From that time, Pascal was condemned.  He seemed to rejoice at the mute terror which he inspired.  The fewer patients he had, the more time he could devote to his favourite sciences.  As his fees were very moderate, the poorer people remained faithful to him; he earned just enough to live, and lived contentedly, a thousand leagues away from the rest of the country, absorbed in the pure delight of his researches and discoveries.  From time to time he sent a memoir to the Academie des Sciences at Paris.  Plassans did not know that this eccentric character, this gentleman who smelt of death was well-known and highly-esteemed in the world of science.  When people saw him starting on Sundays for an excursion among the Garrigues hills, with a botanist’s bag hung round his neck and a geologist’s hammer in his hand, they would shrug their shoulders and institute a comparison between him and some other doctor of the town who was noted for his smart cravat, his affability to the ladies, and the delicious odour of violets which his garments always diffused.  Pascal’s parents did not understand him any better than other people.  When Felicite saw him adopting such a strange, unpretentious mode of life she was stupefied, and reproached him for disappointing her hopes.  She, who tolerated Aristide’s idleness because she thought it would prove fertile, could not view without regret the slow progress of Pascal, his partiality for obscurity and contempt for riches, his determined resolve to lead a life of retirement.  He was certainly not the child who would ever gratify her vanities.

“But where do you spring from?” she would sometimes say to him.  “You are not one of us.  Look at your brothers, how they keep their eyes open, striving to profit by the education we have given them, whilst you waste your time on follies and trifles.  You make a very poor return to us, who have ruined ourselves for your education.  No, you are certainly not one of us.”

Pascal, who preferred to laugh whenever he was called upon to feel annoyed, replied cheerfully, but not without a sting of irony:  “Oh, you need not be frightened, I shall never drive you to the verge of bankruptcy; when any of you are ill, I will attend you for nothing.”

Moreover, though he never displayed any repugnance to his relatives, he very rarely saw them, following in this wise his natural instincts.  Before Aristide obtained a situation at the Sub-Prefecture, Pascal had frequently come to his assistance.  For his part he had remained a bachelor.  He had not the least suspicion of the grave events that were preparing.  For two or three years he had been studying the great problem of heredity, comparing the human and animal races together, and becoming absorbed in the strange results which he obtained.  Certain observations which he had made with respect to himself and his relatives had been, so to say, the starting-point of his studies.  The common people, with their natural intuition, so well understood that he was quite different from the other Rougons, that they invariably called him Monsieur Pascal, without ever adding his family name.