No. 20 · 1893
Le Docteur Pascal
Doctor Pascal
Le Docteur Pascal is the cycle's farewell — a coda, a summation, and an act of faith in life against the evidence of everything the preceding nineteen novels have shown. Dr Pascal Rougon, the family's scientist and its moral conscience, has spent his life in Plassans compiling secret dossiers on every member of the Rougon-Macquart dynasty: birth records, hereditary charts, case notes, the full account of what la fêlure has done through five generations. He believes, against the novel's own weight of evidence, that science can understand and ultimately correct the damage — that heredity is not fatality. His niece Clotilde Rougon, who lives with him and assists his work, is the novel's other pole: she inclines toward mysticism, toward the belief in grace and the unknown, and her debates with Pascal about science and faith run throughout the book. Their love affair — Pascal is old enough to be her father — is the novel's most deliberately transgressive gesture, and Zola renders it with warmth and without apology: this is what life feels like when it insists on itself, regardless of propriety. The novel's antagonist is Félicité Rougon, Pascal's mother, who has worked for decades to construct the family's respectable public image and regards the dossiers as an existential threat. She eventually burns them after Pascal's death. Pascal dies — quietly, of a heart ailment, attended by Clotilde — in one of Zola's most tender death scenes. The closing movement belongs to Clotilde: she has returned from Paris, where she had gone to care for Maxime Saccard; she is pregnant with Pascal's child; she nurses the infant in the final pages, in the sunlight, the last image of the cycle: a child, new life, the future still possible. The Rougon-Macquart line continues, but in whom and to what end, the novel — wisely — does not say.
Bilan du cycle. Pascal Rougon a passé sa vie à Plassans à compiler des dossiers secrets sur toute la famille — l'histoire de la fêlure à travers cinq générations. Il aime sa nièce Clotilde d'un amour que le roman présente avec chaleur et sans excuse. Félicité Rougon, sa mère, brûle les dossiers après sa mort. Pascal meurt doucement d'une maladie cardiaque. Clotilde, revenue de Paris, enceinte, allaite l'enfant dans les dernières pages : nouvelle vie, avenir possible. Le cycle se ferme sur une naissance.
Setting: Plassans