Doctor Pascal

ORIGINAL EDITION. One of the numbered copies on Holland paper.

Zola accustomed us to borrowing from his own life, but in this last volume of the Rougon-Macquart series, the author's identification with one of his characters is complete; Pascal is the augmented double, the ideal Zola. A Rougon who has escaped all the flaws of his family, whose genealogical tree he established, "handsome, powerful, generous", a man of science, a good doctor unconcerned with material things who, in La Fortune, observed the society of his fellow inhabitants of Plassans from the corner of his eye; Pascal is now 59 years old and - like his author with Jeanne Rozerot - has fallen in love with a young woman, Clotilde, his niece whom he took in before falling madly in love with her. She is for him "a late renewal, a youth after thirty years spent in the horror of human suffering" that constitutes the study of his family's heredity.

In a letter dated February 22, 1893, Zola states that with the series' only happy ending - the child suckled by its mother - he wished to conclude by affirming his confidence in "the eternal recommencement of life, [in] hope for the future, in the constant effort of laborious humanity. It seemed courageous to me, in ending this story of the terrible Rougon-Macquart family, to have a last child born from it, the unknown child, perhaps the Messiah of tomorrow". A Republican Messiah, Gérard Gengembre specifies.