Felicite understood the wisdom of these words.  From that time she ceased to accuse her children, and turned her anger against fate, which never wearied of striking her.  She started her old complaints afresh, and bemoaned more and more the want of means which made her strand, as it were, in port.  Whenever Rougon said to her, “Your sons are lazy fellows, they will eat up all we have,” she sourly replied, “Would to God I had more money to give them; if they do vegetate, poor fellows, it’s because they haven’t got a sou to bless themselves with.”

At the beginning of the year 1848, on the eve of the Revolution of February, the three young Rougons held very precarious positions at Plassans.  They presented most curious and profoundly dissimilar characteristics, though they came of the same stock.  They were in reality superior to their parents.  The race of the Rougons was destined to become refined through its female side.  Adelaide had made Pierre a man of moderate enterprise, disposed to low ambitions; Felicite had inspired her sons with a higher intelligence, with a capacity for greater vices and greater virtues.

At the period now referred to the eldest, Eugene, was nearly forty years old.  He was a man of middle height, slightly bald, and already disposed to obesity.  He had his father’s face, a long face with broad features; beneath his skin one could divine the fat to which were due the flabby roundness of his features, and his yellowish, waxy complexion.  Though his massive square head still recalled the peasant, his physiognomy was transfigured, lit up from within as it were, when his drooping eyelids were raised and his eyes awoke to life.  In the son’s case, the father’s ponderousness had turned to gravity.  This big fellow, Eugene, usually preserved a heavy somnolent demeanour.  At the same time, certain of his heavy, languid movements suggested those of a giant stretching his limbs pending the time for action.  By one of those alleged freaks of nature, of which, however, science is now commencing to discover the laws, if physical resemblance to Pierre was perfect in Eugene, Felicite on her side seemed to have furnished him with his brains.  He offered an instance of certain moral and intellectual qualities of maternal origin being embedded in the coarse flesh he had derived from his father.  He cherished lofty ambitions, possessed domineering instincts, and showed singular contempt for trifling expedients and petty fortunes.

He was a proof that Plassans was perhaps not mistaken in suspecting that Felicite had some blue blood in her veins.  The passion for indulgence, which became formidably developed in the Rougons, and was, in fact, the family characteristic, attained in his case its highest pitch; he longed for self-gratification, but in the form of mental enjoyment such as would gratify his burning desire for domination.  A man such as this was never intended to succeed in a provincial town.  He vegetated there for fifteen years, his