as some
mystery at the bottom of this affair, alleging even that the marriage of
the two young people had become an absolute necessity. But events proved
the falsity of the accusation. More than a year went by before Adelaide
had a son. The Faubourg was annoyed; it could not admit that it was
wrong, and determined to penetrate the supposed mystery; accordingly all
the gossips kept a watch upon the Rougons. They soon found ample matter
for tittle-tattle. Rougon died almost suddenly, fifteen months after his
marriage, from a sunstroke received one afternoon while he was weeding a
bed of carrots.

Scarcely a year then elapsed before the young widow caused unheard-of
scandal. It became known, as an indisputable fact, that she had a lover.
She did not appear to make any secret of it; several persons asserted
that they had heard her use endearing terms in public to poor Rougon's
successor. Scarcely a year of widowhood and a lover already! Such a
disregard of propriety seemed monstrous out of all reason. And the
scandal was heightened by Adelaide's strange choice. At that time there
dwelt at the end of the Impasse Saint-Mittre, in a hovel the back
of which abutted on the Fouques' land, a man of bad repute, who was
generally referred to as "that scoundrel Macquart." This man would
vanish for weeks and then turn up some fine evening, sauntering about
with his hands in his pockets and whistling as though he had just
come from a short walk. And the women sitting at their doorsteps as he
passed: "There's that scoundrel Macquart! He has hidden his bales and
his gun in some hollow of the Viorne." The truth was, Macquart had
no means, and yet ate and drank like a happy drone during his short
sojourns in the town. He drank copiously and with fierce obstinacy.
Seating himself alone at a table in some tavern, he would linger there
evening after evening, with his eyes stupidly fixed on his glass,
neither seeing nor hearing anything around him. When the landlord closed
his establishment, he would retire with a firm step, with his head
raised, as if he were kept yet more erect by inebriation. "Macquart
walks so straight, he's surely dead drunk," people used to say, as they
saw him going home. Usually, when he had had no drink, he walked with
a slight stoop and shunned the gaze of curious people with a kind of
savage shyness.

Since the death of his father, a journeyman tanner who had left him as
sole heritage the hovel in the Impasse Sain