standing their vague, mutual
hatred, without realising how foreign they were to one another. It was
only in youth that they found themselves face to face with definite,
self-conscious personalities.

At sixteen, Antoine was a tall fellow, a blend of Macquart's and
Adelaide's failings. Macquart, however, predominated in him, with his
love of vagrancy, his tendency to drunkenness, and his brutish savagery.
At the same time, under the influence of Adelaide's nervous nature, the
vices which in the father assumed a kind of sanguinary frankness were
in the son tinged with an artfulness full of hypocrisy and cowardice.
Antoine resembled his mother by his total want of dignified will, by his
effeminate voluptuous egotism, which disposed him to accept any bed of
infamy provided he could lounge upon it at his ease and sleep warmly in
it. People said of him: "Ah! the brigand! He hasn't even the courage of
his villainy like Macquart; if ever he commits a murder, it will be with
pin pricks." Physically, Antoine inherited Adelaide's thick lips only;
his other features resembled those of the smuggler, but they were softer
and more prone to change of expression.

In Ursule, on the other hand, physical and moral resemblance to the
mother predominated. There was a mixture of certain characteristics in
her also; but born the last, at a time when Adelaide's love was warmer
than Macquart's, the poor little thing seemed to have received with her
sex a deeper impress of her mother's temperament. Moreover, hers was not
a fusion of the two natures, but rather a juxtaposition, a remarkably
close soldering. Ursule was whimsical, and displayed at times the
shyness, the melancholy, and the transports of a pariah; then she would
often break out into nervous fits of laughter, and muse lazily, like
a woman unsound both in head and heart. Her eyes, which at times had
a scared expression like those of Adelaide, were as limpid as crystal,
similar to those of kittens doomed to die of consumption.

In presence of those two illegitimate children Pierre seemed a stranger;
to one who had not penetrated to the roots of his being he would have
appeared profoundly dissimilar. Never did child's nature show a more
equal balance of the characteristics of its parents. He was the exact
mean between the peasant Rougon and the nervous Adelaide. Paternal
grossness was attenuated by the maternal influence. One found in him the
first phase of that evolution of temperame