again.

"No, when master forbids me to do anything, it is because he has his
reasons, and I do not do it."

"Well, my child," cried Felicite vehemently, dominated by her passion,
"you, whom Pascal loves tenderly, and whom he would listen to,
perhaps, you ought to entreat him to burn all that, for if he should
chance to die, and those frightful things which he has in there were
to be found, we should all be dishonored!"

Ah, those abominable papers! she saw them at night, in her nightmares,
revealing in letters of fire, the true histories, the physiological
blemishes of the family, all that wrong side of her glory which she
would have wished to bury forever with the ancestors already dead! She
knew how it was that the doctor had conceived the idea of collecting
these documents at the beginning of his great studies on heredity; how
he had found himself led to take his own family as an example, struck
by the typical cases which he saw in it, and which helped to support
laws discovered by him. Was it not a perfectly natural field of
observation, close at hand and with which he was thoroughly familiar?
And with the fine, careless justness of the scientist, he had been
accumulating for the last thirty years the most private data,
collecting and classifying everything, raising this genealogical tree
of the Rougon-Macquarts, of which the voluminous papers, crammed full
of proofs, were only the commentary.

"Ah, yes," continued Mme. Rougon hotly, "to the fire, to the fire with
all those papers that would tarnish our name!"