this is what he
devised without consulting anyone, even the lawyer, whose suspicions he
was afraid of arousing. He knew how to turn his mother round his finger.
One fine morning he took her to a notary and made her sign a deed of
sale. Provided she were left the hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre,
Adelaide would have sold all Plassans. Besides, Pierre assured her an
annual income of six hundred francs, and made the most solemn promises
to watch over his brother and sister. This oath satisfied the good
woman. She recited, before the notary, the lesson which it had pleased
her son to teach her. On the following day the young man made her place
her name at the foot of a document in which she acknowledged having
received fifty thousand francs as the price of the property. This was
his stroke of genius, the act of a rogue. He contented himself with
telling his mother, who was a little surprised at signing such a receipt
when she had not seen a centime of the fifty thousand francs, that it
was a pure formality of no consequence whatever. As he slipped the paper
into his pocket, he thought to himself, "Now, let the young wolves ask
me to render an account. I will tell them the old woman has squandered
everything. They will never dare to go to law with me about it." A week
afterwards, the party-wall no longer existed: a plough had turned up
the vegetable beds; the Fouques' enclosure, in accordance with young
Rougon's wish, was about to become a thing of the past. A few months
later, the owner of the Jas-Meiffren even had the old market-gardener's
house, which was falling to pieces, pulled down.

When Pierre had secured the fifty thousand francs he married Felicite
Puech with as little delay as possible. Felicite was a short, dark
woman, such as one often meets in Provence. She looked like one of
those brown, lean, noisy grasshoppers, which in their sudden leaps often
strike their heads against the almond-trees. Thin, flat-breasted, with
pointed shoulders and a face like that of a pole-cat, her features
singularly sunken and attenuated, it was not easy to tell her age;
she looked as near fifteen as thirty, although she was in reality only
nineteen, four years younger than her husband. There was much feline
slyness in the depths of her little black eyes, which suggested gimlet
holes. Her low, bumpy forehead, her slightly depressed nose with
delicate quivering nostrils, her thin red lips and prominent chin,
parted from her cheeks b