“Talk to them,” his mother used to say in an undertone; “try and make a practice out of these gentlemen.”
“I am not a veterinary surgeon,” he at last replied, exasperated.
One evening Félicité took him into a corner and tired to catechise him. She was glad to see him come to her house rather assiduously. She thought him reconciled to Society, not suspecting for a moment the singular amusement that he derived from ridiculing these rich people. She cherished the secret project of making him the fashionable doctor of Plassans. It would be sufficient if men like Granoux and Roudier consented to give him a start. She wished, above all, to impart to him the political views of the family, considering that a doctor had everything to gain by constituting himself a warm partisan of the regime which was to succeed the Republic.
“My dear boy,” she said to him, “as you have now become reasonable, you must give some thought to the future. You are accused of being a Republican, because you are foolish enough to attend all the beggars of the town without making any charge. Be frank, what are your real opinions?”
Pascal looked at his mother with naïve astonishment, then with a smile replied: “My real opinions? I don’t quite know—I am accused of being a Republican, did you say? Very well! I don’t feel at all offended. I am undoubtedly a Republican, if you understand by that word a man who wishes the welfare of everybody.”
“But you will never attain to any position,” Félicité quickly interrupted. “You will be crushed. Look at your brothers, they are trying to make their way.”
Pascal then comprehended that he was not called upon to defend his philosophic egotism. His mother simply accused him of not speculating on the political situation. He began to laugh somewhat sadly, and then turned the conversation into another channel. Félicité could never induce him to consider the chances of the various parties, nor to enlist in that one of them which seemed likely to carry the day. However, he still occasionally came to spend an evening in the yellow drawing-room. Granoux interested him like an antediluvian animal.
In the meantime, events were moving. The year 1851 was a year of anxiety and apprehension for the politicians of Plassans, and the cause which the Rougons served derived advantage from this circumstance. The most contradictory news arrived from Paris; sometimes the Republicans were in the ascendant, sometimes the Conservative party was crushing the Republic. The echoes of the squabbles which were rending the Legislative Assembly reached the depths of the provinces, now in an exaggerated, now in an attenuated form, varying so greatly as to obscure the vision of the most clear-sighted. The only general feeling was that a dénouement was approaching. The prevailing ignorance as to the nature of this dénouement kept timid middle class people in a terrible state of anxiety. Everybody wished to see the end. They were sick of uncertainty, and would have flung themselves into the arms of the Grand Turk, if he would have deigned to save France from anarchy.
The marquis’s smile became more acute. Of an evening, in the yellow drawing-room, when Granoux’s growl was rendered indistinct by fright, he would draw near to Félicité and whisper in her ear: “Come, little one, the fruit is ripe—but you must make yourself useful.”
Félicité, who continued to read Eugène’s letters, and knew that a decisive crisis might any day occur, had already often felt the necessity of making herself useful, and reflected as to the manner in which the Rougons should employ themselves. At last she consulted the marquis.