The idea of succeeding in life, of seeing all her family attain to fortune, had become a form of monomania with Felicite.  Pascal, in order to be agreeable to her, came and spent a few evenings in the yellow drawing-room.  He was much less bored there than he had apprehended.  At first he was rather stupefied at the degree of imbecility to which sane men can sink.  The old oil and almond dealers, the marquis and the commander even, appeared to him so many curious animals, which he had not hitherto had an opportunity of studying.  He looked with a naturalist’s interest at their grimacing faces, in which he discerned traces of their occupations and appetites; he listened also to their inane chatter, just as he might have tried to catch the meaning of a cat’s mew or a dog’s bark.  At this period he was occupied with comparative natural history, applying to the human race the observations which he had made upon animals with regard to the working of heredity.  While he was in the yellow drawing-room, therefore, he amused himself with the belief that he had fallen in with a menagerie.  He established comparisons between the grotesque creatures he found there and certain animals of his acquaintance.  The marquis, with his leanness and small crafty-looking head, reminded him exactly of a long green grasshopper.  Vuillet impressed him as a pale, slimy toad.  He was more considerate for Roudier, a fat sheep, and for the commander, an old toothless mastiff.  But the prodigious Granoux was a perpetual cause of astonishment to him.  He spent a whole evening measuring this imbecile’s facial angle.  When he heard him mutter indistinct imprecations against those blood-suckers the Republicans, he always expected to hear him moan like a calf; and he could never see him rise from his chair without imagining that he was about to leave the room on all fours.

“Talk to them,” his mother used to say in an undertone; “try and make a practice out of these gentlemen.”

“I am not a veterinary surgeon,” he at last replied, exasperated.

One evening Felicite took him into a corner and tired to catechise him.  She was glad to see him come to her house rather assiduously.  She thought him reconciled to Society, not suspecting for a moment the singular amusement that he derived from ridiculing these rich people.  She cherished the secret project of making him the fashionable doctor of Plassans.  It would be sufficient if men like Granoux and Roudier consented to give him a start.  She wished, above all, to impart to him the political views of the family, considering that a doctor had everything to gain by constituting himself a warm partisan of the regime which was to succeed the Republic.

“My dear boy,” she said to him, “as you have now become reasonable, you must give some thought to the future.  You are accused of being a Republican, because you are foolish enough to attend all the beggars of the town without making any charge.  Be frank, what are your real opinions?”