g trouble was the
work on family heredity which had for years occupied her son Pascal.
Assisted by his servant Martine, she eventually succeeded in burning the
whole manuscript to which Pascal had devoted his life. Her triumph was
then secure, and in order to raise a monument to the glory of the family
she devoted a large part of her fortune to the erection of an asylum for
the aged, to be known as the Rougon Asylum. At eighty-two years of age,
she laid the foundation stone of the building, and in doing so conquered
Plassans for the third time. Le Docteur Pascal.

ROUGON (SIDONIE), born 1818, daughter of Pierre Rougon. La Fortune des
Rougon.

She married at Plassans an attorney's clerk, named Touche, and together
they went to Paris, setting up business in the Rue Saint-Honore, as
dealers in fruit from the south of France. The venture was unsuccessful,
and the husband soon disappeared. At the rise of the Second Empire,
Sidonie was thirty-five; but she dressed herself with so little care and
had so little of the woman in her manner that she looked much older. She
carried on business in lace and pianos, but did not confine herself
to these trades; when she had sold ten francs worth of lace she would
insinuate herself into her customer's good graces and become her man of
business, attending attorneys, advocates, and judges on her behalf. The
confidences she everywhere received put her on the track of good strokes
of business, often of a nature more than equivocal, and it was she who
arranged the second marriage of her brother Aristide. She was a
true Rougon, who had inherited the hunger for money, the longing for
intrigue, which was the characteristic of the family. La Curee.

In 1851 she had a daughter by an unknown father. The child, who was
named Angelique Marie, was at once sent to the Foundling Hospital by her
mother, who never made any inquiry about her afterwards. Le Reve.

She attended the funeral of her cousin, Claude Lantier, the artist.
Arrived at his house, "she went upstairs, turned round the studio,
sniffed at all its bare wretchedness, and then walked down again with a
hard mouth, irritated at having taken the trouble to come." L'Oeuvre.

"After a long disappearance from the scene, Sidonie, weary of the shady
callings she had plied, and now of a nunlike austerity, retired to
the gloomy shelter of a conventual kind of establishment, holding the
purse-strings of the Oeuvre du Sacrament, an institution found