[*] Both Francois and Marthe figure largely in The Conquest
     of Plassans.

Macquart soon had to abandon all hope of dragging this big industrious fellow into his campaign against the Rougons; whereupon, with all the spite of a lazybones, he regarded him as a cunning miser.  He fancied, however, that he had discovered the accomplice he was seeking in Mouret’s second son, a lad of fifteen years of age.  Young Silvere had never even been to school at the time when Mouret was found hanging among his wife’s skirts.  His elder brother, not knowing what to do with him, took him also to his uncle’s.  The latter made a wry face on beholding the child; he had no intention of carrying his compensation so far as to feed a useless mouth.  Thus Silvere, to whom Felicite also took a dislike, was growing up in tears, like an unfortunate little outcast, when his grandmother Adelaide, during one of the rare visits she paid the Rougons, took pity on him, and expressed a wish to have him with her.  Pierre was delighted; he let the child go, without even suggesting an increase of the paltry allowance that he made Adelaide, and which henceforward would have to suffice for two.

Adelaide was then nearly seventy-five years of age.  Grown old while leading a cloistered existence, she was no longer the lanky ardent girl who formerly ran to embrace the smuggler Macquart.  She had stiffened and hardened in her hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, that dismal silent hole where she lived entirely alone on potatoes and dry vegetables, and which she did not leave once in the course of a month.  On seeing her pass, you might have thought her to be one of those delicately white old nuns with automatic gait, whom the cloister has kept apart from all the concerns of this world.  Her pale face, always scrupulously girt with a white cap, looked like that of a dying woman; a vague, calm countenance it was, wearing an air of supreme indifference.  Prolonged taciturnity had made her dumb; the darkness of her dwelling and the continual sight of the same objects had dulled her glance and given her eyes the limpidity of spring water.  Absolute renunciation, slow physical and moral death, had little by little converted this crazy amorosa into a grave matron.  When, as often happened, a blank stare came into her eyes, and she gazed before her without seeing anything, one could detect utter, internal void through those deep bright cavities.

Nothing now remained of her former voluptuous ardour but weariness of the flesh and a senile tremor of the hands.  She had once loved like a she-wolf, but was now wasted, already sufficiently worn out for the grave.  There had been strange workings of her nerves during her long years of chastity.  A dissolute life would perhaps have wrecked her less than the slow hidden ravages of unsatisfied fever which had modified her organism.