In 1840 he had a son, little Maxime, whom his grandmother Felicite fortunately sent to college, paying his fees clandestinely.  That made one mouth less at home; but poor Angele was dying of hunger, and her husband was at last compelled to seek a situation.  He secured one at the Sub-Prefecture.  He remained there nearly ten years, and only attained a salary of eighteen hundred francs per annum.  From that time forward it was with ever increasing malevolence and rancour that he hungered for the enjoyments of which he was deprived.  His lowly position exasperated him; the paltry hundred and fifty francs which he received every month seemed to him an irony of fate.  Never did man burn with such desire for self-gratification.  Felicite, to whom he imparted his sufferings, was by no means grieved to see him so eager.  She thought his misery would stimulate his energies.  At last, crouching in ambush as it were, with his ears wide open, he began to look about him like a thief seeking his opportunity.  At the beginning of 1848, when his brother left for Paris, he had a momentary idea of following him.  But Eugene was a bachelor; and he, Aristide, could not take his wife so far without money.  So he waited, scenting a catastrophe, and ready to fall on the first prey that might come within his reach.

The other son, Pascal, born between Eugene and Aristide, did not appear to belong to the family.  He was one of those frequent cases which give the lie to the laws of heredity.  During the evolution of a race nature often produces some one being whose every element she derives from her own creative powers.  Nothing in the moral or physical constitution of Pascal recalled the Rougons.  Tall, with a grave and gentle face, he had an uprightness of mind, a love of study, a retiring modesty which contrasted strangely with the feverish ambitions and unscrupulous intrigues of his relatives.  After acquitting himself admirably of his medical studies in Paris, he had retired, by preference, to Plassans, notwithstanding the offers he received from his professors.  He loved a quiet provincial life; he maintained that for a studious man such a life was preferable to the excitement of Paris.  Even at Plassans he did not exert himself to extend his practice.  Very steady, and despising fortune, he contented himself with the few patients sent him by chance.  All his pleasures were centred in a bright little house in the new town, where he shut himself up, lovingly devoting his whole time to the study of natural history.  He was particularly fond of physiology.  It was known in the town that he frequently purchased dead bodies from the hospital grave-digger, a circumstance which rendered him an object of horror to delicate ladies and certain timid gentlemen.  Fortunately, they did not actually look upon him as a sorcerer; but his practice diminished, and he was regarded as an eccentric character, to whom people of good society ought not to entrust even a finger-tip, for fear of being compromised.  The mayor’s wife was one day heard to say:  “I would sooner die than be attended by that gentleman.  He smells of death.”