In presence of those two illegitimate children Pierre seemed a stranger; to one who had not penetrated to the roots of his being he would have appeared profoundly dissimilar.  Never did child’s nature show a more equal balance of the characteristics of its parents.  He was the exact mean between the peasant Rougon and the nervous Adelaide.  Paternal grossness was attenuated by the maternal influence.  One found in him the first phase of that evolution of temperaments which ultimately brings about the amelioration or deterioration of a race.  Although he was still a peasant, his skin was less coarse, his face less heavy, his intellect more capacious and more supple.  In him the defects of his father and his mother had advantageously reacted upon each other.  If Adelaide’s nature, rendered exquisitely sensitive by her rebellious nerves, had combated and lessened Rougon’s full-bodied ponderosity, the latter had successfully prevented the young woman’s tendency to cerebral disorder from being implanted in the child.  Pierre knew neither the passions nor the sickly ravings of Macquart’s young whelps.  Very badly brought up, unruly and noisy, like all children who are not restrained during their infancy, he nevertheless possessed at bottom such sense and intelligence as would always preserve him from perpetrating any unproductive folly.  His vices, his laziness, his appetite for indulgence, lacked the instinctiveness which characterised Antoine’s; he meant to cultivate and gratify them honourably and openly.  In his plump person of medium height, in his long pale face, in which the features derived from his father had acquired some of the maternal refinement, one could already detect signs of sly and crafty ambition and insatiable desire, with the hardness of heart and envious hatred of a peasant’s son whom his mother’s means and nervous temperament had turned into a member of the middle classes.

When, at the age of seventeen, Pierre observed and was able to understand Adelaide’s disorders and the singular position of Antoine and Ursule, he seemed neither sorry nor indignant, but simply worried as to the course which would best serve his own interests.  He was the only one of the three children who had pursued his studies with any industry.  When a peasant begins to feel the need of instruction he most frequently becomes a fierce calculator.  At school Pierre’s playmates roused his first suspicions by the manner in which they treated and hooted his brother.  Later on he came to understand the significance of many looks and words.  And at last he clearly saw that the house was being pillaged.  From that time forward he regarded Antoine and Ursule as shameless parasites, mouths that were devouring his own substance.  Like the people of the Faubourg, he thought that his mother was a fit subject for a lunatic asylum, and feared she would end by squandering all her money, if he did not take steps to prevent it.  What gave him the finishing stroke was the dishonesty of the