphazard
meeting, to the chance of selection. And everything falls into ruin,
when grand and sacred justice ceases to exist.”

“It is true,” he said, in an undertone, as if speaking to himself,
“there is no such thing as equality. No society based upon it could
continue to exist. For centuries, men thought to remedy evil by
character. But that idea is being exploded, and now they propose
justice. Is nature just? I think her logical, rather. Logic is perhaps
a natural and higher justice, going straight to the sum of the common
labor, to the grand final labor.”

“Then it is justice,” she cried, “that crushes the individual for the
happiness of the race, that destroys an enfeebled species to fatten the
victorious species. No, no; that is crime. There is in that only
foulness and murder. He was right this evening in the church. The earth
is corrupt, science only serves to show its rottenness. It is on high
that we must all seek a refuge. Oh, master, I entreat you, let me save
myself, let me save you!”

She burst into tears, and the sound of her sobs rose despairingly on
the stillness of the night. He tried in vain to soothe her, her voice
dominated his.

“Listen to me, master. You know that I love you, for you are everything
to me. And it is you who are the cause of all my suffering. I can
scarcely endure it when I think that we are not in accord, that we
should be separated forever if we were both to die to-morrow. Why will
you not believe?”

He still tried to reason with her.

“Come, don’t be foolish, my dear—”

But she threw herself on her knees, she seized him by the hands, she
clung to him with a feverish force. And she sobbed louder and louder,
in such a clamor of despair that the dark fields afar off were startled
by it.

“Listen to me, he said it in the church. You must change your life and
do penance; you must burn everything belonging to your past errors—your
books, your papers, your manuscripts. Make this sacrifice, master, I
entreat it of you on my knees. And you will see the delightful
existence we shall lead together.”

At last he rebelled.

“No, this is too much. Be silent!”

“If you listen to me, master, you will do what I wish. I assure you
that I am horribly unhappy, even in loving you as I love you. There is
something wanting in our affection. So far it has been profound but
unavailing, and I have an irresistible longing to fill it, oh, with all
that is divine and eternal. What can be wanting to us but God? Kneel
down and pray with me!”

With an abrupt movement he released himself, angry in his turn.

“Be silent; you are talking nonsense. I have left you free, leave me
free.”

“Master, master! it is our happiness that I desire! I will take you
far, far away. We will go to some solitude to live there in God!”

“Be silent! No, never!”

Then they remained for a moment confronting each other, mute and
menacing. Around them stretched La Souleiade in the deep silence of the
night, with the light shadows of its olive trees, the darkness of its
pine and plane trees, in which the saddened voice of the fountain was
singing, and above their heads it seemed as if the spacious sky,
studded with stars, shuddered and grew pale, although the dawn was
still far off.

Clotilde raised her arm as if to point to this infinite, shuddering
sky; but with a quick gesture Pascal seized her hand and drew it down
toward the earth in his. And no word further was spoken; they were
beside themselves with rage and hate. The quarrel was fierce and
bitter.

She drew her hand away abruptly, and sprang backward, like some proud,
untamable animal, rearing; then she rushed quickly through the darkness
toward the house. He heard the patter of her little boots on the stones
of the yard, deadened afterward by the sand of the walk. He, on his
side, already grieved and uneasy, called her back in urgent tones. But
she ran on without answering, without hearing. Alarmed, and with a
heavy heart, he hurried after her, and rounded the clump of plane trees
just in time to see her rush into the house like a whirlwind. He darted
in after her, ran up the stairs, and struck against the door of her
room, which she violently bolted. And here he stopped and grew calm, by
a strong effort resisting the desire to cry out, to call her again, to
break in the door so as to see her once more, to convince her, to have
her all to himself. For a moment he remained motionless, chilled by the
deathlike silence of the room, from which not the faintest sound
issued. Doubtless she had thrown herself on the bed, and was stifling
her cries and her sobs in the pillow. He determined at last to go
downstairs again and close the hall door, and then he returned softly
and listened, waiting for some sound of moaning. And day was breaking
when he went disconsolately to bed, choking back his tears.

Thenceforward it was war without mercy. Pascal felt himself spied upon,
trapped, menaced. He was no longer master of his house; he had no
longer any home. The enemy was always there, forcing him to be
constantly on his guard, to lock up everything. One after the other,
two vials of nerve-substance which he had compounded were found in
fragments, and he was obliged to barricade himself in his room, where
he could be heard pounding for days together, without showing himself
even at mealtime. He no longer took Clotilde with him on his visiting
days, because she discouraged his patients by her attitude of
aggressive incredulity. But from the moment he left the house, the
doctor had only one desire—to return to it quickly, for he trembled
lest he should find his locks forced, and his drawers rifled on his
return. He no longer employed the young girl to classify and copy his
notes, for several of them had disappeared, as if they had been carried
away by the wind. He did not even venture to employ her to correct his
proofs, having ascertained that she had cut out of an article an entire
passage, the sentiment of which offended her Catholic belief. And thus
she remained idle, prowling about the rooms, and having an abundance of
time to watch for an occasion which would put in her possession the key
of the large press. This was her dream, the plan which she revolved in
her mind during her long silence, while her eyes shone and her hands
burned with fever—to have the key, to open the press, to take and burn
everything in an _auto da fé_ which would be pleasing to God. A few
pages of manuscript, forgotten by him on a corner of the table, while
he went to wash his hands and put on his coat, had disappeared, leaving
behind only a little heap of ashes in the fireplace. He could no longer
leave a scrap of paper about. He carried away everything; he hid
everything. One evening, when he had remained late with a patient, as
he was returning home in the dusk a wild terror seized him at the
faubourg, at sight of a thick black smoke rising up in clouds that
darkened the heavens. Was it not La Souleiade that was burning down,
set on fire by the bonfire made with his papers? He ran toward the
house, and was reassured only on seeing in a neighboring field a fire
of roots burning slowly.

But how terrible are the tortures of the scientist who feels himself
menaced in this way in the labors of his intellect! The discoveries
which he has made, the writings which he has counted upon leaving
behind him, these are his pride, they are creatures of his blood—his
children—and whoever destroys, whoever burns them, burns a part of
himself. Especially, in this perpetual lying in wait for the creatures
of his brain, was Pascal tortured by the thought that the enemy was in
his house, installed in his very heart, and that he loved her in spite
of everything, this creature whom he had made what she was. He was left
disarmed, without possible defense; not wishing to act, and having no
other resources than to watch with vigilance. On all sides the
investment was closing around him. He fancied he felt the little
pilfering hands stealing into his pockets. He had no longer any
tranquillity, even with the doors closed, for he feared that he was
being robbed through the crevices.

“But, unhappy child,” he cried one day, “I love but you in the world,
and you are killing me! And yet you love me, too; you act in this way
because you love me, and it is abominable. It would be better to have
done with it all at once, and throw ourselves into the river with a
stone tied around our necks.”

She did not answer, but her dauntless eyes said ardently that she would
willingly die on the instant, if it were with him.

“And if I should suddenly die to-night, what would happen to-morrow?
You would empty the press, you would empty the drawers, you would make
a great heap of all my works and burn them! You would, would you not?
Do you know that that would be a real murder, as much as if you
assassinated some one? And what abominable cowardice, to kill the
thoughts!”

“No,” she said at last, in a low voice; “to kill evil, to prevent it
from spreading and springing up again!”

All their explanations only served to kindle anew their anger. And they
had terrible ones. And one evening, when old Mme. Rougon had chanced in
on one of these quarrels, she remained alone with Pascal, after
Clotilde had fled to hide herself in her room. There was silence for a
moment. In spite of the heartbroken air which she had assumed, a wicked
joy shone in the depths of her sparkling eyes.

“But your unhappy house is a hell!” she cried at last.

The doctor avoided an answer by a gesture. He had always felt that his
mother backed the young girl, inflaming her religious faith, utilizing
this ferment of revolt to bring trouble into his house. He was not
deceived. He knew perfectly well that the two women had seen each other
during the day, and that he owed to this meeting, to a skilful
embittering of Clotilde’s mind, the frightful scene at which he still
trembled. Doubtless his mother had come to learn what mischief had been
wrought, and to see if the _denouement_ was not at last at hand.

“Things cannot go on in this way,” she resumed. “Why do you not
separate since you can no longer agree. You ought to send her to her
brother Maxime. He wrote to me not long since asking her again.”

He straightened himself, pale and determined.

“To part angry with each other? Ah, no, no! that would be an eternal
remorse, an incurable wound. If she must one day go away, I wish that
we may be able to love each other at a distance. But why go away?
Neither of us complains of the other.”

Félicité felt that she had been too hasty. Therefore she assumed her
hypocritical, conciliating air.

