Emile Zola
Biographic Data
| ID | 204619 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emile Zola |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emile |
| FAMILY NAME | Zola |
| SIGNATURE | ZOLA E |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1873 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
The Assommoir
Gervaise had waited up for Lantier until two in the morning. Then, shivering all over from sitting half undressed in the cold air from the window, she’d slumped across the bed, feeling feverish, her cheeks wet with tears. For a week now, when they came out of the Veau à Deux Têtes,* where they had their meals, he’d sent her home to bed with the children and not come in himself until the early hours, saying he’d been looking for a job. That partic…
Assommoir
Chapter VII
Gervaise’s saint’s day was the nineteenth of June. On these occasions the Coupeaus put on a real spread, the sort of binge you’d come away from as round as a barrel, your belly full for the rest of the week. All their spare cash was scraped together. As soon as the couple had a few sous, they blew them on food. They added imaginary saint’s days to the calendar just as an excuse for a good feed. Virginie was all in favour of Gervaise stuffing hers…
Chapter II
Three weeks later, at about half past eleven on a bright sunny morning, Gervaise and Coupeau the roofer were having a brandied plum together in Père Colombe’s bar, the Assommoir. * Coupeau had been smoking a cigarette outside on the pavement when Gervaise crossed the street after delivering some laundry, and insisted that she join him. Her big square laundry basket lay beside her on the floor, behind the little zinc table.
Nana
‘She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.’ Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress. Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and…
La Débâcle
‘My title speaks not merely of war, but also of the crumbling of a regime and the end of a world.’ The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Débâcle (1892) takes as its subject the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1. During Zola's lifetime it was the bestselling of all his novels, praised by contemporaries for its epic sweep as well as for its attention to historical detail. La Débâcle seeks to expla…
The Sin of Abbé Mouret
Debacle
Chapter One
In the small, dark bedroom in Bazeilles, a sudden disturbance made Weiss jump out of bed. He listened: it was the cannon. Fumbling, he had to light a candle to see what time his watch said: four o’clock, the day was only barely beginning.*...
Chapter XIII
Brother Archangias , awake now, and standing over the gap in the wall, was hitting the stones with his stick, and swearing dreadfully. ‘May the devil break their thighs! May he nail them rump to rump like dogs! May he drag them by their feet,...
Chapter XIV
At that same time, Albine was still wandering about in the Paradou, with the dumb agony of a wounded animal. She was no longer weeping. Her face was white, with one deep furrow on her brow. Why was she suffering such a death? What...
Chapter XIV
Lit by only one lamp, burning amid the greenery on the altar of the Virgin, the church was filled at each end with big, floating shadows. The pulpit cast a great patch of dark shadow up to the rafters of the ceiling. The confessional...
Chapter XIV
The very next morning, Serge shut himself up in his room. The smell of the flower garden was really irritating him. He drew the calico curtains across, to avoid seeing the park and to prevent it coming in. Perhaps here he would be able...
Chapter Two
As the column of prisoners was leaving Torcy there was such a scramble that Maurice was separated from Jean. No matter how fast he ran to catch up, he just got more lost. And when he finally arrived at the bridge over the canal which...
Chapter I
After the Pater , Abbé Mouret bowed in front of the altar, and moved to the Epistle side. Then he came down and made a sign of the cross over big Fortuné and Rosalie, kneeling side by side at the edge of the...
Earth
"Set in a village in the Beauce, in northern France, it depicts the harshness of the peasants' world and their visceral attachment to the land. Jean Macquart, a veteran of the battle of Solferino and now an itinerant farm labourer, is drawn into the affairs of the Fouan family when he starts courting young Franc̦oise. He becomes involved in a bitter dispute over the property of Papa Fouan when the old man divides his land between his three childr…
Chapter 5
Months went by, winter came and went, then spring, and life in Rognes went on in its usual way, it took years for it to look as if anything had been achieved, in this mournful life of never-ending toil. In July, however, in the...
Chapter 7
Once again it was haymaking time, under a blue and extremely hot sky, refreshed by breezes; and the wedding had been set for Midsummer Day, which fell that year on a Saturday. The Fouans had strongly recommended that Buteau start the invitations with La Grande,...
The Conquest of Plassans
"The arrival of Abbé Faujas in the provincial town of Plassans has profound consequences for the community, and for the family of François Mouret in particular. Faujas and his mother come to lodge with François, his wife Marthe, and their three children, and Marthe quickly falls under the influence of the priest. Ambitious and unscrupulous, Faujas gradually infiltrates into all quarters of the town, intent on political as well as religious conque…
Chapter 22
In the hut at Les Tulettes it was blackest night. An icy draught brought Mouret out of the cataleptic stupor he had been thrown into by the crisis that evening. Crouched against the wall, he remained motionless for a moment, his eyes open, rolling...
Chapter III
The letter from the Russian banker in Constantinople, that Sigismond had translated, was the favourable reply Saccard had been waiting for to get things started in Paris; and two days later, as soon as he woke up, Saccard had the sudden conviction that he...
Money
‘The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift the world. Love and money are the only things.’ Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to make his way once more in Paris. Unscrupulous, seductive, and with unbounded ambition, he schemes and manipulates his way to power. Financial undertakings in the Middle East lead to the establishment of a powerful new bank and speculation on the stock market; Sacca…
La bête humaine
Chapter XI
The scene was the main bedroom at La Croix-de-Maufras, the one hung with red damask and which had two tall windows that looked out on to the railway line only a few metres away. From the bed, an old four-poster on the opposite side...
