such mud of nonsense even the talent was drowned.

One thing remains: the poison flows as usual in the soul of the
reader, the mind became familiar with the evil and ceased to despise
it. The poison licks, spoils the simplicity of the soul, moral
impressions and that sense of conscience which distinguishes the bad
from the good.

The doctor dies from languishing after Clotilde. She comes back under
the old roof and takes care of the child. Nothing of that which the
doctor sowed in her soul had perished. On the contrary, everything
grows very well. She loved the life, she also loves it now, she is
resigned to it entirely; not through resignation but because she
acknowledges it--and the more she thinks of it, rocking in her lap
the child without a name, she acknowledges more. Such is the end of
Rougon-Macquarts.

But such an end is a new surprise. Here we have before us nineteen
volumes, and in those volumes, as Zola himself says, _tant de boue,
tant de larmes. C'était à se demander si d'un coup de foudre, il
n'aurait pas mieux valu balayer cette fourmilière gatée et miserable_.
And it is true! Any one who will read those volumes comes to the
conclusion that life is a blindly mechanical and exasperating process,
in which one must take part because one cannot avoid it. There is more
mud in it than green grass, more corruption than wholesomeness, more
odor of corpses than perfume of flowers, more illness, more madness,
and more crime than health and virtue. It is a Gehenna not only
dreadful but also abominable. The hair rises on the head, and in the
mean while the mouth is wet and the question comes, will it not be
better that a thunderbolt destroyed _cette fourmilière gatée et