is big industrious
fellow into his campaign against the Rougons; whereupon, with all the
spite of a lazybones, he regarded him as a cunning miser. He fancied,
however, that he had discovered the accomplice he was seeking in
Mouret's second son, a lad of fifteen years of age. Young Silvere had
never even been to school at the time when Mouret was found hanging
among his wife's skirts. His elder brother, not knowing what to do
with him, took him also to his uncle's. The latter made a wry face on
beholding the child; he had no intention of carrying his compensation so
far as to feed a useless mouth. Thus Silvere, to whom Felicite also took
a dislike, was growing up in tears, like an unfortunate little outcast,
when his grandmother Adelaide, during one of the rare visits she paid
the Rougons, took pity on him, and expressed a wish to have him with
her. Pierre was delighted; he let the child go, without even suggesting
an increase of the paltry allowance that he made Adelaide, and which
henceforward would have to suffice for two.

Adelaide was then nearly seventy-five years of age. Grown old while
leading a cloistered existence, she was no longer the lanky ardent girl
who formerly ran to embrace the smuggler Macquart. She had stiffened and
hardened in her hovel in the Impasse Saint-Mittre, that dismal silent
hole where she lived entirely alone on potatoes and dry vegetables, and
which she did not leave once in the course of a month. On seeing her
pass, you might have thought her to be one of those delicately white old
nuns with automatic gait, whom the cloister has kept apart from all the
concerns of this world. Her pale face, always scrupulously girt with a
white cap, looked like that of a dying woman; a vague, calm countenance
it was, wearing an air of supreme indifference. Prolonged taciturnity
had made her dumb; the darkness of her dwelling and the continual
sight of the same objects had dulled her glance and given her eyes the
limpidity of spring water. Absolute renunciation, slow physical and
moral death, had little by little converted this crazy _amorosa_ into a
grave matron. When, as often happened, a blank stare came into her
eyes, and she gazed before her without seeing anything, one could detect
utter, internal void through those deep bright cavities.

Nothing now remained of her former voluptuous ardour but weariness of
the flesh and a senile tremor of the hands. She had once loved like
a she-wolf, but was now w