“Of course, if it pleases you both to quarrel, no one has anything to
say in the matter. Only, my poor friend, permit me, in that case, to
say that I think Clotilde is not altogether in the wrong. You force me
to confess that I saw her a little while ago; yes, it is better that
you should know, notwithstanding my promise to be silent. Well, she is
not happy; she makes a great many complaints, and you may imagine that
I scolded her and preached complete submission to her. But that does
not prevent me from being unable to understand you myself, and from
thinking that you do everything you can to make yourself unhappy.”

She sat down in a corner of the room, and obliged him to sit down with
her, seeming delighted to have him here alone, at her mercy. She had
already, more than once before, tried to force him to an explanation in
this way, but he had always avoided it. Although she had tortured him
for years past, and he knew her thoroughly, he yet remained a
deferential son, he had sworn never to abandon this stubbornly
respectful attitude. Thus, the moment she touched certain subjects, he
took refuge in absolute silence.

“Come,” she continued; “I can understand that you should not wish to
yield to Clotilde; but to me? How if I were to entreat you to make me
the sacrifice of all those abominable papers which are there in the
press! Consider for an instant if you should die suddenly, and those
papers should fall into strange hands. We should all be disgraced. You
would not wish that, would you? What is your object, then? Why do you
persist in so dangerous a game? Promise me that you will burn them.”

He remained silent for a time, but at last he answered:

“Mother, I have already begged of you never to speak on that subject. I
cannot do what you ask.”

“But at least,” she cried, “give me a reason. Any one would think our
family was as indifferent to you as that drove of oxen passing below
there. Yet you belong to it. Oh, I know you do all you can not to
belong to it! I myself am sometimes astonished at you. I ask myself
where you can have come from. But for all that, it is very wicked of
you to run this risk, without stopping to think of the grief you are
causing to me, your mother. It is simply wicked.”

He grew still paler, and yielding for an instant to his desire to
defend himself, in spite of his determination to keep silent, he said:

“You are hard; you are wrong. I have always believed in the necessity,
the absolute efficacy of truth. It is true that I tell the truth about
others and about myself, and it is because I believe firmly that in
telling the truth I do the only good possible. In the first place,
those papers are not intended for the public; they are only personal
notes which it would be painful to me to part with. And then, I know
well that you would not burn only them—all my other works would also be
thrown into the fire. Would they not? And that is what I do not wish;
do you understand? Never, while I live, shall a line of my writing be
destroyed here.”

But he already regretted having said so much, for he saw that she was
urging him, leading him on to the cruel explanation she desired.

“Then finish, and tell me what it is that you reproach us with. Yes,
me, for instance; what do you reproach me with? Not with having brought
you up with so much difficulty. Ah, fortune was slow to win! If we
enjoy a little happiness now, we have earned it hard. Since you have
seen everything, and since you put down everything in your papers, you
can testify with truth that the family has rendered greater services to
others than it has ever received. On two occasions, but for us,
Plassans would have been in a fine pickle. And it is perfectly natural
that we should have reaped only ingratitude and envy, to the extent
that even to-day the whole town would be enchanted with a scandal that
should bespatter us with mud. You cannot wish that, and I am sure that
you will do justice to the dignity of my attitude since the fall of the
Empire, and the misfortunes from which France will no doubt never
recover.”

“Let France rest, mother,” he said, speaking again, for she had touched
the spot where she knew he was most sensitive. “France is tenacious of
life, and I think she is going to astonish the world by the rapidity of
her convalescence. True, she has many elements of corruption. I have
not sought to hide them, I have rather, perhaps, exposed them to view.
But you greatly misunderstand me if you imagine that I believe in her
final dissolution, because I point out her wounds and her lesions. I
believe in the life which ceaselessly eliminates hurtful substances,
which makes new flesh to fill the holes eaten away by gangrene, which
infallibly advances toward health, toward constant renovation, amid
impurities and death.”

He was growing excited, and he was conscious of it, and making an angry
gesture, he spoke no more. His mother had recourse to tears, a few
little tears which came with difficulty, and which were quickly dried.
And the fears which saddened her old age returned to her, and she
entreated him to make his peace with God, if only out of regard for the
family. Had she not given an example of courage ever since the downfall
of the Empire? Did not all Plassans, the quarter of St. Marc, the old
quarter and the new town, render homage to the noble attitude she
maintained in her fall? All she asked was to be helped; she demanded
from all her children an effort like her own. Thus she cited the
example of Eugène, the great man who had fallen from so lofty a height,
and who resigned himself to being a simple deputy, defending until his
latest breath the fallen government from which he had derived his
glory. She was also full of eulogies of Aristide, who had never lost
hope, who had reconquered, under the new government, an exalted
position, in spite of the terrible and unjust catastrophe which had for
a moment buried him under the ruins of the Union Universelle. And would
he, Pascal, hold himself aloof, would he do nothing that she might die
in peace, in the joy of the final triumph of the Rougons, he who was so
intelligent, so affectionate, so good? He would go to mass, would he
not, next Sunday? and he would burn all those vile papers, only to
think of which made her ill. She entreated, commanded, threatened. But
he no longer answered her, calm and invincible in his attitude of
perfect deference. He wished to have no discussion. He knew her too
well either to hope to convince her or to venture to discuss the past
with her.

“Why!” she cried, when she saw that he was not to be moved, “you do not
belong to us. I have always said so. You are a disgrace to us.”

He bent his head and said:

“Mother, when you reflect you will forgive me.”

On this day Félicité was beside herself with rage when she went away;
and when she met Martine at the door of the house, in front of the
plane trees, she unburdened her mind to her, without knowing that
Pascal, who had just gone into his room, heard all. She gave vent to
her resentment, vowing, in spite of everything, that she would in the
end succeed in obtaining possession of the papers and destroying them,
since he did not wish to make the sacrifice. But what turned the doctor
cold was the manner in which Martine, in a subdued voice, soothed her.
She was evidently her accomplice. She repeated that it was necessary to
wait; not to do anything hastily; that mademoiselle and she had taken a
vow to get the better of monsieur, by not leaving him an hour’s peace.
They had sworn it. They would reconcile him with the good God, because
it was not possible that an upright man like monsieur should remain
without religion. And the voices of the two women became lower and
lower, until they finally sank to a whisper, an indistinct murmur of
gossiping and plotting, of which he caught only a word here and there;
orders given, measures to be taken, an invasion of his personal
liberty. When his mother at last departed, with her light step and
slender, youthful figure, he saw that she went away very well
satisfied.

Then came a moment of weakness, of utter despair. Pascal dropped into a
chair, and asked himself what was the use of struggling, since the only
beings he loved allied themselves against him. Martine, who would have
thrown herself into the fire at a word from him, betraying him in this
way for his good! And Clotilde leagued with this servant, plotting with
her against him in holes and corners, seeking her aid to set traps for
him! Now he was indeed alone; he had around him only traitresses, who
poisoned the very air he breathed. But these two still loved him. He
might perhaps have succeeded in softening them, but when he knew that
his mother urged them on, he understood their fierce persistence, and
he gave up the hope of winning them back. With the timidity of a man
who had spent his life in study, aloof from women, notwithstanding his
secret passion, the thought that they were there to oppose him, to
attempt to bend him to their will, overwhelmed him. He felt that some
one of them was always behind him. Even when he shut himself up in his
room, he fancied that they were on the other side of the wall; and he
was constantly haunted by the idea that they would rob him of his
thought, if they could perceive it in his brain, before he should have
formulated it.

This was assuredly the period in his life in which Dr. Pascal was most
unhappy. To live constantly on the defensive, as he was obliged to do,
crushed him, and it seemed to him as if the ground on which his house
stood was no longer his, as if it was receding from beneath his feet.
He now regretted keenly that he had not married, and that he had no
children. Had not he himself been afraid of life? And had he not been
well punished for his selfishness? This regret for not having children
now never left him. His eyes now filled with tears whenever he met on
the road bright-eyed little girls who smiled at him. True, Clotilde was
there, but his affection for her was of a different kind—crossed at
present by storms—not a calm, infinitely sweet affection, like that for
a child with which he might have soothed his lacerated heart. And then,
no doubt what he desired in his isolation, feeling that his days were
drawing to an end, was above all, continuance; in a child he would
survive, he would live forever. The more he suffered, the greater the
consolation he would have found in bequeathing this suffering, in the
faith which he still had in life. He considered himself indemnified for
the physiological defects of his family. But even the thought that
heredity sometimes passes over a generation, and that the disorders of
his ancestors might reappear in a child of his did not deter him; and
this unknown child, in spite of the old corrupt stock, in spite of the
long succession of execrable relations, he desired ardently at certain
times: as one desires unexpected gain, rare happiness, the stroke of
fortune which is to console and enrich forever. In the shock which his
other affections had received, his heart bled because it was too late.

