omething 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 t