asylum
Les Tulettes
The asylum a few miles outside Plassans where Adélaïde Fouque — Tante Dide, the deranged founding mother of the entire Rougon-Macquart line — has been confined since middle age. She appears first in La Fortune des Rougon, already broken and detached from reality; she reappears at the very end of the cycle in Le Docteur Pascal, over a hundred years old, a living fossil, the source from whom all the family's vitality and all its madness descend. Her reaction to the news of Silvère's execution — a strange, ancient laugh — is one of the most chilling moments in the cycle. Les Tulettes is the origin and the limit of the family's history.
L'asile à quelques kilomètres de Plassans où est internée Adélaïde Fouque, Tante Dide — mère fondatrice démente de toute la lignée. Elle réapparaît dans Le Docteur Pascal centenaire, vestige vivant de la folie héréditaire familiale.