One sultry night toward the end of September, Pascal found himself
unable to sleep. He opened one of the windows of his room; the sky was
dark, some storm must be passing in the distance, for there was a
continuous rumbling of thunder. He could distinguish vaguely the dark
mass of the plane trees, which occasional flashes of lightning
detached, in a dull green, from the darkness. His soul was full of
anguish; he lived over again the last unhappy days, days of fresh
quarrels, of torture caused by acts of treachery, by suspicions, which
grew stronger every day, when a sudden recollection made him start. In
his fear of being robbed, he had finally adopted the plan of carrying
the key of the large press in his pocket. But this afternoon, oppressed
by the heat, he had taken off his jacket, and he remembered having seen
Clotilde hang it up on a nail in the study. A sudden pang of terror
shot through him, sharp and cold as a steel point; if she had felt the
key in the pocket she had stolen it. He hastened to search the jacket
which he had a little before thrown upon a chair; the key was not here.
At this very moment he was being robbed; he had the clear conviction of
it. Two o’clock struck. He did not again dress himself, but, remaining
in his trousers only, with his bare feet thrust into slippers, his
chest bare under his unfastened nightshirt, he hastily pushed open the
door, and rushed into the workroom, his candle in his hand.

“Ah! I knew it,” he cried. “Thief! Assassin!”

It was true; Clotilde was there, undressed like himself, her bare feet
covered by canvas slippers, her legs bare, her arms bare, her shoulders
bare, clad only in her chemise and a short skirt. Through caution, she
had not brought a candle. She had contented herself with opening one of
the window shutters, and the continual lightning flashes of the storm
which was passing southward in the dark sky, sufficed her, bathing
everything in a livid phosphorescence. The old press, with its broad
sides, was wide open. Already she had emptied the top shelf, taking
down the papers in armfuls, and throwing them on the long table in the
middle of the room, where they lay in a confused heap. And with
feverish haste, fearing lest she should not have the time to burn them,
she was making them up into bundles, intending to hide them, and send
them afterward to her grandmother, when the sudden flare of the candle,
lighting up the room, caused her to stop short in an attitude of
surprise and resistance.

“You rob me; you assassinate me!” repeated Pascal furiously.

She still held one of the bundles in her bare arms. He wished to take
it away from her, but she pressed it to her with all her strength,
obstinately resolved upon her work of destruction, without showing
confusion or repentance, like a combatant who has right upon his side.
Then, madly, blindly, he threw himself upon her, and they struggled
together. He clutched her bare flesh so that he hurt her.

“Kill me!” she gasped. “Kill me, or I shall destroy everything!”

He held her close to him, with so rough a grasp that she could scarcely
breathe, crying:

“When a child steals, it is punished!”

A few drops of blood appeared and trickled down her rounded shoulder,
where an abrasion had cut the delicate satin skin. And, on the instant,
seeing her so breathless, so divine, in her virginal slender height,
with her tapering limbs, her supple arms, her slim body with its
slender, firm throat, he released her. By a last effort he tore the
package from her.

“And you shall help me to put them all up there again, by Heaven! Come
here: begin by arranging them on the table. Obey me, do you hear?”

“Yes, master!”

She approached, and helped him to arrange the papers, subjugated,
crushed by this masculine grasp, which had entered into her flesh, as
it were. The candle which flared up in the heavy night air, lighted
them; and the distant rolling of the thunder still continued, the
window facing the storm seeming on fire.

V.

For an instant Pascal looked at the papers, the heap of which seemed
enormous, lying thus in disorder on the long table that stood in the
middle of the room. In the confusion several of the blue paper
envelopes had burst open, and their contents had fallen out—letters,
newspaper clippings, documents on stamped paper, and manuscript notes.

He was already mechanically beginning to seek out the names written on
the envelopes in large characters, to classify the packages again,
when, with an abrupt gesture, he emerged from the somber meditation
into which he had fallen. And turning to Clotilde who stood waiting,
pale, silent, and erect, he said:

“Listen to me; I have always forbidden you to read these papers, and I
know that you have obeyed me. Yes, I had scruples of delicacy. It is
not that you are an ignorant girl, like so many others, for I have
allowed you to learn everything concerning man and woman, which is
assuredly bad only for bad natures. But to what end disclose to you too
early these terrible truths of human life? I have therefore spared you
the history of our family, which is the history of every family, of all
humanity; a great deal of evil and a great deal of good.”

He paused as if to confirm himself in his resolution and then resumed
quite calmly and with supreme energy:

“You are twenty-five years old; you ought to know. And then the life we
are leading is no longer possible. You live and you make me live in a
constant nightmare, with your ecstatic dreams. I prefer to show you the
reality, however execrable it may be. Perhaps the blow which it will
inflict upon you will make of you the woman you ought to be. We will
classify these papers again together, and read them, and learn from
them a terrible lesson of life!”

Then, as she still continued motionless, he resumed:

“Come, we must be able to see well. Light those other two candles
there.”

He was seized by a desire for light, a flood of light; he would have
desired the blinding light of the sun; and thinking that the light of
the three candles was not sufficient, he went into his room for a pair
of three-branched candelabra which were there. The nine candles were
blazing, yet neither of them, in their disorder—he with his chest bare,
she with her left shoulder stained with blood, her throat and arms
bare—saw the other. It was past two o’clock, but neither of them had
any consciousness of the hour; they were going to spend the night in
this eager desire for knowledge, without feeling the need of sleep,
outside time and space. The mutterings of the storm, which, through the
open window, they could see gathering, grew louder and louder.

Clotilde had never before seen in Pascal’s eyes the feverish light
which burned in them now. He had been overworking himself for some time
past, and his mental sufferings made him at times abrupt, in spite of
his good-natured complacency. But it seemed as if an infinite
tenderness, trembling with fraternal pity, awoke within him, now that
he was about to plunge into the painful truths of existence; and it was
something emanating from himself, something very great and very good
which was to render innocuous the terrible avalanche of facts which was
impending. He was determined that he would reveal everything, since it
was necessary that he should do so in order to remedy everything. Was
not this an unanswerable, a final argument for evolution, the story of
these beings who were so near to them? Such was life, and it must be
lived. Doubtless she would emerge from it like the steel tempered by
the fire, full of tolerance and courage.

“They are setting you against me,” he resumed; “they are making you
commit abominable acts, and I wish to restore your conscience to you.
When you know, you will judge and you will act. Come here, and read
with me.”

She obeyed. But these papers, about which her grandmother had spoken so
angrily, frightened her a little; while a curiosity that grew with
every moment awoke within her. And then, dominated though she was by
the virile authority which had just constrained and subjugated her, she
did not yet yield. But might she not listen to him, read with him? Did
she not retain the right to refuse or to give herself afterward? He
spoke at last.

“Will you come?”

“Yes, master, I will.”

He showed her first the genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquarts. He
did not usually lock it in the press, but kept it in the desk in his
room, from which he had taken it when he went there for the candelabra.
For more than twenty years past he had kept it up to date, inscribing
the births, deaths, marriages, and other important events that had
taken place in the family, making brief notes in each case, in
accordance with his theory of heredity.

It was a large sheet of paper, yellow with age, with folds cut by wear,
on which was drawn boldly a symbolical tree, whose branches spread and
subdivided into five rows of broad leaves; and each leaf bore a name,
and contained, in minute handwriting, a biography, a hereditary case.

A scientist’s joy took possession of the doctor at sight of this labor
of twenty years, in which the laws of heredity established by him were
so clearly and so completely applied.

“Look, child! You know enough about the matter, you have copied enough
of my notes to understand. Is it not beautiful? A document so complete,
so conclusive, in which there is not a gap? It is like an experiment
made in the laboratory, a problem stated and solved on the blackboard.
You see below, the trunk, the common stock, Aunt Dide; then the three
branches issuing from it, the legitimate branch, Pierre Rougon, and the
two illegitimate branches, Ursule Macquart and Antoine Macquart; then,
new branches arise, and ramify, on one side, Maxime, Clotilde, and
Victor, the three children of Saccard, and Angelique, the daughter of
Sidonie Rougon; on the other, Pauline, the daughter of Lisa Macquart,
and Claude, Jacques, Étienne, and Anna, the four children of Gervaise,
her sister; there, at the extremity, is Jean, their brother, and here
in the middle, you see what I call the knot, the legitimate issue and
the illegitimate issue, uniting in Marthe Rougon and her cousin
François Mouret, to give rise to three new branches, Octave, Serge, and
Désirée Mouret; while there is also the issue of Ursule and the hatter
Mouret; Silvère, whose tragic death you know; Hélène and her daughter
Jean; finally, at the top are the latest offshoots, our poor Charles,
your brother Maxime’s son, and two other children, who are dead,
Jacques Louis, the son of Claude Lantier, and Louiset, the son of Anna
Coupeau. In all five generations, a human tree which, for five springs
already, five springtides of humanity, has sent forth shoots, at the
impulse of the sap of eternal life.”

He became more and more animated, pointing out each case on the sheet
of old yellow paper, as if it were an anatomical chart.

