You hold all the best cards in the pack." On the following day, Felicite, incited by this conversation, desired to make sure on the matter.

They were then in the first days of the year 1851.

For more than eighteen months, Rougon had been in the habit of receiving a letter from his son Eugene regularly every fortnight.

He would shut himself in the bedroom to read these letters, which he then hid at the bottom of an old secretaire, the key of which he carefully kept in his waistcoat pocket.

Whenever his wife questioned him about their son he would simply answer: "Eugene writes that he is going on all right." Felicite had long since thought of laying hands on her son's letters.