Pierre, the legitimate son, either from secret instinct or from his knowledge of the different manner in which he and the others were regarded by the neighbours, domineered over his brother and sister from an early age.  In their quarrels, although he was much weaker than Antoine, he always got the better of the contest, beating the other with all the authority of a master.  With regard to Ursule, a poor, puny, wan little creature, she was handled with equal roughness by both the boys.  Indeed, until they were fifteen or sixteen, the three children fraternally beat each other without understanding their vague, mutual hatred, without realising how foreign they were to one another.  It was only in youth that they found themselves face to face with definite, self-conscious personalities.

At sixteen, Antoine was a tall fellow, a blend of Macquart’s and Adelaide’s failings.  Macquart, however, predominated in him, with his love of vagrancy, his tendency to drunkenness, and his brutish savagery.  At the same time, under the influence of Adelaide’s nervous nature, the vices which in the father assumed a kind of sanguinary frankness were in the son tinged with an artfulness full of hypocrisy and cowardice.  Antoine resembled his mother by his total want of dignified will, by his effeminate voluptuous egotism, which disposed him to accept any bed of infamy provided he could lounge upon it at his ease and sleep warmly in it.  People said of him:  “Ah! the brigand!  He hasn’t even the courage of his villainy like Macquart; if ever he commits a murder, it will be with pin pricks.”  Physically, Antoine inherited Adelaide’s thick lips only; his other features resembled those of the smuggler, but they were softer and more prone to change of expression.

In Ursule, on the other hand, physical and moral resemblance to the mother predominated.  There was a mixture of certain characteristics in her also; but born the last, at a time when Adelaide’s love was warmer than Macquart’s, the poor little thing seemed to have received with her sex a deeper impress of her mother’s temperament.  Moreover, hers was not a fusion of the two natures, but rather a juxtaposition, a remarkably close soldering.  Ursule was whimsical, and displayed at times the shyness, the melancholy, and the transports of a pariah; then she would often break out into nervous fits of laughter, and muse lazily, like a woman unsound both in head and heart.  Her eyes, which at times had a scared expression like those of Adelaide, were as limpid as crystal, similar to those of kittens doomed to die of consumption.