francs, and made the most solemn promises to watch over his brother and sister.  This oath satisfied the good woman.  She recited, before the notary, the lesson which it had pleased her son to teach her.  On the following day the young man made her place her name at the foot of a document in which she acknowledged having received fifty thousand francs as the price of the property.  This was his stroke of genius, the act of a rogue.  He contented himself with telling his mother, who was a little surprised at signing such a receipt when she had not seen a centime of the fifty thousand francs, that it was a pure formality of no consequence whatever.  As he slipped the paper into his pocket, he thought to himself, “Now, let the young wolves ask me to render an account.  I will tell them the old woman has squandered everything.  They will never dare to go to law with me about it.”  A week afterwards, the party-wall no longer existed:  a plough had turned up the vegetable beds; the Fouques’ enclosure, in accordance with young Rougon’s wish, was about to become a thing of the past.  A few months later, the owner of the Jas-Meiffren even had the old market-gardener’s house, which was falling to pieces, pulled down.

When Pierre had secured the fifty thousand francs he married Felicite Puech with as little delay as possible.  Felicite was a short, dark woman, such as one often meets in Provence.  She looked like one of those brown, lean, noisy grasshoppers, which in their sudden leaps often strike their heads against the almond-trees.  Thin, flat-breasted, with pointed shoulders and a face like that of a pole-cat, her features singularly sunken and attenuated, it was not easy to tell her age; she looked as near fifteen as thirty, although she was in reality only nineteen, four years younger than her husband.  There was much feline slyness in the depths of her little black eyes, which suggested gimlet holes.  Her low, bumpy forehead, her slightly depressed nose with delicate quivering nostrils, her thin red lips and prominent chin, parted from her cheeks by strange hollows, all suggested the countenance of an artful dwarf, a living mask of intrigue, an active, envious ambition.  With all her ugliness, however, Felicite possessed a sort of gracefulness which rendered her seductive.  People said of her that she could be pretty or ugly as she pleased.  It would depend on the fashion in which she tied her magnificent hair; but it depended still more on the triumphant smile which illumined her golden complexion when she thought she had got the better of somebody.  Born under an evil star, and believing herself ill-used by fortune, she was generally content to appear an ugly creature.  She did not, however, intend to abandon the struggle, for she had vowed that she would some day make the whole town burst with envy, by an insolent display of happiness and luxury.  Had she been able to act her part on a more spacious stage, where full play would have been allowed her ready