nevitable, to the
degradation of her surroundings. He, gradually conquered by alcohol,
brought by it to madness and death; she herself perverted, become a
slattern, her moral ruin completed by the return of Lantier, living
in the tranquil ignominy of a household of three, thenceforward the
wretched victim of want, her accomplice, to which she at last succumbed,
dying one night of starvation.

Her eldest son, Claude, had the unhappy genius of a great painter struck
with madness, the impotent madness of feeling within him the masterpiece
to which his fingers refused to give shape; a giant wrestler always
defeated, a crucified martyr to his work, adoring woman, sacrificing his
wife Christine, so loving and for a time so beloved, to the increate,
divine woman of his visions, but whom his pencil was unable to delineate
in her nude perfection, possessed by a devouring passion for producing,
an insatiable longing to create, a longing so torturing when it could
not be satisfied, that he ended it by hanging himself.

Jacques brought crime, the hereditary taint being transmuted in him into
an instinctive appetite for blood, the young and fresh blood from the
gashed throat of a woman, the first comer, the passer-by in the street:
a horrible malady against which he struggled, but which took possession
of him again in the course of his _amour_ with the submissive and
sensual Severine, whom a tragic story of assassination caused to live in
constant terror, and whom he stabbed one evening in an excess of frenzy,
maddened by the sight of her white throat. Then this savage human beast
rushed among the trains filing past swiftly, and mounted the snorting
engine of which he was the engineer, the beloved engine which was one
day to crush him to atoms, and then, left without a guide, to rush
furiously off into space braving unknown disasters.

Etienne, in his turn driven out, arrived in the black country on a
freezing night in March, descended into the voracious pit, fell in love
with the melancholy Catherine, of whom a ruffian robbed him; lived with
the miners their gloomy life of misery and base promiscuousness, until
one day when hunger, prompting rebellion, sent across the barren plain a
howling mob of wretches who demanded bread, tearing down and burning
as they went, under the menace of the guns of the band that went off of
themselves, a terrible convulsion announcing the end of the world. The
avenging blood of the Maheus was to ris