“And as I have already said, everything is here. You see in direct
heredity, the differentiations, that of the mother, Silvère, Lisa,
Désirée, Jacques, Louiset, yourself; that of the father, Sidonie,
François, Gervaise, Octave, Jacques, Louis. Then there are the three
cases of crossing: by conjugation, Ursule, Aristide, Anna, Victor; by
dissemination, Maxime, Serge, Étienne; by fusion, Antoine, Eugène,
Claude. I even noted a fourth case, a very remarkable one, an even
cross, Pierre and Pauline; and varieties are established, the
differentiation of the mother, for example, often accords with the
physical resemblance of the father; or, it is the contrary which takes
place, so that, in the crossing, the physical and mental predominance
remains with one parent or the other, according to circumstances. Then
here is indirect heredity, that of the collateral branches. I have but
one well established example of this, the striking personal resemblance
of Octave Mouret to his uncle Eugène Rougon. I have also but one
example of transmission by influence, Anna, the daughter of Gervaise
and Coupeau, who bore a striking resemblance, especially in her
childhood, to Lantier, her mother’s first lover. But what I am very
rich in is in examples of reversion to the original stock—the three
finest cases, Marthe, Jeanne, and Charles, resembling Aunt Dide; the
resemblance thus passing over one, two, and three generations. This is
certainly exceptional, for I scarcely believe in atavism; it seems to
me that the new elements brought by the partners, accidents, and the
infinite variety of crossings must rapidly efface particular
characteristics, so as to bring back the individual to the general
type. And there remains variation—Hélène, Jean, Angelique. This is the
combination, the chemical mixture in which the physical and mental
characteristics of the parents are blended, without any of their traits
seeming to reappear in the new being.”

There was silence for a moment. Clotilde had listened to him with
profound attention, wishing to understand. And he remained absorbed in
thought, his eyes still fixed on the tree, in the desire to judge his
work impartially. He then continued in a low tone, as if speaking to
himself:

“Yes, that is as scientific as possible. I have placed there only the
members of the family, and I had to give an equal part to the partners,
to the fathers and mothers come from outside, whose blood has mingled
with ours, and therefore modified it. I had indeed made a
mathematically exact tree, the father and the mother bequeathing
themselves, by halves, to the child, from generation to generation, so
that in Charles, for example, Aunt Dide’s part would have been only a
twelfth—which would be absurd, since the physical resemblance is there
complete. I have therefore thought it sufficient to indicate the
elements come from elsewhere, taking into account marriages and the new
factor which each introduced. Ah! these sciences that are yet in their
infancy, in which hypothesis speaks stammeringly, and imagination
rules, these are the domain of the poet as much as of the scientist.
Poets go as pioneers in the advance guard, and they often discover new
countries, suggesting solutions. There is there a borderland which
belongs to them, between the conquered, the definitive truth, and the
unknown, whence the truth of to-morrow will be torn. What an immense
fresco there is to be painted, what a stupendous human tragedy, what a
comedy there is to be written with heredity, which is the very genesis
of families, of societies, and of the world!”

His eyes fixed on vacancy, he remained for a time lost in thought.
Then, with an abrupt movement, he came back to the envelopes and,
pushing the tree aside, said:

“We will take it up again presently; for, in order that you may
understand now, it is necessary that events should pass in review
before you, and that you should see in action all these actors ticketed
here, each one summed up in a brief note. I will call for the
envelopes, you will hand them to me one by one, and I will show you the
papers in each, and tell you their contents, before putting it away
again up there on the shelf. I will not follow the alphabetical order,
but the order of events themselves. I have long wished to make this
classification. Come, look for the names on the envelopes; Aunt Dide
first.”

At this moment the edge of the storm which lighted up the sky caught La
Souleiade slantingly, and burst over the house in a deluge of rain. But
they did not even close the window. They heard neither the peals of
thunder nor the ceaseless beating of the rain upon the roof. She handed
him the envelope bearing the name of Aunt Dide in large characters; and
he took from it papers of all sorts, notes taken by him long ago, which
he proceeded to read.

“Hand me Pierre Rougon. Hand me Ursule Macquart. Hand me Antoine
Macquart.”

Silently she obeyed him, her heart oppressed by a dreadful anguish at
all she was hearing. And the envelopes were passed on, displayed their
contents, and were piled up again in the press.

First was the foundress of the family, Adelaïde Fouqué, the tall, crazy
girl, the first nervous lesion giving rise to the legitimate branch,
Pierre Rougon, and to the two illegitimate branches, Ursule and Antoine
Macquart, all that _bourgeois_ and sanguinary tragedy, with the _coup
d’etat_ of December, 1854, for a background, the Rougons, Pierre and
Félicité, preserving order at Plassans, bespattering with the blood of
Silvère their rising fortunes, while Adelaïde, grown old, the miserable
Aunt Dide, was shut up in the Tulettes, like a specter of expiation and
of waiting.

Then like a pack of hounds, the appetites were let loose. The supreme
appetite of power in Eugène Rougon, the great man, the disdainful
genius of the family, free from base interests, loving power for its
own sake, conquering Paris in old boots with the adventurers of the
coming Empire, rising from the legislative body to the senate, passing
from the presidency of the council of state to the portfolio of
minister; made by his party, a hungry crowd of followers, who at the
same time supported and devoured him; conquered for an instant by a
woman, the beautiful Clorinde, with whom he had been imbecile enough to
fall in love, but having so strong a will, and burning with so vehement
a desire to rule, that he won back power by giving the lie to his whole
life, marching to his triumphal sovereignty of vice emperor.

With Aristide Saccard, appetite ran to low pleasures, the whole hot
quarry of money, luxury, women—a devouring hunger which left him
homeless, at the time when millions were changing hands, when the
whirlwind of wild speculation was blowing through the city, tearing
down everywhere to construct anew, when princely fortunes were made,
squandered, and remade in six months; a greed of gold whose ever
increasing fury carried him away, causing him, almost before the body
of his wife Angèle was cold in death, to sell his name, in order to
have the first indispensable thousand francs, by marrying Renée. And it
was Saccard, too, who, a few years later, put in motion the immense
money-press of the Banque Universelle. Saccard, the never vanquished;
Saccard, grown more powerful, risen to be the clever and daring grand
financier, comprehending the fierce and civilizing role that money
plays, fighting, winning, and losing battles on the Bourse, like
Napoleon at Austerlitz and Waterloo; engulfing in disaster a world of
miserable people; sending forth into the unknown realms of crime his
natural son Victor, who disappeared, fleeing through the dark night,
while he himself, under the impassable protection of unjust nature, was
loved by the adorable Mme. Caroline, no doubt in recompense of all the
evil he had done.

Here a tall, spotless lily had bloomed in this compost, Sidonie Rougon,
the sycophant of her brother, the go-between in a hundred suspicious
affairs, giving birth to the pure and divine Angelique, the little
embroiderer with fairylike fingers who worked into the gold of the
chasubles the dream of her Prince Charming, so happy among her
companions the saints, so little made for the hard realities of life,
that she obtained the grace of dying of love, on the day of her
marriage, at the first kiss of Félicien de Hautecœur, in the triumphant
peal of bells ringing for her splendid nuptials.

The union of the two branches, the legitimate and the illegitimate,
took place then, Marthe Rougon espousing her cousin François Mouret, a
peaceful household slowly disunited, ending in the direst
catastrophes—a sad and gentle woman taken, made use of, and crushed in
the vast machine of war erected for the conquest of a city; her three
children torn from her, she herself leaving her heart in the rude grasp
of the Abbé Faujas. And the Rougons saved Plassans a second time, while
she was dying in the glare of the conflagration in which her husband
was being consumed, mad with long pent-up rage and the desire for
revenge.

Of the three children, Octave Mouret was the audacious conqueror, the
clear intellect, resolved to demand from the women the sovereignty of
Paris, fallen at his _début_ into the midst of a corrupt _bourgeois_
society, acquiring there a terrible sentimental education, passing from
the capricious refusal of one woman to the unresisting abandonment of
another, remaining, fortunately, active, laborious, and combative,
gradually emerging, and improved even, from the low plotting, the
ceaseless ferment of a rotten society that could be heard already
cracking to its foundations. And Octave Mouret, victorious,
revolutionized commerce; swallowed up the cautious little shops that
carried on business in the old-fashioned way; established in the midst
of feverish Paris the colossal palace of temptation, blazing with
lights, overflowing with velvets, silks, and laces; won fortunes
exploiting woman; lived in smiling scorn of woman until the day when a
little girl, the avenger of her sex, the innocent and wise Denise,
vanquished him and held him captive at her feet, groaning with anguish,
until she did him the favor, she who was so poor, to marry him in the
midst of the apotheosis of his Louvre, under the golden shower of his
receipts.

