“Ah, those women!  Walking in the shade, I closed my parasol and I hurt a child.  In that moment all of the women fell on me and began to shout such things!  Ah, it was so dreadful! that I shall never have any children, that such things are not for such a dishcloth as I! and many other things which I cannot repeat; I do not wish to repeat them; I do not even understand them.”

Her breast was moved by sobbings; he became pale, and seizing her by the shoulders, commenced to cover her face with kisses, saying: 

“It’s my fault, you suffer through me!  Listen, we will go very far from here, where no one knows us, where everybody will greet you and you shall be happy.”

Only one thing does not come to their minds:  to be married.  When Pascal’s mother speaks to him about it, they do not listen to it.  It is not dictated to her by woman’s modesty, to him by the care for her and the desire to shelter her from insults.  Why?  Because Zola likes it that way.

But perhaps he cares to show what tragical results are produced by illegitimate marriages?  Not at all.  He shares the doctor’s and Clotilde’s opinion.  Were they married, there would be no drama, and the author wishes to have it.  That is the reason.

Then comes the doctor’s insolvency.  One must separate.  This separation becomes the misfortune of their lives:  the doctor will die of it.  Both feel that it will not be the end, they do not wish it—­and they do not think of any means which would forever affirm their mutual dependence and change the departure for only a momentary separation, but not for eternal farewells:  and they do not marry.

They did not have any religion, therefore they did not wish for any priest; it is logical, but why did they not wish for a maire?  The question remains without an answer.

Here, besides lack of moral sense, there is something more, the lack of common sense.  The novel is not only immoral, but at the same time it is a bad shanty, built of rotten pieces of wood, not holding together, unable to suffer any contact with logic and common sense.  In such mud of nonsense even the talent was drowned.

One thing remains:  the poison flows as usual in the soul of the reader, the mind became familiar with the evil and ceased to despise it.  The poison licks, spoils the simplicity of the soul, moral impressions and that sense of conscience which distinguishes the bad from the good.

The doctor dies from languishing after Clotilde.  She comes back under the old roof and takes care of the child.  Nothing of that which the doctor sowed in her soul had perished.  On the contrary, everything grows very well.  She loved the life, she also loves it now, she is resigned to it entirely; not through resignation but because she acknowledges it—­and the more she thinks of it, rocking in her lap the child without a name, she acknowledges more.  Such is the end of Rougon-Macquarts.