Published in 1893, Le Docteur Pascal enjoys a manifest structural significance as the closing text in the Rougon-Macquart series, but critical interest in Zola has tended to favour the other novels. Though one can understand Zola's complaints about having to reread the whole of his series in preparation for its concluding composition, Pascal's reflections on the family do offer a highly literal as well as symbolic relecture of the Rougon-Macquart family tree. The account of the relecture (Zola uses the term) between the doctor and geneticist, Pascal, and his niece, Clotilde, acquires a particular consequentiality when viewed in terms of the spatial disposition of desiring relations and the issue of paternal knowledge. The very foundations of the series in La Fortune des Rougon set up the interplay of legitimacy and illegitimacy which is played out in the ramifications of the family tree. The threat of illegitimacy and uncertainty threatens every union, be it conjugal or otherwise, for even the union of legitimate marriage relies on a bond with another family and hence a susceptibility to the secret history of its illegitimacies and seductions. Families usually perpetuate themselves by seeking bonds outside of their own ranks, but the renouement (rather than dénouement) of Le Docteur Pascal ties up the ever burgeoning family tree by crowning the plot of progeny with this fertile incestuous bond.