This doctrine conducts also to perfect atrophy of moral sense. This heredity is a wall in which one can make as many windows as one pleases. The doctor is such a window. He considers himself as being degenerated from the nervousness of the family; it means that he is a normal man, and as such he would transmit his health to his descendants. Clotilde thinks also that it would be quite a good idea, and as they are in love, consequently they take possession of each other, and they do it as did people in the epoch of caverns. Zola considered it a perfectly natural thing, Doctor Pascal thinks the same, and as Clotilde passed into his camp, she did not make any opposition. This appears a little strange. Clotilde was religious only a little while ago! Her youth and lack of experience do not justify her either. Even at eight years, girls have some sentiment of modesty. At twenty years a young girl always knows what she is doing, and she cannot be called a sacrifice, and if she departs from the sentiment of modesty she does it either by love, which makes noble the raptures, or because she does it by the act of duty, but at the same time she wishes to be herself a legitimated duty. Even if a woman is an irreligious being and she refuses to be blessed by religion, she can desire that her sentiment were legitimated. The priest or _monsieur le maire_? Clotilde, who loves Doctor Pascal, does not ask for anything. Marriage, accomplished by a _maire_, seems to her to be a secondary thing. Here also one cannot understand her, because a true love would wish to make the knot lasting. That which really happens is quite different, in the novel, that first separation is the end of the relation between them. Were they married at least by a _maire_, they would have remained even in the separation husband and wife, they would not cease to belong to each other; but as they were not married, therefore at the moment of her departure he became unmarried, as formerly, Doctor Pascal, she--seduced Clotilde. Even during their life in common there happened a thousand disagreeable incidents for both of them. One time, for instance, Clotilde rushes crying and red, and when the frightened doctor asks her what is the matter, she answers: "Ah, those women! Walking in the shade, I closed my parasol and I hurt a child. In that moment all of the women fell on me and began to shout such things! Ah, it was so dreadful! that I shall never have any children, that such things are not for such a dishcloth as I! and many other things which I cannot repeat; I do not wish to repeat them; I do not even understand them." Her breast was moved by sobbings; he became pale, and seizing her by the shoulders, commenced to cover her face with kisses, saying: "It's my fault, you suffer through me! Listen, we will go very far from here, where no one knows us, where everybody will greet you and you shall be happy."