ate,
took place then, Marthe Rougon espousing her cousin Francois Mouret,
a peaceful household slowly disunited, ending in the direst
catastrophes--a sad and gentle woman taken, made use of, and crushed in
the vast machine of war erected for the conquest of a city; her three
children torn from her, she herself leaving her heart in the rude grasp
of the Abbe Faujas. And the Rougons saved Plassans a second time, while
she was dying in the glare of the conflagration in which her husband was
being consumed, mad with long pent-up rage and the desire for revenge.

Of the three children, Octave Mouret was the audacious conqueror, the
clear intellect, resolved to demand from the women the sovereignty of
Paris, fallen at his _debut_ into the midst of a corrupt _bourgeois_
society, acquiring there a terrible sentimental education, passing from
the capricious refusal of one woman to the unresisting abandonment
of another, remaining, fortunately, active, laborious, and combative,
gradually emerging, and improved even, from the low plotting, the
ceaseless ferment of a rotten society that could be heard already
cracking to its foundations. And Octave Mouret, victorious,
revolutionized commerce; swallowed up the cautious little shops that
carried on business in the old-fashioned way; established in the midst
of feverish Paris the colossal palace of temptation, blazing with
lights, overflowing with velvets, silks, and laces; won fortunes
exploiting woman; lived in smiling scorn of woman until the day when
a little girl, the avenger of her sex, the innocent and wise Denise,
vanquished him and held him captive at her feet, groaning with anguish,
until she did him the favor, she who was so poor, to marry him in the
midst of the apotheosis of his Louvre, under the golden shower of his
receipts.

There remained the two other children, Serge Mouret and Desiree Mouret,
the latter innocent and healthy, like some happy young animal; the
former refined and mystical, who was thrown into the priesthood by a
nervous malady hereditary in his family, and who lived again the story
of Adam, in the Eden of Le Paradou. He was born again to love Albine,
and to lose her, in the bosom of sublime nature, their accomplice; to be
recovered, afterward by the Church, to war eternally with life, striving
to kill his manhood, throwing on the body of the dead Albine the handful
of earth, as officiating priest, at the very time when Desiree, the
sister and friend