In the taverns, where Macquart reigned supreme, people went so far as to say the journalist was paid to provoke disturbances.
Baffled on this side, Macquart had no alternative but to sound his sister Ursule's children.

Ursule had died in 1839, thus fulfilling her brother's evil prophecy.

The nervous affection which she had inherited from her mother had turned into slow consumption, which gradually killed her.

She left three children; a daughter, eighteen years of age, named Helene, who married a clerk, and two boys, the elder, Francois, a young man of twenty-three, and the younger, a sickly little fellow scarcely six years old, named Silvere.

The death of his wife, whom he adored, proved a thunderbolt to Mouret.