BRETIGNY (COMTESSE DE).  Auguste Lantier, reading the news from a journal to his friends Coupeau and Mes-Bottes, announced that the eldest daughter of the Comtesse de Bretigny was to be married to Baron de Valencay, aide-de-camp to His Majesty the Emperor.  L’Assommoir.

BRETON-LE-CUL-SEC, one of the band of brigands led by Beau-Francois.  La Terre.

BRICHET, the father of Fortune, Rosalie Bambousse’s lover.  He was a little man, withered by age, and with a cringing manner.  He tilled a small piece of stony land near Les Artaud, and was very poor.  La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret.

BRICHET (MADAME), wife of the preceding, a tall, lachrymose woman, was the one solitary devotee of the village of Les Artaud.  Whenever she had been to communion, she hung about the parsonage, knowing that the priest’s servant always kept a couple of loaves for her from the last baking.  La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret.

BRICHET (FORTUNE), son of the preceding, was a largely built, bold-looking young fellow of about twenty-five years of age, who had been the lover of Rosalie Bambousse for some time before Abbe Mouret was able to induce the girl’s parents to consent to her marriage.  La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret.

BRICHET (VINCENT), brother of Fortune, was the boy who assisted Abbe Mouret in serving Mass.  He was an idle young scamp, and constantly incurred the chastisement of Brother Archangias, who predicted a bad end for him on account of his friendship for Catherine Bambousse.  La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret.

BRIQUET, a peasant of Rognes.  His son drew the number 13 for the conscription.  La Terre.

BRON (MADAME), concierge at the Theatre des Varietes.  She sold liquor to the employees at the theatre.  Nana.

BRU, an old house-painter who lived in a garret in the same tenement-house as the Coupeaus, where he starved with cold and hunger.  He had lost three sons in the Crimea, and he lived on what he could pick up, now that for two years past he could hold a brush no longer.  Gervaise Coupeau showed him some kindness and asked him to her famous birthday party.  Things having gone from bad to worse with him, he was found one morning lying dead in his garret.  L’Assommoir.

BRULE (LA), mother of La Pierronne.  She was the widow of a miner who had been killed in the pit, and lived with her daughter at the settlement known as the Deux-Cent-Quarante.  A terrible old woman, frantic to revenge on the masters the death of her husband, she was the leader in the outrages perpetrated by the strikers in the Montsou district.  It was she who gave the signal for the attack on the troops, but at the first volley fired by the soldiers she fell back stiff and crackling like a bundle of dry faggots, stammering one last oath in the gurgling of blood.  Germinal.

BRUNET (LES), a bourgeois family in the new quarter of Plassans, of whom Madame Felicite Rougon was jealous.  La Fortune des Rougon.