There remained the two other children, Serge Mouret and Désirée Mouret,
the latter innocent and healthy, like some happy young animal; the
former refined and mystical, who was thrown into the priesthood by a
nervous malady hereditary in his family, and who lived again the story
of Adam, in the Eden of Le Paradou. He was born again to love Albine,
and to lose her, in the bosom of sublime nature, their accomplice; to
be recovered, afterward by the Church, to war eternally with life,
striving to kill his manhood, throwing on the body of the dead Albine
the handful of earth, as officiating priest, at the very time when
Désirée, the sister and friend of animals, was rejoicing in the midst
of the swarming life of her poultry yard.

Further on there opened a calm glimpse of gentle and tragic life,
Hélène Mouret living peacefully with her little girl, Jeanne, on the
heights of Passy, overlooking Paris, the bottomless, boundless human
sea, in face of which was unrolled this page of love: the sudden
passion of Hélène for a stranger, a physician, brought one night by
chance to the bedside of her daughter; the morbid jealousy of
Jeanne—the instinctive jealousy of a loving girl—disputing her mother
with love, her mother already so wasted by her unhappy passion that the
daughter died because of her fault; terrible price of one hour of
desire in the entire cold and discreet life of a woman, poor dead
child, lying alone in the silent cemetery, in face of eternal Paris.

With Lisa Macquart began the illegitimate branch; appearing fresh and
strong in her, as she displayed her portly, prosperous figure, sitting
at the door of her pork shop in a light colored apron, watching the
central market, where the hunger of a people muttered, the age-long
battle of the Fat and the Lean, the lean Florent, her brother-in-law,
execrated, and set upon by the fat fishwomen and the fat shopwomen, and
whom even the fat pork-seller herself, honest, but unforgiving, caused
to be arrested as a republican who had broken his ban, convinced that
she was laboring for the good digestion of all honest people.

From this mother sprang the sanest, the most human of girls, Pauline
Quenu, the well-balanced, the reasonable, the virgin; who, knowing
everything, accepted the joy of living in so ardent a love for others
that, in spite of the revolt of her youthful heart, she resigned to her
friend her cousin and betrothed, Lazare, and afterward saved the child
of the disunited household, becoming its true mother; always
triumphant, always gay, notwithstanding her sacrificed and ruined life,
in her monotonous solitude, facing the great sea, in the midst of a
little world of sufferers groaning with pain, but who did not wish to
die.

Then came Gervaise Macquart with her four children: bandy-legged,
pretty, and industrious Gervaise, whom her lover Lantier turned into
the street in the faubourg, where she met the zinc worker Coupeau, the
skilful, steady workman whom she married, and with whom she lived so
happily at first, having three women working in her laundry, but
afterward sinking with her husband, as was inevitable, to the
degradation of her surroundings. He, gradually conquered by alcohol,
brought by it to madness and death; she herself perverted, become a
slattern, her moral ruin completed by the return of Lantier, living in
the tranquil ignominy of a household of three, thenceforward the
wretched victim of want, her accomplice, to which she at last
succumbed, dying one night of starvation.

Her eldest son, Claude, had the unhappy genius of a great painter
struck with madness, the impotent madness of feeling within him the
masterpiece to which his fingers refused to give shape; a giant
wrestler always defeated, a crucified martyr to his work, adoring
woman, sacrificing his wife Christine, so loving and for a time so
beloved, to the increate, divine woman of his visions, but whom his
pencil was unable to delineate in her nude perfection, possessed by a
devouring passion for producing, an insatiable longing to create, a
longing so torturing when it could not be satisfied, that he ended it
by hanging himself.

Jacques brought crime, the hereditary taint being transmuted in him
into an instinctive appetite for blood, the young and fresh blood from
the gashed throat of a woman, the first comer, the passer-by in the
street: a horrible malady against which he struggled, but which took
possession of him again in the course of his _amour_ with the
submissive and sensual Severine, whom a tragic story of assassination
caused to live in constant terror, and whom he stabbed one evening in
an excess of frenzy, maddened by the sight of her white throat. Then
this savage human beast rushed among the trains filing past swiftly,
and mounted the snorting engine of which he was the engineer, the
beloved engine which was one day to crush him to atoms, and then, left
without a guide, to rush furiously off into space braving unknown
disasters.

Étienne, in his turn driven out, arrived in the black country on a
freezing night in March, descended into the voracious pit, fell in love
with the melancholy Catherine, of whom a ruffian robbed him; lived with
the miners their gloomy life of misery and base promiscuousness, until
one day when hunger, prompting rebellion, sent across the barren plain
a howling mob of wretches who demanded bread, tearing down and burning
as they went, under the menace of the guns of the band that went off of
themselves, a terrible convulsion announcing the end of the world. The
avenging blood of the Maheus was to rise up later; of Alzire dead of
starvation, Maheu killed by a bullet, Zacharie killed by an explosion
of fire-damp, Catherine under the ground. La Maheude alone survived to
weep her dead, descending again into the mine to earn her thirty sons,
while Étienne, the beaten chief of the band, haunted by the dread of
future demands, went away on a warm April morning, listening to the
secret growth of the new world whose germination was soon to dazzle the
earth.

Nana then became the avenger; the girl born among the social filth of
the faubourgs; the golden fly sprung from the rottenness below, that
was tolerated and concealed, carrying in the fluttering of its wings
the ferment of destruction, rising and contaminating the aristocracy,
poisoning men only by alighting upon them, in the palaces through whose
windows it entered; the unconscious instrument of ruin and death—fierce
flame of Vandeuvres, the melancholy fate of Foucarmont, lost in the
Chinese waters, the disaster of Steiner, reduced to live as an honest
man, the imbecility of La Faloise and the tragic ruin of the Muffats,
and the white corpse of Georges, watched by Philippe, come out of
prison the day before, when the air of the epoch was so contaminated
that she herself was infected, and died of malignant smallpox, caught
at the death-bed of her son Louiset, while Paris passed beneath her
windows, intoxicated, possessed by the frenzy of war, rushing to
general ruin.

Lastly comes Jean Macquart, the workman and soldier become again a
peasant, fighting with the hard earth, which exacts that every grain of
corn shall be purchased with a drop of sweat, fighting, above all, with
the country people, whom covetousness and the long and difficult battle
with the soil cause to burn with the desire, incessantly stimulated, of
possession. Witness the Fouans, grown old, parting with their fields as
if they were parting with their flesh; the Buteaus in their eager greed
committing parricide, to hasten the inheritance of a field of lucern;
the stubborn Françoise dying from the stroke of a scythe, without
speaking, rather than that a sod should go out of the family—all this
drama of simple natures governed by instinct, scarcely emerged from
primitive barbarism—all this human filth on the great earth, which
alone remains immortal, the mother from whom they issue and to whom
they return again, she whom they love even to crime, who continually
remakes life, for its unknown end, even with the misery and the
abomination of the beings she nourishes. And it was Jean, too, who,
become a widower and having enlisted again at the first rumor of war,
brought the inexhaustible reserve, the stock of eternal rejuvenation
which the earth keeps; Jean, the humblest, the staunchest soldier at
the final downfall, swept along in the terrible and fatal storm which,
from the frontier to Sedan, in sweeping away the Empire, threatened to
sweep away the country; always wise, circumspect, firm in his hope,
loving with fraternal affection his comrade Maurice, the demented child
of the people, the holocaust doomed to expiation, weeping tears of
blood when inexorable destiny chose himself to hew off this rotten
limb, and after all had ended—the continual defeats, the frightful
civil war, the lost provinces, the thousands of millions of francs to
pay—taking up the march again, notwithstanding, returning to the land
which awaited him, to the great and difficult task of making a new
France.

Pascal paused; Clotilde had handed him all the packages, one by one,
and he had gone over them all, laid bare the contents of all,
classified them anew, and placed them again on the top shelf of the
press. He was out of breath, exhausted by his swift course through all
this humanity, while, without voice, without movement, the young girl,
stunned by this overflowing torrent of life, waited still, incapable of
thought or judgment. The rain still beat furiously upon the dark
fields. The lightning had just struck a tree in the neighborhood, that
had split with a terrible crash. The candles flared up in the wind that
came in from the open window.

“Ah!” he resumed, pointing to the papers again, “there is a world in
itself, a society, a civilization, the whole of life is there, with its
manifestations, good and bad, in the heat and labor of the forge which
shapes everything. Yes, our family of itself would suffice as an
example to science, which will perhaps one day establish with
mathematical exactness the laws governing the diseases of the blood and
nerves that show themselves in a race, after a first organic lesion,
and that determine, according to environment, the sentiments, desires,
and passions of each individual of that race, all the human, natural
and instinctive manifestations which take the names of virtues and
vices. And it is also a historical document, it relates the story of
the Second Empire, from the _coup d’etat_ to Sedan; for our family
spring from the people, they spread themselves through the whole of
contemporary society, invaded every place, impelled by their unbridled
appetites, by that impulse, essentially modern, that eager desire that
urges the lower classes to enjoyment, in their ascent through the
social strata. We started, as I have said, from Plassans, and here we
are now arrived once more at Plassans.”

