Le Docteur Pascal

Pascal, a physician in Plassans for 30 years, has spent his life cataloging and chronicling the lives of his family based on his theories of heredity.

Using his own family as a case study, Pascal classifies the 30 descendants of his grandmother Adelaïde Fouque (Tante Dide) based on this model.

Pascal has developed a serum he hopes will cure hereditary and nervous diseases (including consumption) and improve if not prolong life.

Pascal's explains his goal as a scientist as laying the groundwork for happiness and peace by seeking and uncovering the truth, which he believes lies in the science of heredity.

Furthermore, it is the only novel in which a representative from each of the five generations dies: Tante Dide, Antoine Macquart, Pascal Rougon, Maxime Rougon/Saccard, and his son Charles.

He dies during the course of the novel when his body, soaked with alcohol from a lifetime of drinking, catches fire - a fictional instance of spontaneous human combustion that may be compared to the death of Krook in Bleak House.

Here again Zola touches, in a horrific manner, on the consequences of the excessive consumption of alcohol, a theme common to the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle.

Modified family tree for the Rougon-Macquart . This is the last tree drawn by Zola . It is part of the preparation work for the novel Le Docteur Pasca l. It contains "l'enfant inconnu" ("the unknown child"), the last child of the family, born from Clotilde and Pascal (after his death).