was some mystery at the bottom of this affair, alleging even that the marriage of the two young people had become an absolute necessity.  But events proved the falsity of the accusation.  More than a year went by before Adelaide had a son.  The Faubourg was annoyed; it could not admit that it was wrong, and determined to penetrate the supposed mystery; accordingly all the gossips kept a watch upon the Rougons.  They soon found ample matter for tittle-tattle.  Rougon died almost suddenly, fifteen months after his marriage, from a sunstroke received one afternoon while he was weeding a bed of carrots.

Scarcely a year then elapsed before the young widow caused unheard-of scandal.  It became known, as an indisputable fact, that she had a lover.  She did not appear to make any secret of it; several persons asserted that they had heard her use endearing terms in public to poor Rougon’s successor.  Scarcely a year of widowhood and a lover already!  Such a disregard of propriety seemed monstrous out of all reason.  And the scandal was heightened by Adelaide’s strange choice.  At that time there dwelt at the end of the Impasse Saint-Mittre, in a hovel the back of which abutted on the Fouques’ land, a man of bad repute, who was generally referred to as “that scoundrel Macquart.”  This man would vanish for weeks and then turn up some fine evening, sauntering about with his hands in his pockets and whistling as though he had just come from a short walk.  And the women sitting at their doorsteps as he passed:  “There’s that scoundrel Macquart!  He has hidden his bales and his gun in some hollow of the Viorne.”  The truth was, Macquart had no means, and yet ate and drank like a happy drone during his short sojourns in the town.  He drank copiously and with fierce obstinacy.  Seating himself alone at a table in some tavern, he would linger there evening after evening, with his eyes stupidly fixed on his glass, neither seeing nor hearing anything around him.  When the landlord closed his establishment, he would retire with a firm step, with his head raised, as if he were kept yet more erect by inebriation.  “Macquart walks so straight, he’s surely dead drunk,” people used to say, as they saw him going home.  Usually, when he had had no drink, he walked with a slight stoop and shunned the gaze of curious people with a kind of savage shyness.

Since the death of his father, a journeyman tanner who had left him as sole heritage the hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, he had never been known to have either relatives or friends.  The proximity of the frontiers and the neighbouring forests of the Seille had turned this singular, lazy fellow into a combination of smuggler and poacher, one of those suspicious-looking characters of whom passers-by observe:  “I shouldn’t care to meet that man at midnight in a dark wood.”  Tall, with a formidable beard and lean face, Macquart was the terror of the good women of the Faubourg of Plassans; they actually accused him of devouring little children