Doctor Pascal | Page 7

had had when seventeen by a servant,
and who now, at the age of fifteen, weak of intellect, a half-idiot, lived
at Plassans, going from the house of one to that of another, a burden to
all.
She remained silent a moment longer, waiting for some remark from
Clotilde, some transition by which she might come to the subject she
wished to touch upon. When she saw that the young girl, occupied in
arranging the papers on her desk, was no longer listening, she came to a
sudden decision, after casting a glance at Martine, who continued
mending the chair, as if she were deaf and dumb.
"Your uncle cut the article out of the _Temps_, then?"
Clotilde smiled calmly.
"Yes, master put it away among his papers. Ah! how many notes he
buries in there! Births, deaths, the smallest event in life, everything
goes in there. And the genealogical tree is there also, our famous
genealogical tree, which he keeps up to date!"
The eyes of old Mme. Rougon flamed. She looked fixedly at the young
girl.
"You know them, those papers?"
"Oh, no, grandmother; master has never spoken to me of them; and he
has forbidden me to touch them."
But she did not believe her.
"Come! you have them under your hands, you must have read them."
Very simple, with her calm rectitude, Clotilde answered, smilingly
again.

"No, when master forbids me to do anything, it is because he has his
reasons, and I do not do it."
"Well, my child," cried Felicite vehemently, dominated by her passion,
"you, whom Pascal loves tenderly, and whom he would listen to,
perhaps, you ought to entreat him to burn all that, for if he should
chance to die, and those frightful things which he has in there were to
be found, we should all be dishonored!"
Ah, those abominable papers! she saw them at night, in her nightmares,
revealing in letters of fire, the true histories, the physiological
blemishes of the family, all that wrong side of her glory which she
would have wished to bury forever with the ancestors already dead!
She knew how it was that the doctor had conceived the idea of
collecting these documents at the beginning of his great studies on
heredity; how he had found himself led to take his own family as an
example, struck by the typical cases which he saw in it, and which
helped to support laws discovered by him. Was it not a perfectly
natural field of observation, close at hand and with which he was
thoroughly familiar? And with the fine, careless justness of the scientist,
he had been accumulating for the last thirty years the most private data,
collecting and classifying everything, raising this genealogical tree of
the Rougon-Macquarts, of which the voluminous papers, crammed full
of proofs, were only the commentary.
"Ah, yes," continued Mme. Rougon hotly, "to the fire, to the fire with
all those papers that would tarnish our name!"
And as the servant rose to leave the room, seeing the turn the
conversation was taking, she stopped her by a quick gesture.
"No, no, Martine; stay! You are not in the way, since you are now one
of the family."
Then, in a hissing voice:
"A collection of falsehoods, of gossip, all the lies that our enemies,
enraged by our triumph, hurled against us in former days! Think a little
of that, my child. Against all of us, against your father, against your
mother, against your brother, all those horrors!"
"But how do you know they are horrors, grandmother?"
She was disconcerted for a moment.
"Oh, well; I suspect it! Where is the family that has not had misfortunes
which might be injuriously interpreted? Thus, the mother of us all, that

dear and venerable Aunt Dide, your great-grandmother, has she not
been for the past twenty-one years in the madhouse at the Tulettes? If
God has granted her the grace of allowing her to live to the age of one
hundred and four years, he has also cruelly afflicted her in depriving
her of her reason. Certainly, there is no shame in that; only, what
exasperates me--what must not be--is that they should say afterward
that we are all mad. And, then, regarding your grand-uncle Macquart,
too, deplorable rumors have been spread. Macquart had his faults in
past days, I do not seek to defend him. But to-day, is he not living very
reputably on his little property at the Tulettes, two steps away from our
unhappy mother, over whom he watches like a good son? And listen!
one last example. Your brother, Maxime, committed a great fault when
he had by a servant that poor little Charles, and it is certain, besides,
that the unhappy child is of unsound mind. No matter. Will