say that the darkness of her mind is complete, that no
memories remain stored up in its depths. Ah! the poor old mother, how I
pity her, if the light has not yet been finally extinguished. What
can her thoughts have been for the last twenty-one years, if she still
remembers?"

With a gesture he put this dreadful past which he knew from him. He
saw her again young, a tall, pale, slender girl with frightened eyes,
a widow, after fifteen months of married life with Rougon, the clumsy
gardener whom she had chosen for a husband, throwing herself immediately
afterwards into the arms of the smuggler Macquart, whom she loved with
a wolfish love, and whom she did not even marry. She had lived thus for
fifteen years, with her three children, one the child of her marriage,
the other two illegitimate, a capricious and tumultuous existence,
disappearing for weeks at a time, and returning all bruised, her arms
black and blue. Then Macquart had been killed, shot down like 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 Silvere, 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.

Felicite, 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 was