The Fortune of the Rougons

It was about five o’clock in the morning when Rougon at last ventured to leave his mother’s house. The old woman had gone to sleep on a chair. He crept stealthily to the end of...

The insurrectionary army was continuing its heroic march through the cold, clear country. It was like a mighty wave of enthusiasm. The thrill of patriotism, which transported Mi...

In that closed, sequestered town of Plassans, where class distinction was so clearly marked in 1848, the commotion caused by political events was very slight. Even at the presen...

Plassans is a sub-prefecture with about ten thousand inhabitants. Built on a plateau overlooking the Viorne, and resting on the north side against the Garrigues hills, one of th...

Antoine Macquart had returned to Plassans after the fall of the first Napoleon. He had had the incredible good fortune to escape all the final murderous campaigns of the Empire....

It was not until Sunday, the day after the massacre at Sainte-Roure, that the troops passed through Plassans again. The prefect and the colonel, whom Monsieur Garconnet had invi...

me; on the contrary, I am often very glad of my uncle’s severity, and the tasks he sets me. He was quite right to make me a peasant girl; I should perhaps have turned out badly,...

On quitting Plassans by the Rome Gate, on the southern side of the town, you will find, on the right side of the road to Nice, and a little way past the first suburban houses, a...

children’s ingratitude. Had he not always been a good father to them? Jean and Gervaise were monsters, who had made him an evil return for all he had done for them. Now they aba...

“The Fortune of the Rougons” is the initial volume of the Rougon-Macquart series. Though it was by no means M. Zola’s first essay in fiction, it was undoubtedly his first great...