e up later; of Alzire dead of
starvation, Maheu killed by a bullet, Zacharie killed by an explosion of
fire-damp, Catherine under the ground. La Maheude alone survived to weep
her dead, descending again into the mine to earn her thirty sons, while
Etienne, the beaten chief of the band, haunted by the dread of future
demands, went away on a warm April morning, listening to the secret
growth of the new world whose germination was soon to dazzle the earth.

Nana then became the avenger; the girl born among the social filth of
the faubourgs; the golden fly sprung from the rottenness below, that
was tolerated and concealed, carrying in the fluttering of its wings
the ferment of destruction, rising and contaminating the aristocracy,
poisoning men only by alighting upon them, in the palaces through whose
windows it entered; the unconscious instrument of ruin and death--fierce
flame of Vandeuvres, the melancholy fate of Foucarmont, lost in the
Chinese waters, the disaster of Steiner, reduced to live as an honest
man, the imbecility of La Faloise and the tragic ruin of the Muffats,
and the white corpse of Georges, watched by Philippe, come out of prison
the day before, when the air of the epoch was so contaminated that she
herself was infected, and died of malignant smallpox, caught at the
death-bed of her son Louiset, while Paris passed beneath her windows,
intoxicated, possessed by the frenzy of war, rushing to general ruin.

Lastly comes Jean Macquart, the workman and soldier become again a
peasant, fighting with the hard earth, which exacts that every grain of
corn shall be purchased with a drop of sweat, fighting, above all, with
the country people, whom covetousness and the long and difficult battle
with the soil cause to burn with the desire, incessantly stimulated, of
possession. Witness the Fouans, grown old, parting with their fields as
if they were parting with their flesh; the Buteaus in their eager greed
committing parricide, to hasten the inheritance of a field of lucern;
the stubborn Francoise dying from the stroke of a scythe, without
speaking, rather than that a sod should go out of the family--all this
drama of simple natures governed by instinct, scarcely emerged from
primitive barbarism--all this human filth on the great earth, which
alone remains immortal, the mother from whom they issue and to whom they
return again, she whom they love even to crime, who continually remakes
life, for its unknown end, even w