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.

[*] Figures prominently in _La Terre_ (_The Earth_) and _