Doctor Pascal

"While La Débâcle (1892), the nineteenth novel of the Les Rougon-Macquart, brought to a close the history of the Second Empire, Dr Pascal (Le Docteur Pascal, 1893), the twentieth and final novel of the series, concludes the saga of the Rougon-Macquart family. Set in Plassans, the novel begins in 1872, after the fall of the Empire. Pascal Rougon, a doctor, first appears in The Fortune of the Rougons (1871) as the second son of Pierre and Félicité Rougon; his elder brother is Eugène Rougon, his younger brother is Aristide (Saccard). He stands apart, to such an extent that he 'did not seem to belong to the family' (The Fortune of the Rougons, p. 61). When he reappears twenty-two years later as the central figure of the novel that bears his name, it is as a heroic, almost messianic, old man, a kind of scientist-scholar, prophesying a glorious future. Devoted to medical research, he has spent his life studying genetics, chronicling and classifying the hereditary ills of his own family-the thirty descendants of his grandmother Adélaïde Fouque (Tante Dide). He keeps his files locked in a cupboard, along with a family tree he has painstakingly compiled. Additionally, he has developed a process of hypodermic injections which, he believes, will cure hereditary and nervous diseases. Pascal's young niece, Clotilde (daughter of Aristide), who lives with him, has acquired strong religious convictions under the influence of Martine, the doctor's pious old servant.