“You’ll be in a fine plight when you’ve broken one of my arms or legs,” she would say to him.  “Who’ll keep you then, you lazy fellow?”

Excepting for these turbulent scenes, Antoine began to find his new mode of existence quite endurable.  He was well clothed, and ate and drank his fill.  He had laid aside the basket work altogether; sometimes, when he was feeling over-bored, he would resolve to plait a dozen baskets for the next market day; but very often he did not even finish the first one.  He kept, under a couch, a bundle of osier which he did not use up in twenty years.

The Macquarts had three children, two girls and a boy.  Lisa,[*] born the first, in 1827, one year after the marriage, remained but little at home.  She was a fine, big, healthy, full-blooded child, greatly resembling her mother.  She did not, however, inherit the latter’s animal devotion and endurance.  Macquart had implanted in her a most decided longing for ease and comfort.  While she was a child she would consent to work for a whole day in return for a cake.  When she was scarcely seven years old, the wife of the postmaster, who was a neighbour of the Macquarts, took a liking to her.  She made a little maid of her.  And when she lost her husband in 1839, and went to live in Paris, she took Lisa with her.  The parents had almost given her their daughter.

     [*] The pork-butcher’s wife in Le Ventre de Paris (The
     Fat and the Thin).

The second girl, Gervaise,[*] born the following year, was a cripple from birth.  Her right thigh was smaller than the left and showed signs of curvature, a curious hereditary result of the brutality which her mother had to endure during her fierce drunken brawls with Macquart.  Gervaise remained puny, and Fine, observing her pallor and weakness, put her on a course of aniseed, under the pretext that she required something to strengthen her.  But the poor child became still more emaciated.  She was a tall, lank girl, whose frocks, invariably too large, hung round her as if they had nothing under them.  Above a deformed and puny body she had a sweet little doll-like head, a tiny round face, pale and exquisitely delicate.  Her infirmity almost became graceful.  Her body swayed gently at every step with a sort of rhythmical swing.

     [*] The chief female character in L’Assommoir (The Dramshop).

The Macquarts’ son, Jean,[*] was born three years later.  He was a robust child, in no respect recalling Gervaise.  Like the eldest girl, he took after his mother, without having any physical resemblance to her.  He was the first to import into the Rougon-Macquart stock a fat face with regular features, which showed all the coldness of a grave yet not over-intelligent nature.  This boy grew up with the determination of some day making an independent position for himself.  He attended school diligently, and tortured his dull brain to force a little arithmetic and spelling into it.  After that he became an apprentice, repeating much the same efforts with a perseverance that was the more meritorious as it took him a whole day to learn what others acquired in an hour.