Complete Works of Emile Zola (1902 page)

His practice as a medical man extended to Les Artaud, and he attended his nephew Abbe Serge Mouret during an attack of brain fever. On the priest’s partial recovery, he removed him to the Paradou, and left him in the care of Albine, niece of old Jeanbernat, the caretaker of that neglected demesne. Dr. Pascal was much attached to Albine, and deeply regretted the sad love affair which resulted from Mouret’s forgetfulness of his past. He had no religious beliefs himself, and he urged Mouret to return to Albine, but the voice of the Church proved too strong in the end. La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret.

At sixty years of age Pascal was so fresh and vigorous that, though his hair and beard were white, he might have been mistaken for a young man with powdered locks. He had lived for seventeen years at La Souleiade, near Plassans, with his niece Clotilde and his old servant Martine, having amassed a little fortune, which was sufficient for his needs. He had devoted his life to the study of heredity, finding typical examples in his own family. He brought up Clotilde without imposing on her his own philosophic creed, even allowing Martine to take her to church regularly. But this tolerance brought about a serious misunderstanding between them, for the girl fell under the influence of religious mysticism, and came to look with horror on the savant’s scientific pursuits. Discovered by him in an attempt to destroy his documents, he explained to Clotilde fully and frankly the bearing of their terrible family history on his theory of heredity, with the result that her outlook on life was entirely changed; he had opposed the force of human truth against the shadows of mysticism. The struggle between Pascal and Clotilde brought them to a knowledge of mutual love, and an illicit relationship was established between them. He would have married her (this being legal in France), but having lost most of his money he was unwilling to sacrifice what he believed to be her interests, and persuaded her to go to Paris to live with her brother Maxime. Soon after her departure he was seized with an affection of the heart, and, after some weeks of suffering, died only an hour before her return. Immediately after his death his mother, Madame Felicite Rougon, took possession of his papers, and in an immense
auto-da-fe
destroyed in an hour the records of a lifetime of work. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (PIERRE), born 1787, legitimate son of Adelaide Fouque, was a thrifty, selfish lad who saw that his mother by her improvident conduct was squandering the estate to which he considered himself sole heir. His aim was to induce his mother and her two illegitimate children to remove from the house and land, and in this he was ultimately successful. Having sold the property for fifty thousand francs, he induced his mother, who by this time was of weak intellect, to sign a receipt for that sum, and was so able to defraud his half-brother and sister of the shares to which they would have been entitled. Soon thereafter he married Felicite Puech, the daughter of an oil dealer in Plassans. The firm of Puech and Lacamp was not prosperous, but the money brought by Pierre Rougon retrieved the situation, and after a few years the two original partners retired. Fortune, however, soon changed, and for thirty years there was a continual struggle to make ends meet. Three sons and two daughters were born, and their education was a heavy drain upon their parents’ means. In 1845 Pierre and his wife retired from business with forty thousand francs at the most. Instigated by the Marquis de Carnavant, they went in for politics, and soon regular meetings of the reactionary party came to be held in their “yellow drawing-room.” Advised, however, by their son Eugene, they resolved to support the cause of the Bonapartes, and at the time of the
Coup d’Etat
of 1851 Pierre was the leader of that party in Plassans. Having concealed himself when the Republican insurgents entered Plassans, he avoided capture, and after they retired he led the band of citizens which recaptured the town hall. This bloodless victory having been somewhat minimized by the townspeople, Pierre and his wife, with a view to establishing a strong claim for subsequent reward, bribed Antoine Macquart to lead the Republicans left in Plassans to an attack on the town hall. To meet this he prepared a strong ambuscade, and the Republicans were repulsed with considerable loss. As a result of this treachery, Pierre was regarded by his fellow-citizens as the saviour of the town, and the Government subsequently appointed him Receiver of Taxes, decorating him with the Cross of the Legion of Honour. La Fortune des Rougon.

He settled down quietly and took little part in public affairs, though his wife continued to hold weekly receptions at which members of the different political parties were represented. La Conquete de Plassans.

