, bankers, great merchants, to simple soldiers or rascals
without any professions--finally the doctor stops reading--and looking
with his eyes of savant at his niece, asks: "Well, what now?"

And beautiful Clotilde throws herself into his arms, crying:
"_Vicisti! Vicisti!_"

And her God, her church, her flight toward ideals, her spiritual needs
disappeared, turned into ashes.

Why? On the ground of what final conclusion? For what good reason?
What could there be in the tree that convinced her? How could it
produce any other impression than that of tediousness? Why did she
not ask the question, which surely must have come to the lips of the
reader: "And what then?"--it is unknown! I never noticed that any
other author could deduct from such a trifling and insignificant
cause such great and immediate consequences. It is as much of an
astonishment as if Zola should order Clotilde's faith and principles
to be turned into ashes after the doctor has read to her an almanac,
time-table, bill of fare, or catalogue of some museum. The
freedom surpasses here all possible limits and becomes absolutely
incomprehensible. The reader asks whether the author deceives himself
or if he wishes to throw some dust into the eyes of the public? And
this climax of the novel is at the same time the downfall of all
doctrine. Clotilde ought to have answered as follows:

"Your theory has no connection with my faith in God and the Church.
Your heredity is so _loose_ and on the strength of it one can be
so much, _everything_, that it becomes _nothing_--therefore the
consequences which you deduct from it also are based upon nothing.
Nana, according to you, is a street-walker, and Angelle is a saint;
the priest Mouret is an ascetic, Jacques Lantier a murderer, and all
that on account of great-grandmother Adelaide! But I tell you with
more real probability, that the good are good because they have my
faith, because they believe in responsibility and immortality of the
soul, and the bad are bad because they do not believe in anything. How
can you prove that the cause of good and bad is in great-grandmother
Adelaide Fouque? Perhaps you will tell me that it is so because it
is so; but I can tell you that the faith and responsibility were for
centuries a stopper for evil, and you cannot deny it, if you wish to
be a positivist, because those are material facts. In a word, I have
objective proofs where you have your personal views, and if it is so,
then