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Updated: May 2, 2025
The tattlers drew closer together and such words as "rogues," "thieves," and "shameless intriguers," ascended to the shutter behind which Pierre and Felicite were perspiring with fear and indignation. The people on the square even went so far as to pity Macquart. This was the final blow.
Never had the Faubourg beheld such audacious impropriety. The stupefaction was so great, the idea of Macquart having found a young and wealthy mistress so completely upset the gossips, that they even spoke gently of Adelaide. "Poor thing! She's gone quite mad," they would say. "If she had any relatives she would have been placed in confinement long ago."
Her son, who watched her curiously, did not see her shed a tear. Macquart had made her sole legatee. She inherited his hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, and his carbine, which a fellow-smuggler, braving the balls of the custom-house officers, loyally brought back to her.
He was a journeyman tanner named Lantier. At first Macquart was furious, but he calmed down somewhat when he learnt that Lantier's mother, a worthy woman, was willing to take charge of the child. He kept Gervaise, however; she was then already earning twenty-five sous a day, and he therefore avoided all question of marriage.
The Rougon Macquart Family is less a novel or series of novels than it is a dissertation on the Second Empire from a hostile point of view. As a gallery of historical pictures, painted by an able and contemporaneous hand, it is a work of considerable value, but this value is in spite of, not on account of, the story.
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.
They looked at each other; by a common impulse the same explanation rose to their lips, Felicite was certainly there yesterday; and a sudden conviction forced itself on the doctor's mind the conviction that his mother had seen Uncle Macquart burning and that she had not quenched him.
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, Etienne, 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 Francois Mouret, to give rise to three new branches, Octave, Serge, and Desiree Mouret; while there is also the issue of Ursule and the hatter Mouret; Silvere, whose tragic death you know; Helene 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.
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.
Four years later she had a second child, which was likewise taken in by Lantier's mother. This time Macquart shut his eyes altogether.
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