She remained silent a moment longer, waiting for some remark from Clotilde, some transition by which she might come to the subject she wished to touch upon. When she saw that the young girl, occupied in arranging the papers on her desk, was no longer listening, she came to a sudden decision, after casting a glance at Martine, who continued mending the chair, as if she were deaf and dumb. “Your uncle cut the article out of the _Temps_, then?” Clotilde smiled calmly. “Yes, master put it away among his papers. Ah! how many notes he buries in there! Births, deaths, the smallest event in life, everything goes in there. And the genealogical tree is there also, our famous genealogical tree, which he keeps up to date!” The eyes of old Mme. Rougon flamed. She looked fixedly at the young girl. “You know them, those papers?” “Oh, no, grandmother; master has never spoken to me of them; and he has forbidden me to touch them.” But she did not believe her. “Come! you have them under your hands, you must have read them.” Very simple, with her calm rectitude, Clotilde answered, smilingly again. “No, when master forbids me to do anything, it is because he has his reasons, and I do not do it.” “Well, my child,” cried Félicité vehemently, dominated by her passion, “you, whom Pascal loves tenderly, and whom he would listen to, perhaps, you ought to entreat him to burn all that, for if he should chance to die, and those frightful things which he has in there were to be found, we should all be dishonored!” Ah, those abominable papers! she saw them at night, in her nightmares, revealing in letters of fire, the true histories, the physiological blemishes of the family, all that wrong side of her glory which she would have wished to bury forever with the ancestors already dead! She knew how it was that the doctor had conceived the idea of collecting these documents at the beginning of his great studies on heredity; how he had found himself led to take his own family as an example, struck by the typical cases which he saw in it, and which helped to support laws discovered by him. Was it not a perfectly natural field of observation, close at hand and with which he was thoroughly familiar? And with the fine, careless justness of the scientist, he had been accumulating for the last thirty years the most private data, collecting and classifying everything, raising this genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquarts, of which the voluminous papers, crammed full of proofs, were only the commentary. “Ah, yes,” continued Mme. Rougon hotly, “to the fire, to the fire with all those papers that would tarnish our name!” And as the servant rose to leave the room, seeing the turn the conversation was taking, she stopped her by a quick gesture. “No, no, Martine; stay! You are not in the way, since you are now one of the family.” Then, in a hissing voice: