Above all things, he longed to make a rapid fortune.

When he was building his castles in the air, they would rise in his mind as if by magic; he would become possessed of tons of gold in one night.

These visions agreed with his indolence, as he never troubled himself about the means, considering those the best which were the most expeditious.

In his case the race of the Rougons, of those coarse, greedy peasants with brutish appetites, had matured too rapidly; every desire for material indulgence was found in him, augmented threefold by hasty education, and rendered the more insatiable and dangerous by the deliberate way in which the young man had come to regard their realisation as his set purpose.

In spite of her keen feminine intuition, Felicite preferred this son; she did not perceive the greater affinity between herself and Eugene; she excused the follies and indolence of her youngest son under the pretext that he would some day be the superior genius of the family, and that such a man was entitled to live a disorderly life until his intellectual strength should be revealed.
Aristide subjected her indulgence to a rude test.