The Fouques were the richest market-gardeners in that part of the country; they supplied an entire district of Plassans with vegetables.

However, their name died out a few years before the Revolution.

Only one girl, Adelaide, remained; born in 1768, she had become an orphan at the age of eighteen.
This girl, whose father had died insane, was a long, lank, pale creature, with a scared look and strange ways which one might have taken for shyness so long as she was a little girl.

As she grew up, however, she became still stranger; she did certain things which were inexplicable even to the cleverest folk of the Faubourg, and from that time it was rumoured that she was cracked like her father.
She had scarcely been an orphan six months, in possession of a fortune which rendered her an eagerly sought heiress, when it transpired that she had married a young gardener named Rougon, a rough-hewn peasant from the Basses-Alpes.

This Rougon, after the death of the last of the male Fouques, who had engaged him for a term, had remained in the service of the deceased's daughter.