the great family tree which was to occupy his attention during the next
twenty years of his life. His object was to describe the origin of
the family which he had selected for dissection in his series, and to
outline the various principal characters, members of that family. Mr.
Andrew Lang, writing on this subject in the _Fortnightly Review_, points
out that certain Arab tribes trace their descent from a female Dog, and
suggests that the Rougon-Macquart family might have claimed the same
ancestry. Adelaide Fouque came of a race of peasants who had long lived
at Plassans, a name invented by Zola to conceal the identity of Aix,
the town in Provence where his youth had been spent. She was highly
neurotic, with a tendency to epilepsy, but from the point of view of the
naturalistic novelist she offered many advantages. When a mere girl she
married a man named Rougon, who died soon afterwards, leaving her with
a son named Pierre, from whom descended the legitimate branch of the
family. Then followed a liaison with a drunken smuggler named Macquart,
as a result of which two children were born, the Macquarts. Adelaide's
original neurosis had by this time become more pronounced, and she
ultimately became insane. Pierre married and had five children, but his
financial affairs had not prospered, though by underhand methods he had
contrived to get possession of his mother's property, to the exclusion
of her other children. Then came the _Coup d'Etat_ of 1851, and
Pierre, quick to seize his opportunity, rendered such services to the
Bonapartist party as to lay the foundation of the family fortune, a
foundation which was, however, cemented with treachery and blood. It was
with these two families, then, both descended from a common ancestress,
and sometimes subsequently united by intermarriage, that the whole
series of novels was to deal. They do not form an edifying group,
these Rougon-Macquarts, but Zola, who had based his whole theory of the
experimental novel upon the analogy of medical research, was not on the
outlook for healthy subjects; he wanted social sores to probe. This is