He paused again, and then resumed in a low, dreamy voice:

“What an appalling mass stirred up! how many passions, how many joys,
how many sufferings crammed into this colossal heap of facts! There is
pure history: the Empire founded in blood, at first pleasure-loving and
despotic, conquering rebellious cities, then gliding to a slow
disintegration, dissolving in blood—in such a sea of blood that the
entire nation came near being swamped in it. There are social studies:
wholesale and retail trade, prostitution, crime, land, money, the
_bourgeoisie_, the people—that people who rot in the sewer of the
faubourgs, who rebel in the great industrial centers, all that
ever-increasing growth of mighty socialism, big with the new century.
There are simple human studies: domestic pages, love stories, the
struggle of minds and hearts against unjust nature, the destruction of
those who cry out under their too difficult task, the cry of virtue
immolating itself, victorious over pain, There are fancies, flights of
the imagination beyond the real: vast gardens always in bloom,
cathedrals with slender, exquisitely wrought spires, marvelous tales
come down from paradise, ideal affections remounting to heaven in a
kiss. There is everything: the good and the bad, the vulgar and the
sublime, flowers, mud, blood, laughter, the torrent of life itself,
bearing humanity endlessly on!”

He took up again the genealogical tree which had remained neglected on
the table, spread it out and began to go over it once more with his
finger, enumerating now the members of the family who were still
living: Eugène Rougon, a fallen majesty, who remained in the Chamber,
the witness, the impassible defender of the old world swept away at the
downfall of the Empire. Aristide Saccard, who, after having changed his
principles, had fallen upon his feet a republican, the editor of a
great journal, on the way to make new millions, while his natural son
Victor, who had never reappeared, was living still in the shade, since
he was not in the galleys, cast forth by the world into the future,
into the unknown, like a human beast foaming with the hereditary virus,
who must communicate his malady with every bite he gives. Sidonie
Rougon, who had for a time disappeared, weary of disreputable affairs,
had lately retired to a sort of religious house, where she was living
in monastic austerity, the treasurer of the Marriage Fund, for aiding
in the marriage of girls who were mothers. Octave Mouret, proprietor of
the great establishment _Au Bonheur des Dames_, whose colossal fortune
still continued increasing, had had, toward the end of the winter, a
third child by his wife Denise Baudu, whom he adored, although his mind
was beginning to be deranged again. The Abbé Mouret, curé at St.
Eutrope, in the heart of a marshy gorge, lived there in great
retirement, and very modestly, with his sister Désirée, refusing all
advancement from his bishop, and waiting for death like a holy man,
rejecting all medicines, although he was already suffering from
consumption in its first stage. Hélène Mouret was living very happily
in seclusion with her second husband, M. Rambaud, on the little estate
which they owned near Marseilles, on the seashore; she had had no child
by her second husband. Pauline Quenu was still at Bonneville at the
other extremity of France, in face of the vast ocean, alone with little
Paul, since the death of Uncle Chanteau, having resolved never to
marry, in order to devote herself entirely to the son of her cousin
Lazare, who had become a widower and had gone to America to make a
fortune. Étienne Lantier, returning to Paris after the strike at
Montsou, had compromised himself later in the insurrection of the
Commune, whose principles he had defended with ardor; he had been
condemned to death, but his sentence being commuted was transported and
was now at Nouméa. It was even said that he had married immediately on
his arrival there, and that he had had a child, the sex of which,
however, was not known with certainty. Finally, Jean Macquart, who had
received his discharge after the Bloody Week, had settled at
Valqueyras, near Plassans, where he had had the good fortune to marry a
healthy girl, Mélanie Vial, the daughter of a well-to-do peasant, whose
lands he farmed, and his wife had borne him a son in May.

“Yes, it is true,” he resumed, in a low voice; “races degenerate. There
is here a veritable exhaustion, rapid deterioration, as if our family,
in their fury of enjoyment, in the gluttonous satisfaction of their
appetites, had consumed themselves too quickly. Louiset, dead in
infancy; Jacques Louis, a half imbecile, carried off by a nervous
disease; Victor returned to the savage state, wandering about in who
knows what dark places; our poor Charles, so beautiful and so frail;
these are the latest branches of the tree, the last pale offshoots into
which the puissant sap of the larger branches seems to have been unable
to mount. The worm was in the trunk, it has ascended into the fruit,
and is devouring it. But one must never despair; families are a
continual growth. They go back beyond the common ancestor, into the
unfathomable strata of the races that have lived, to the first being;
and they will put forth new shoots without end, they will spread and
ramify to infinity, through future ages. Look at our tree; it counts
only five generations. It has not so much importance as a blade of
grass, even, in the human forest, vast and dark, of which the peoples
are the great secular oaks. Think only of the immense roots which
spread through the soil; think of the continual putting forth of new
leaves above, which mingle with other leaves of the ever-rolling sea of
treetops, at the fructifying, eternal breath of life. Well, hope lies
there, in the daily reconstruction of the race by the new blood which
comes from without. Each marriage brings other elements, good or bad,
of which the effect is, however, to prevent certain and progressive
regeneration. Breaches are repaired, faults effaced, an equilibrium is
inevitably re-established at the end of a few generations, and it is
the average man that always results; vague humanity, obstinately
pursuing its mysterious labor, marching toward its unknown end.”

He paused, and heaved a deep sigh.

“Ah! our family, what is it going to become; in what being will it
finally end?”

He continued, not now taking into account the survivors whom he had
just named; having classified these, he knew what they were capable of,
but he was full of keen curiosity regarding the children who were still
infants. He had written to a _confrère_ in Nouméa for precise
information regarding the wife whom Étienne had lately married there,
and the child which she had had, but he had heard nothing, and he
feared greatly that on that side the tree would remain incomplete. He
was more fully furnished with documents regarding the two children of
Octave Mouret, with whom he continued to correspond; the little girl
was growing up puny and delicate, while the little boy, who strongly
resembled his mother, had developed superbly, and was perfectly
healthy. His strongest hope, besides these, was in Jean’s children, the
eldest of whom was a magnificent boy, full of the youthful vigor of the
races that go back to the soil to regenerate themselves. Pascal
occasionally went to Valqueyras, and he returned happy from that
fertile spot, where the father, quiet and rational, was always at his
plow, the mother cheerful and simple, with her vigorous frame, capable
of bearing a world. Who knew what sound branch was to spring from that
side? Perhaps the wise and puissant of the future were to germinate
there. The worst of it, for the beauty of his tree, was that all these
little boys and girls were still so young that he could not classify
them. And his voice grew tender as he spoke of this hope of the future,
these fair-haired children, in the unavowed regret for his celibacy.

Still contemplating the tree spread out before him, he cried:

“And yet it is complete, it is decisive. Look! I repeat to you that all
hereditary cases are to be found there. To establish my theory, I had
only to base it on the collection of these facts. And indeed, the
marvelous thing is that there you can put your finger on the cause why
creatures born of the same stock can appear radically different,
although they are only logical modifications of common ancestors. The
trunk explains the branches, and these explain the leaves. In your
father Saccard and your Uncle Eugène Rougon, so different in their
temperaments and their lives, it is the same impulse which made the
inordinate appetites of the one and the towering ambition of the other.
Angelique, that pure lily, is born from the disreputable Sidonie, in
the rapture which makes mystics or lovers, according to the
environment. The three children of the Mourets are born of the same
breath which makes of the clever Octave the dry goods merchant, a
millionaire; of the devout Serge, a poor country priest; of the
imbecile Désirée, a beautiful and happy girl. But the example is still
more striking in the children of Gervaise; the neurosis passes down,
and Nana sells herself; Étienne is a rebel; Jacques, a murderer;
Claude, a genius; while Pauline, their cousin german, near by, is
victorious virtue—virtue which struggles and immolates itself. It is
heredity, life itself which makes imbeciles, madmen, criminals and
great men. Cells abort, others take their place, and we have a
scoundrel or a madman instead of a man of genius, or simply an honest
man. And humanity rolls on, bearing everything on its tide.”

Then in a new shifting of his thought, growing still more animated, he
continued:

“And animals—the beast that suffers and that loves, which is the rough
sketch, as it were, of man—all the animals our brothers, that live our
life, yes, I would have put them in the ark, I would give them a place
among our family, show them continually mingling with us, completing
our existence. I have known cats whose presence was the mysterious
charm of the household; dogs that were adored, whose death was mourned,
and left in the heart an inconsolable grief. I have known goats, cows,
and asses of very great importance, and whose personality played such a
part that their history ought to be written. And there is our Bonhomme,
our poor old horse, that has served us for a quarter of a century. Do
you not think that he has mingled his life with ours, and that
henceforth he is one of the family? We have modified him, as he has
influenced us a little; we shall end by being made in the same image,
and this is so true that now, when I see him, half blind, with
wandering gaze, his legs stiff with rheumatism, I kiss him on both
cheeks as if he were a poor old relation who had fallen to my charge.
Ah, animals, all creeping and crawling things, all creatures that
lament, below man, how large a place in our sympathies it would be
necessary to give them in a history of life!”