The masterpiece
The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist who has come from the provinces to conquer Paris but is conquered instead by the flaws of his own genius. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It provides a unique insight into Zola's career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-e…
No prominent works on this page.
Le Ventre de Paris
Roman. - Troisieme volet de la serie Les Rougon-Macquart, d'abord paru en feuilleton dans L'etat (janvier-mars 1873)
Au Bonheur des Dames
A la fin du XIXe siècle, les grands magasins révolutionnent le commerce. La provinciale Denise Baudu y est vendeuse sous les ordres du directeur Octave Mouret, qu'elle finit par convertir à l'amour. Avec un dossier pédagogique sur le naturalisme, la genèse du roman, l'intertextualité et la réception de l'oeuvre, ainsi qu'une interview de Philippe Claudel. ©Electre 2019
Lettres de Paris; Choix d'articles traduits du russe et presentes par Phillip A. Duncan et Vera Erdely
Les Rougon-Macquart, Tome III, Pot-Bouille; Au bonheur des dames; La Joie de vivre; Germinal
Unpublished Field Notes
Ladies' Paradise
Zola's prophetic celebration of unbridled commerce and consumerism, The Ladies' Paradise ( Au bonheur des dames, 1883) recounts the frenzied transformations that made late nineteenth-century Paris the fashion capital of the world. The novel's capitalist hero, Octave Mouret, creates a giant department store that devours the dusty, outmoded boutiques surrounding it. Paralleling the story of commercial triumph is the love story between Mouret and th…
Lettre à la jeunesse
The masterpiece
The Masterpiece is the tragic story of Claude Lantier, an ambitious and talented young artist who has come from the provinces to conquer Paris but is conquered instead by the flaws of his own genius. Set in the 1860s and 1870s, it is the most autobiographical of the twenty novels in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. It provides a unique insight into Zola's career as a writer and his relationship with Cezanne, a friend since their schooldays in Aix-e…
Germinal
Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!" While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigor and powe…
Chapter 4
One morning, six weeks later, Claude was painting in the sunshine that came streaming in through his studio window. The middle of August had been dull and wet, but now the sky was blue again his heart was back in his work. His big...
Chapter Ii
On Sunday Étienne escaped from the village as soon as night had fallen. A very bright, star-spangled sky lit the earth with a dusky blue glow. He went down towards the canal and walked slowly, following the bank up towards Marchiennes. It was his...
Chapter I
Crossing the open plain, wading through the thick, dark ink of a starless night, a solitary figure followed the highway from Marchiennes to Montsou,* which cut its paved pathway straight through ten kilometres of beet fields. The man could not even...
La bête humaine
Chapter XI
The scene was the main bedroom at La Croix-de-Maufras, the one hung with red damask and which had two tall windows that looked out on to the railway line only a few metres away. From the bed, an old four-poster on the opposite side...
The Conquest of Plassans
"The arrival of Abbé Faujas in the provincial town of Plassans has profound consequences for the community, and for the family of François Mouret in particular. Faujas and his mother come to lodge with François, his wife Marthe, and their three children, and Marthe quickly falls under the influence of the priest. Ambitious and unscrupulous, Faujas gradually infiltrates into all quarters of the town, intent on political as well as religious conque…
Chapter 22
In the hut at Les Tulettes it was blackest night. An icy draught brought Mouret out of the cataleptic stupor he had been thrown into by the crisis that evening. Crouched against the wall, he remained motionless for a moment, his eyes open, rolling...
Chapter III
The letter from the Russian banker in Constantinople, that Sigismond had translated, was the favourable reply Saccard had been waiting for to get things started in Paris; and two days later, as soon as he woke up, Saccard had the sudden conviction that he...
Money
‘The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift the world. Love and money are the only things.’ Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to make his way once more in Paris. Unscrupulous, seductive, and with unbounded ambition, he schemes and manipulates his way to power. Financial undertakings in the Middle East lead to the establishment of a powerful new bank and speculation on the stock market; Sacca…
Earth
"Set in a village in the Beauce, in northern France, it depicts the harshness of the peasants' world and their visceral attachment to the land. Jean Macquart, a veteran of the battle of Solferino and now an itinerant farm labourer, is drawn into the affairs of the Fouan family when he starts courting young Franc̦oise. He becomes involved in a bitter dispute over the property of Papa Fouan when the old man divides his land between his three childr…
Chapter 5
Months went by, winter came and went, then spring, and life in Rognes went on in its usual way, it took years for it to look as if anything had been achieved, in this mournful life of never-ending toil. In July, however, in the...
Chapter 7
Once again it was haymaking time, under a blue and extremely hot sky, refreshed by breezes; and the wedding had been set for Midsummer Day, which fell that year on a Saturday. The Fouans had strongly recommended that Buteau start the invitations with La Grande,...
La Débâcle
‘My title speaks not merely of war, but also of the crumbling of a regime and the end of a world.’ The penultimate novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Débâcle (1892) takes as its subject the dramatic events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870-1. During Zola's lifetime it was the bestselling of all his novels, praised by contemporaries for its epic sweep as well as for its attention to historical detail. La Débâcle seeks to expla…
The Sin of Abbé Mouret
Debacle
Chapter One
In the small, dark bedroom in Bazeilles, a sudden disturbance made Weiss jump out of bed. He listened: it was the cannon. Fumbling, he had to light a candle to see what time his watch said: four o’clock, the day was only barely beginning.*...
Art (25 works) · History (15 works) · Fiction (12 works) · Fiction (12 works) · Historical and Literary Studies (11 works) · Art history (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Continental european fiction (fictional works by one author) (8 works)