He became so corpulent that he was unable to move, and was carried off by an attack of indigestion on the night of 3rd September, 1870, a few hours after hearing of the catastrophe of Sedan. The downfall of the regime which he prided himself on having helped to establish seemed to have crushed him like a thunderbolt. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (MADAME FELICITE), wife of the preceding, and daughter of Puech, the oil-dealer. She was married in 1810, and had three sons and two daughters. A woman of strong ambitions, she hoped to better her social position by the aid of her sons, on whose education she spent large sums. Disappointed in this hope for many years, she and her husband retired from business with barely sufficient means to keep themselves in comfort. She, instigated by the Marquis de Carnavant (her putative father), urged her husband to take part in politics, and meetings of the reactionary party were regularly held in her “yellow drawing-room.” While the success of the
Coup d’Etat
was in some doubt, she encouraged her husband in maintaining the position he had taken up; and, having ascertained that the success of the Bonapartists was assured she arranged with Antoine Macquart for the attack on the town hall, the repulse of which led to the rise of the family fortunes. La Fortune des Rougon.

After her husband’s appointment as Receiver of Taxes, she continued her weekly receptions, but endeavoured to give them a non-political character by inviting representatives of all parties. Her son Eugene, now a Minister of State, kept her advised as to the course she should pursue, and on his instructions she gave some assistance to Abbe Faujas in his political “conquest of Plassans.” La Conquete de Plassans.

In 1856 she interested herself in a lawsuit raised by M. Charbonnel, a retired oil-merchant of Plassans, and requested her son Eugene, the President of the Council of State, to use his influence on behalf of her friend. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

After the disasters of the war, Plassans escaped from her dominion, and she had to content herself with the role of dethroned queen of the old regime. Her ruling passion was the defence of the glory of the Rougons, and the obliteration of everything tending to reflect on the family name. In this connection she welcomed the death of Adelaide Fouque, the common ancestress of the Rougons and the Macquarts, and she did nothing to save her old accomplice Antoine Macquart from the terrible fate which overtook him. After these events, her only remaining trouble was the work on family heredity which had for years occupied her son Pascal. Assisted by his servant Martine, she eventually succeeded in burning the whole manuscript to which Pascal had devoted his life. Her triumph was then secure, and in order to raise a monument to the glory of the family she devoted a large part of her fortune to the erection of an asylum for the aged, to be known as the Rougon Asylum. At eighty-two years of age, she laid the foundation stone of the building, and in doing so conquered Plassans for the third time. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (SIDONIE), born 1818, daughter of Pierre Rougon. La Fortune des Rougon.

She married at Plassans an attorney’s clerk, named Touche, and together they went to Paris, setting up business in the Rue Saint-Honore, as dealers in fruit from the south of France. The venture was unsuccessful, and the husband soon disappeared. At the rise of the Second Empire, Sidonie was thirty-five; but she dressed herself with so little care and had so little of the woman in her manner that she looked much older. She carried on business in lace and pianos, but did not confine herself to these trades; when she had sold ten francs worth of lace she would insinuate herself into her customer’s good graces and become her man of business, attending attorneys, advocates, and judges on her behalf. The confidences she everywhere received put her on the track of good strokes of business, often of a nature more than equivocal, and it was she who arranged the second marriage of her brother Aristide. She was a true Rougon, who had inherited the hunger for money, the longing for intrigue, which was the characteristic of the family. La Curee.

In 1851 she had a daughter by an unknown father. The child, who was named Angelique Marie, was at once sent to the Foundling Hospital by her mother, who never made any inquiry about her afterwards. Le Reve.

She attended the funeral of her cousin, Claude Lantier, the artist. Arrived at his house, “she went upstairs, turned round the studio, sniffed at all its bare wretchedness, and then walked down again with a hard mouth, irritated at having taken the trouble to come.” L’Oeuvre.

