They all shivered, and no one spoke again.

"Since the terrible shock she received," explained Pascal in a low
voice, "she has been that way; all intelligence, all memory seem
extinguished in her. For the most part she is silent; at times she
pours forth a flood of stammering and indistinct words. She laughs and
cries without cause, she is a thing that nothing affects. And yet I
should not venture to say that the darkness of her mind is complete,
that no memories remain stored up in its depths. Ah! the poor old
mother, how I pity her, if the light has not yet been finally
extinguished. What can her thoughts have been for the last twenty-one
years, if she still remembers?"

With a gesture he put this dreadful past which he knew from him. He
saw her again young, a tall, pale, slender girl with frightened eyes,
a widow, after fifteen months of married life with Rougon, the clumsy
gardener whom she had chosen for a husband, throwing herself
immediately afterwards into the arms of the smuggler Macquart, whom
she loved with a wolfish love, and whom she did not even marry. She
had lived thus for fifteen years, with her three children, one the
child of her marriage, the other two illegitimate, a capricious and
tumultuous existence, disappearing for weeks at a time, and returning
all bruised, her arms black and blue. Then Macquart had been killed,
shot down like a dog by a _gendarme_; and the first shock had
paralyzed her, so that even then she retained nothing living but her
water-clear eyes in her livid face; and she shut herself up from the
world in the hut which her lover had left her, leading there for forty
years the dead existence of a nun, broken by terrible nervous attacks.
But the other shock was to finish her, to overthrow her reason, and
Pascal recalled the atrocious scene, for he had witnessed it--a poor