Never did child's nature show a more
equal balance of the characteristics of its parents. He was the exact
mean between the peasant Rougon and the nervous Adelaide. Paternal
grossness was attenuated by the maternal influence. One found in him the
first phase of that evolution of temperaments which ultimately brings
about the amelioration or deterioration of a race. Although he was still
a peasant, his skin was less coarse, his face less heavy, his intellect
more capacious and more supple. In him the defects of his father and his
mother had advantageously reacted upon each other. If Adelaide's nature,
rendered exquisitely sensitive by her rebellious nerves, had combated
and lessened Rougon's full-bodied ponderosity, the latter had
successfully prevented the young woman's tendency to cerebral disorder
from being implanted in the child. Pierre knew neither the passions nor
the sickly ravings of Macquart's young whelps. Very badly brought up,
unruly and noisy, like all children who are not restrained during their
infancy, he nevertheless possessed at bottom such sense and intelligence
as would always preserve him from perpetrating any unproductive folly.
His vices, his laziness, his appetite for indulgence, lacked the
instinctiveness which characterised Antoine's; he meant to cultivate
and gratify them honourably and openly. In his plump person of medium
height, in his long pale face, in which the features derived from his
father had acquired some of the maternal refinement, one could already
detect signs of sly and crafty ambition and insatiable desire, with
the hardness of heart and envious hatred of a peasant's son whom his
mother's means and nervous temperament had turned into a member of the
middle classes.
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