This was a last cry in which Pascal gave utterance to his passionate
tenderness for all created beings. He had gradually become more and
more excited, and had so come to make this confession of his faith in
the continuous and victorious work of animated nature. And Clotilde,
who thus far had not spoken, pale from the catastrophe in which her
plans had ended, at last opened her lips to ask:

“Well, master, and what am I here?”

She placed one of her slender fingers on the leaf of the tree on which
she saw her name written. He had always passed this leaf by. She
insisted.

“Yes, I; what am I? Why have you not read me my envelope?”

For a moment he remained silent, as if surprised at the question.

“Why? For no reason. It is true, I have nothing to conceal from you.
You see what is written here? ‘Clotilde, born in 1847. Selection of the
mother. Reversional heredity, with moral and physical predominance of
the maternal grandfather.’ Nothing can be clearer. Your mother has
predominated in you; you have her fine intelligence, and you have also
something of her coquetry, at times of her indolence and of her
submissiveness. Yes, you are very feminine, like her. Without your
being aware of it, I would say that you love to be loved. Besides, your
mother was a great novel reader, an imaginative being who loved to
spend whole days dreaming over a book; she doted on nursery tales, had
her fortune told by cards, consulted clairvoyants; and I have always
thought that your concern about spiritual matters, your anxiety about
the unknown, came from that source. But what completed your character
by giving you a dual nature, was the influence of your grandfather,
Commandant Sicardot. I knew him; he was not a genius, but he had at
least a great deal of uprightness and energy. Frankly, if it were not
for him, I do not believe that you would be worth much, for the other
influences are hardly good. He has given you the best part of your
nature, combativeness, pride, and frankness.”

She had listened to him with attention. She nodded slightly, to signify
that it was indeed so, that she was not offended, although her lips
trembled visibly at these new details regarding her people and her
mother.

“Well,” she resumed, “and you, master?”

This time he did not hesitate.

“Oh, I!” he cried, “what is the use of speaking of me? I do not belong
to the family. You see what is written here. ‘Pascal, born in 1813.
Individual variation. Combination in which the physical and moral
characters of the parents are blended, without any of their traits
seeming to appear in the new being.’ My mother has told me often enough
that I did not belong to it, that in truth she did not know where I
could have come from.”

Those words came from him like a cry of relief, of involuntary joy.

“And the people make no mistake in the matter. Have you ever heard me
called Pascal Rougon in the town? No; people always say simply Dr.
Pascal. It is because I stand apart. And it may not be very
affectionate to feel so, but I am delighted at it, for there are in
truth inheritances too heavy to bear. It is of no use that I love them
all. My heart beats none the less joyously when I feel myself another
being, different from them, without any community with them. Not to be
of them, my God! not to be of them! It is a breath of pure air; it is
what gives me the courage to have them all here, to put them, in all
their nakedness, in their envelopes, and still to find the courage to
live!”

He stopped, and there was silence for a time. The rain had ceased, the
storm was passing away, the thunderclaps sounded more and more distant,
while from the refreshed fields, still dark, there came in through the
open window a delicious odor of moist earth. In the calm air the
candles were burning out with a tall, tranquil flame.

“Ah!” said Clotilde simply, with a gesture of discouragement, “what are
we to become finally?”

She had declared it to herself one night, in the threshing yard; life
was horrible, how could one live peaceful and happy? It was a terrible
light that science threw on the world. Analysis searched every wound of
humanity, in order to expose its horror. And now he had spoken still
more bluntly; he had increased the disgust which she had for persons
and things, pitilessly dissecting her family. The muddy torrent had
rolled on before her for nearly three hours, and she had heard the most
dreadful revelations, the harsh and terrible truth about her people,
her people who were so dear to her, whom it was her duty to love; her
father grown powerful through pecuniary crimes; her brother dissolute;
her grandmother unscrupulous, covered with the blood of the just; the
others almost all tainted, drunkards, ruffians, murderers, the
monstrous blossoming of the human tree.

The blow had been so rude that she could not yet recover from it,
stunned as she was by the revelation of her whole family history, made
to her in this way at a stroke. And yet the lesson was rendered
innocuous, so to say, by something great and good, a breath of profound
humanity which had borne her through it. Nothing bad had come to her
from it. She felt herself beaten by a sharp sea wind, the storm wind
which strengthens and expands the lungs. He had revealed everything,
speaking freely even of his mother, without judging her, continuing to
preserve toward her his deferential attitude, as a scientist who does
not judge events. To tell everything in order to know everything, in
order to remedy everything, was not this the cry which he had uttered
on that beautiful summer night?

And by the very excess of what he had just revealed to her, she
remained shaken, blinded by this too strong light, but understanding
him at last, and confessing to herself that he was attempting in this
an immense work. In spite of everything, it was a cry of health, of
hope in the future. He spoke as a benefactor who, since heredity made
the world, wished to fix its laws, in order to control it, and to make
a new and happy world. Was there then only mud in this overflowing
stream, whose sluices he had opened? How much gold had passed, mingled
with the grass and the flowers on its borders? Hundreds of beings were
still flying swiftly before her, and she was haunted by good and
charming faces, delicate girlish profiles, by the serene beauty of
women. All passion bled there, hearts swelled with every tender
rapture. They were numerous, the Jeannes, the Angeliques, the Paulines,
the Marthes, the Gervaises, the Hélènes. They and others, even those
who were least good, even terrible men, the worst of the band, showed a
brotherhood with humanity.

And it was precisely this breath which she had felt pass, this broad
current of sympathy, that he had introduced naturally into his exact
scientific lesson. He did not seem to be moved; he preserved the
impersonal and correct attitude of the demonstrator, but within him
what tender suffering, what a fever of devotion, what a giving up of
his whole being to the happiness of others? His entire work,
constructed with such mathematical precision, was steeped in this
fraternal suffering, even in its most cruel ironies. Had he not just
spoken of the animals, like an elder brother of the wretched living
beings that suffer? Suffering exasperated him; his wrath was because of
his too lofty dream, and he had become harsh only in his hatred of the
factitious and the transitory; dreaming of working, not for the polite
society of a time, but for all humanity in the gravest hours of its
history. Perhaps, even, it was this revolt against the vulgarity of the
time which had made him throw himself, in bold defiance, into theories
and their application. And the work remained human, overflowing as it
was with an infinite pity for beings and things.

Besides, was it not life? There is no absolute evil. Most often a
virtue presents itself side by side with a defect. No man is bad to
every one, each man makes the happiness of some one; so that, when one
does not view things from a single standpoint only, one recognizes in
the end the utility of every human being. Those who believe in God
should say to themselves that if their God does not strike the wicked
dead, it is because he sees his work in its totality, and that he
cannot descend to the individual. Labor ends to begin anew; the living,
as a whole, continue, in spite of everything, admirable in their
courage and their industry; and love of life prevails over all.

This giant labor of men, this obstinacy in living, is their excuse, is
redemption. And then, from a great height the eye saw only this
continual struggle, and a great deal of good, in spite of everything,
even though there might be a great deal of evil. One shared the general
indulgence, one pardoned, one had only an infinite pity and an ardent
charity. The haven was surely there, waiting those who have lost faith
in dogmas, who wish to understand the meaning of their lives, in the
midst of the apparent iniquity of the world. One must live for the
effort of living, for the stone to be carried to the distant and
unknown work, and the only possible peace in the world is in the joy of
making this effort.

Another hour passed; the entire night had flown by in this terrible
lesson of life, without either Pascal or Clotilde being conscious of
where they were, or of the flight of time. And he, overworked for some
time past, and worn out by the life of suspicion and sadness which he
had been leading, started nervously, as if he had suddenly awakened.

“Come, you know all; do you feel your heart strong, tempered by the
truth, full of pardon and of hope? Are you with me?”

But, still stunned by the frightful moral shock which she had received,
she too, started, bewildered. Her old beliefs had been so completely
overthrown, so many new ideas were awakening within her, that she did
not dare to question herself, in order to find an answer. She felt
herself seized and carried away by the omnipotence of truth. She
endured it without being convinced.

“Master,” she stammered, “master—”

And they remained for a moment face to face, looking at each other. Day
was breaking, a dawn of exquisite purity, far off in the vast, clear
sky, washed by the storm. Not a cloud now stained the pale azure tinged
with rose color. All the cheerful sounds of awakening life in the
rain-drenched fields came in through the window, while the candles,
burned down to the socket, paled in the growing light.

“Answer; are you with me, altogether with me?”

For a moment he thought she was going to throw herself on his neck and
burst into tears. A sudden impulse seemed to impel her. But they saw
each other in their semi-nudity. She, who had not noticed it before,
was now conscious that she was only half dressed, that her arms were
bare, her shoulders bare, covered only by the scattered locks of her
unbound hair, and on her right shoulder, near the armpit, on lowering
her eyes, she perceived again the few drops of blood of the bruise
which he had given her, when he had grasped her roughly, in struggling
to master her. Then an extraordinary confusion took possession of her,
a certainty that she was going to be vanquished, as if by this grasp he
had become her master, and forever. This sensation was prolonged; she
was seized and drawn on, without the consent of her will, by an
irresistible impulse to submit.

