Here a tall, spotless lily had bloomed in this compost, Sidonie Rougon, the sycophant of her brother, the go-between in a hundred suspicious affairs, giving birth to the pure and divine Angelique, the little embroiderer with fairylike fingers who worked into the gold of the chasubles the dream of her Prince Charming, so happy among her companions the saints, so little made for the hard realities of life, that she obtained the grace of dying of love, on the day of her marriage, at the first kiss of Félicien de Hautecœur, in the triumphant peal of bells ringing for her splendid nuptials. The union of the two branches, the legitimate and the illegitimate, took place then, Marthe Rougon espousing her cousin François Mouret, a peaceful household slowly disunited, ending in the direst catastrophes—a sad and gentle woman taken, made use of, and crushed in the vast machine of war erected for the conquest of a city; her three children torn from her, she herself leaving her heart in the rude grasp of the Abbé Faujas. And the Rougons saved Plassans a second time, while she was dying in the glare of the conflagration in which her husband was being consumed, mad with long pent-up rage and the desire for revenge. Of the three children, Octave Mouret was the audacious conqueror, the clear intellect, resolved to demand from the women the sovereignty of Paris, fallen at his _début_ into the midst of a corrupt _bourgeois_ society, acquiring there a terrible sentimental education, passing from the capricious refusal of one woman to the unresisting abandonment of another, remaining, fortunately, active, laborious, and combative, gradually emerging, and improved even, from the low plotting, the ceaseless ferment of a rotten society that could be heard already cracking to its foundations. And Octave Mouret, victorious, revolutionized commerce; swallowed up the cautious little shops that carried on business in the old-fashioned way; established in the midst of feverish Paris the colossal palace of temptation, blazing with lights, overflowing with velvets, silks, and laces; won fortunes exploiting woman; lived in smiling scorn of woman until the day when a little girl, the avenger of her sex, the innocent and wise Denise, vanquished him and held him captive at her feet, groaning with anguish, until she did him the favor, she who was so poor, to marry him in the midst of the apotheosis of his Louvre, under the golden shower of his receipts.