“After a long disappearance from the scene, Sidonie, weary of the shady callings she had plied, and now of a nunlike austerity, retired to the gloomy shelter of a conventual kind of establishment, holding the purse-strings of the Oeuvre du Sacrament, an institution founded with the object of assisting seduced girls, who had become mothers, to secure husbands.” Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (VICTOR), son of Aristide Saccard and Rosaline Chavaille. Brought up in the gutter, he was from the first incorrigibly lazy and vicious. La Mechain, his mother’s cousin, after discovering his paternity, told the facts to Caroline Hamelin, who, to save Saccard annoyance, paid over a considerable sum and removed the boy to
L’Oeuvre du Travail
, one of the institutions founded by the Princess d’Orviedo. Here every effort was made to reclaim him, but without success; vice and cunning had become his nature. In the end he made a murderous attack upon Alice du Beauvilliers, who was visiting the hospital, and having stolen her purse, made his escape. Subsequent search proved fruitless; he had disappeared in the under-world of crime. L’Argent.

“In 1873, Victor had altogether vanished, living, no doubt, in the shady haunts of crime — since he was in no penitentiary — let loose upon the world like some brute foaming with the hereditary virus, whose every bite would enlarge that existing evil — free to work out his own future, his unknown destiny, which was perchance the scaffold.” Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON ( —— ), the child of Doctor Pascal Rougon and of Clotilde Rougon, born some months after his father’s death. Pascal a few minutes before he died, drew towards him the genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart family, over which he had spent so many years, and in a vacant space wrote the words: “The unknown child, to be born in 1874. What will it be?” Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUSSE (LA), a peasant girl of Les Artaud, who assisted to decorate the church for the festival of the Virgin. La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret.

ROUSSEAU, one of the auditors of the Universal Bank, an office which he shared with Lavigniere, under whose influence he was to a great extent. L’Argent.

ROUSSELOT (MONSEIGNEUR), Bishop of Plassans, an amiable but weak man, who was entirely under the influence of Abbe Fenil. Having got into disfavour with the Government over the election of a Legitimist as Deputy, he was anxious to retrieve his position, and with this object agreed to appoint Abbe Faujas vicar of Saint-Saturnin’s church. This led to a quarrel with Abbe Fenil, who, of course, resented the appointment. The Bishop being still in some doubt as to the standing of Abbe Faujas with the Government, went to Paris, where he interviewed Eugene Rougon, the Minister of State. Satisfied with the information which he received, he threw himself heartily into the political struggle then proceeding at Plassans, giving Faujas every assistance in carrying out his schemes on behalf of the Bonapartist candidate. La Conquete de Plassans.

ROUSSIE (LA), a woman who had formerly worked as a putter in the Voreux pit. Germinal.

ROUSTAN (ABBE), one of the clergy of Sainte-Eustache church. Madame Lisa Quenu consulted him as to her proposed course of action regarding Florent. Le Ventre de Paris.

ROUVET, an old peasant who lived in the same village as Zephyrin Lacour and Rosalie Pichon. One of her pleasures consisted in calling to mind the sayings of the old man. Une Page d’Amour.

ROZAN (DUC DE), was a young man of dissolute life, who, after getting the control of his fortune, soon went through the greater part of it. He was the lover of Renee Saccard for a time. La Curee.

ROZAN (DUCHESSE DE), mother of the preceding. She kept her son so short of money that, till he was thirty-five, he seldom had more than a dozen louis at a time. Her death was largely occasioned by the knowledge of the enormous amount of debts her son had incurred. La Curee.

RUSCONI (CHEVALIER), the Sardinian Minister at Paris, a friend of Comtesse Balbi, and her daughter. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon.

S

SABATANI, a native of the Levant, who appeared in Paris after defaulting on some foreign Stock Exchange. He was a handsome man, and little by little gained the confidence of the Bourse “by scrupulous correctness of behaviour and an unremitting graciousness even towards the most disreputable.” He began doing business with Mazard by depositing a small sum as “cover” in the belief that the insignificance of the amount would in time be forgotten; and “he evinced great prudence, increasing the orders in a stealthy gradual fashion, pending the day when, with a heavy settlement to meet, it would be necessary for him to disappear.” When Saccard founded the Universal Bank, he selected Sabatani as the “man of straw” in whose name the shares held by the Bank itself were to be taken up. Sabatani soon increased his speculations to an enormous extent, gaining large sums, but after the collapse of the Universal Bank he disappeared without paying his “differences,” thereby contributing largely to the ruin of Mazard. L’Argent.