But Clotilde does not answer anything like this.  On the contrary, she eats at once the apple from this tree—­passes soul and body into the doctor’s camp, and she does it because Zola wishes to have it that way.  There is no other reason for it and cannot be.

Had she done that on account of love for the doctor, had this reason, which in a woman can play such an important part, acted on her, everything would be easy to understand.  But there is no such thing!  In that case what would become of all of Zola’s doctrine?  It acts exclusively upon Clotilde, the author wishes to have only such a reason.  And it happens as he wishes, but at the cost of logic and common sense.  Since that time everything would be permitted:  one will be allowed to persuade the reader that the man who is not loved makes a woman fall in love with him by means of showing her a price list of butter or candies.  To such results a great and true talent is conducted by a doctrine.

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: