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, Helene
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 Helene
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 i