Abruptly Clotilde straightened herself, struggling with herself,
wishing to reflect and to recover herself. She pressed her bare arms
against her naked throat. All the blood in her body rushed to her skin
in a rosy blush of shame. Then, in her divine and slender grace, she
turned to flee.

“Master, master, let me go—I will see—”

With the swiftness of alarmed maidenhood, she took refuge in her
chamber, as she had done once before. He heard her lock the door
hastily, with a double turn of the key. He remained alone, and he asked
himself suddenly, seized by infinite discouragement and sadness, if he
had done right in speaking, if the truth would germinate in this dear
and adored creature, and bear one day a harvest of happiness.

VI.

The days wore on. October began with magnificent weather—a sultry
autumn in which the fervid heat of summer was prolonged, with a
cloudless sky. Then the weather changed, fierce winds began to blow,
and a last storm channeled gullies in the hillsides. And to the
melancholy household at La Souleiade the approach of winter seemed to
have brought an infinite sadness.

It was a new hell. There were no more violent quarrels between Pascal
and Clotilde. The doors were no longer slammed. Voices raised in
dispute no longer obliged Martine to go continually upstairs to listen
outside the door. They scarcely spoke to each other now; and not a
single word had been exchanged between them regarding the midnight
scene, although weeks had passed since it had taken place. He, through
an inexplicable scruple, a strange delicacy of which he was not himself
conscious, did not wish to renew the conversation, and to demand the
answer which he expected—a promise of faith in him and of submission.
She, after the great moral shock which had completely transformed her,
still reflected, hesitated, struggled, fighting against herself,
putting off her decision in order not to surrender, in her instinctive
rebelliousness. And the misunderstanding continued, in the midst of the
mournful silence of the miserable house, where there was no longer any
happiness.

During all this time Pascal suffered terribly, without making any
complaint. He had sunk into a dull distrust, imagining that he was
still being watched, and that if they seemed to leave him at peace it
was only in order to concoct in secret the darkest plots. His
uneasiness increased, even, and he expected every day some catastrophe
to happen—the earth suddenly to open and swallow up his papers, La
Souleiade itself to be razed to the ground, carried away bodily,
scattered to the winds.

The persecution against his thought, against his moral and intellectual
life, in thus hiding itself, and so rendering him helpless to defend
himself, became so intolerable to him that he went to bed every night
in a fever. He would often start and turn round suddenly, thinking he
was going to surprise the enemy behind him engaged in some piece of
treachery, to find nothing there but the shadow of his own fears. At
other times, seized by some suspicion, he would remain on the watch for
hours together, hidden, behind his blinds, or lying in wait in a
passage; but not a soul stirred, he heard nothing but the violent
beating of his heart. His fears kept him in a state of constant
agitation; he never went to bed at night without visiting every room;
he no longer slept, or, if he did, he would waken with a start at the
slightest noise, ready to defend himself.

And what still further aggravated Pascal’s sufferings was the constant,
the ever more bitter thought that the wound was inflicted upon him by
the only creature he loved in the world, the adored Clotilde, whom for
twenty years he had seen grow in beauty and in grace, whose life had
hitherto bloomed like a beautiful flower, perfuming his. She, great
God! for whom his heart was full of affection, whom he had never
analyzed, she, who had become his joy, his courage, his hope, in whose
young life he lived over again. When she passed by, with her delicate
neck, so round, so fresh, he was invigorated, bathed in health and joy,
as at the coming of spring.

His whole life, besides, explained this invasion, this subjugation of
his being by the young girl who had entered into his heart while she
was still a little child, and who, as she grew up, had gradually taken
possession of the whole place. Since he had settled at Plassans, he had
led a blest existence, wrapped up in his books, far from women. The
only passion he was ever known to have had, was his love for the lady
who had died, whose finger tips he had never kissed. He had not lived;
he had within him a reserve of youthfulness, of vigor, whose surging
flood now clamored rebelliously at the menace of approaching age. He
would have become attached to an animal, a stray dog that he had
chanced to pick up in the street, and that had licked his hand. And it
was this child whom he loved, all at once become an adorable woman, who
now distracted him, who tortured him by her hostility.

Pascal, so gay, so kind, now became insupportably gloomy and harsh. He
grew angry at the slightest word; he would push aside the astonished
Martine, who would look up at him with the submissive eyes of a beaten
animal. From morning till night he went about the gloomy house,
carrying his misery about with him, with so forbidding a countenance
that no one ventured to speak to him.

He never took Clotilde with him now on his visits, but went alone. And
thus it was that he returned home one afternoon, his mind distracted
because of an accident which had happened; having on his conscience, as
a physician, the death of a man.

He had gone to give a hypodermic injection to Lafouasse, the tavern
keeper, whose ataxia had within a short time made such rapid progress
that he regarded him as doomed. But, notwithstanding, Pascal still
fought obstinately against the disease, continuing the treatment, and
as ill luck would have it, on this day the little syringe had caught up
at the bottom of the vial an impure particle, which had escaped the
filter. Immediately a drop of blood appeared; to complete his
misfortune, he had punctured a vein. He was at once alarmed, seeing the
tavern keeper turn pale and gasp for breath, while large drops of cold
perspiration broke out upon his face. Then he understood; death came as
if by a stroke of lightning, the lips turning blue, the face black. It
was an embolism; he had nothing to blame but the insufficiency of his
preparations, his still rude method. No doubt Lafouasse had been
doomed. He could not, perhaps, have lived six months longer, and that
in the midst of atrocious sufferings, but the brutal fact of this
terrible death was none the less there, and what despairing regret,
what rage against impotent and murderous science, and what a shock to
his faith! He returned home, livid, and did not make his appearance
again until the following day, after having remained sixteen hours shut
up in his room, lying in a semi-stupor on the bed, across which he had
thrown himself, dressed as he was.

On the afternoon of this day Clotilde, who was sitting beside him in
the study, sewing, ventured to break the oppressive silence. She looked
up, and saw him turning over the leaves of a book wearily, searching
for some information which he was unable to find.

“Master, are you ill? Why do you not tell me, if you are. I would take
care of you.”

He kept his eyes bent upon the book, and muttered:

“What does it matter to you whether I am ill or not? I need no one to
take care of me.”

She resumed, in a conciliating voice:

“If you have troubles, and can tell them to me, it would perhaps be a
relief to you to do so. Yesterday you came in looking so sad. You must
not allow yourself to be cast down in that way. I have spent a very
anxious night. I came to your door three times to listen, tormented by
the idea that you were suffering.”

Gently as she spoke, her words were like the cut of a whip. In his weak
and nervous condition a sudden access of rage made him push away the
book and rise up trembling.

“So you spy upon me, then. I cannot even retire to my room without
people coming to glue their ears to the walls. Yes, you listen even to
the beatings of my heart. You watch for my death, to pillage and burn
everything here.”

His voice rose and all his unjust suffering vented itself in complaints
and threats.

“I forbid you to occupy yourself about me. Is there nothing else that
you have to say to me? Have you reflected? Can you put your hand in
mine loyally, and say to me that we are in accord?”

She did not answer. She only continued to look at him with her large
clear eyes, frankly declaring that she would not surrender yet, while
he, exasperated more and more by this attitude, lost all self-control.

“Go away, go away,” he stammered, pointing to the door. “I do not wish
you to remain near me. I do not wish to have enemies near me. I do not
wish you to remain near me to drive me mad!”

She rose, very pale, and went at once out of the room, without looking
behind, carrying her work with her.

During the month which followed, Pascal took refuge in furious and
incessant work. He now remained obstinately, for whole days at a time,
alone in the study, sometimes passing even the nights there, going over
old documents, to revise all his works on heredity. It seemed as if a
sort of frenzy had seized him to assure himself of the legitimacy of
his hopes, to force science to give him the certainty that humanity
could be remade—made a higher, a healthy humanity. He no longer left
the house, he abandoned his patients even, and lived among his papers,
without air or exercise. And after a month of this overwork, which
exhausted him without appeasing his domestic torments, he fell into
such a state of nervous exhaustion that illness, for some time latent,
declared itself at last with alarming violence.

Pascal, when he rose in the morning, felt worn out with fatigue,
wearier and less refreshed than he had been on going to bed the night
before. He constantly had pains all over his body; his limbs failed
him, after five minutes’ walk; the slightest exertion tired him; the
least movement caused him intense pain. At times the floor seemed
suddenly to sway beneath his feet. He had a constant buzzing in his
ears, flashes of light dazzled his eyes. He took a loathing for wine,
he had no longer any appetite, and his digestion was seriously