検索キーワード： 著者 "Émile Zola" すべてのカテゴリー

Orpheline, Pauline Quenu est recueillie par des parents dans un village battu par les vents de Normandie. Très vite, Pauline s'attache à Lazare, un jeune homme tourmenté, hanté par la maladie et la peur de la mort. Tandis qu'elle donne sans compter — son affection, son énergie, jusqu'à ses biens —, elle voit peu à peu ses espoirs s'effondrer. Dans ce huis clos face à la mer, où les tempêtes semblent répondre aux tourments intérieurs, Émile Zola livre un roman poignant sur la souffrance, l'amour silencieux et la force de continuer à vivre, malgré tout.

Octave Mouret, précurseur inspiré, bouleverse sa corporation comme Haussmann bouleverse la ville. Il parie tout sur les femmes, sur leurs envies et sur leur incapacité à surmonter les tentations.
Une lui résiste : Denise, incarnation de la vertu et de la générosité. Elle devient une obsession pour cet ogre.

"Je veux vous expliquer comment une famille, un petit groupe d'êtres, se comporte dans une société, en s'épanouissant pour donner naissance à dix, à vingt individus, qui paraissent, au premier coup d'oeil, profondément dissemblables, mais que l'analyse montre intimement liés les uns aux autres. L'hérédité a ses lois, comme la pesanteur." Emile Zola.

Serge Mouret, ordonné prêtre à l'âge de vingt-cinq ans, choisit d'exercer son ministère dans le village des Artaud, à quelques kilomètres de Plassans, sa ville natale. Il voue un amour mystique pour la Vierge Marie, accompagné d’extases, de visions et de mortifications qui finissent par le rendre gravement malade. À deux doigts de mourir, il est confié par son oncle, le docteur Pascal, à Jeanbernat et à sa nièce Albine, qui vivent dans une propriété à l’abandon appelée Le Paradou. La faute de l'abbé Mouret est le cinquième volume des Rougon-Macquart.

Toute acquise à Napoléon III dans le passé, grâce aux intrigues politiques de la famille Rougon, la petite ville de Plassans est maintenant sous le contrôle des légitimistes. Prêtre Bonapartiste, l'abbé Faujas, est envoyé de Besançon pour tenter de faire revenir la ville dans le droit chemin. Il est hébergé dans un premier temps par la famille Mouret. Il y a là François Mouret, quarante-cinq ans (fils d'Ursule Macquart) commerçant en retraite, sa femme Marthe Rougon et ses enfants, Octave, Serge et Désirée.

Dans ce roman, on découvre une société dominée par le plaisir et l'argent, le milieu du théâtre parisien au 19ème siècle et de la prostitution, celui de l'aristocratie et de la grande bourgeoisie.À travers le personnage de Nana, jolie fille du ruisseau, prostituée et comédienne sans talent devenue célèbre courtisane, Zola décrit la déchéance d'une femme, et celle de la bonne société qui lui apporte ses amants, mais aussi la fin du Second Empire, qui se rue avec insouciance vers la guerre et la débâcle.

Sous le second empire, le bouleversement de Paris voit le quartier marchand se transformer avec l'apparition du projet Baltard...

Perhaps the most autobiographical of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, The Masterpiece is a hard, bleak, and raw portrait of unrecognized artistic genius. Claude Lantier, brother to Nana and son of Gervaise, is a struggling painter who dreams of conquering the Paris art scene with his revolutionary "open air" style of painting. Discouraged and mocked, Claude retreats to the countryside with a young woman from Clermont, with whom he has fallen in love, before returning to Paris, where he continues to experience rejection at every turn.

After her lover abandons her and their two children, Gervaise marries a tin worker, Coupeau, who helps her rebuild her life. She starts her own business, and the two have a daughter, Anna (the protagonist of Zola's later novel Nana). But their happiness is short-lived as a freak accident leaves Coupeau seriously injured, beginning the family's fall into alcohol, desperation, and violence.

Zola's original French publication, Au Bonheur des Dames ("The Ladies' Delight"), published 1882, is the eleventh novel in his Rougon-Macquart series. This English translation by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, was published in 1886. It's a glitzy, fast paced Parisian drama depicting life at the world's first department store, revealing its many innovative marketing concepts, fashion, glamour, lust, greed, courage, deception, human foibles, and the vision and financial risk-taking that led to a world transformation in shopping -- one that set all the little shop keepers on their heads. All this is ...

Anna Coupeau, known as Nana, makes her debut in 1867 at the Theatre de Varietes, and is an instant sensation. It is as a prostitute, however, that she becomes infamous in Paris, as a destroyer of men. She meets with an ignominious end at the very eve of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. - Summary by Mark Leder

This, the fifth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart Cycle, serves effectively as a sequel to "The Conquest of Plassans". Serge Mouret, the son of Francois and Marthe, is now a priest, in the little backwater of Artauds. After he suffers a breakdown, with subsequent amnesia, however, he enters into a romance with the childlike Albine, which leads to catastrophe. - Summary by Mark Leder

The Attack on the Mill is a powerful tale of love, loyalty, and devastation set against the backdrop of the Franco-Prussian War. On the eve of a joyous wedding at Father Merlier's idyllic mill in the Lorraine countryside, the drums of war grow louder.

Gervaise Macquart runs away to Paris with Lantier, to work as a washerwoman. Lantier abandons her and their two sons. She then marries the roofer Coupeau, and has a daughter, nicknamed Nana. She opens her own laundry; then everything goes downhill, as both Gervaise and Coupeau succumb to alcoholism. - Summary by Mark Leder

Covering a two-year period, Zola recounts the lives, intrigues, quarrel and loves of a group of five families all living in what was at the time an entirely new social construct, the apartment building. This marks the midpoint of Zola's immense undertaking, the Rougon-Macquart Cycle. - Summary by Mark Leder

"A Love Episode" ("Une Page d'Amour") is the eighth volume in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels. It deals with Helene Mouret Grandjean, a widow, her daughter Jeanne, and her love for Dr. Deberle. - Summary by Mark Leder

The first book in the 20-novel Rougon-Macquart Cycle. A monument of French naturalism. The sprawling tale of a family in Provence, during the Second Empire, the family that grew out of the liaisons between Adelaide Fouque and her husband Rougons, and the smuggler Macquart. - Summary by Mark Leder

A jealous husband sets out to murder his wife's lover, setting in motion an unstoppable series of events. Witness to the murder is a train driver who struggles to resist his uncontrollable desire to kill women. - Summary by Aaron Hackett

Here, in Zola's sixth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, we get to know Pierre and Felicite's eldest son, Eugene. He's the son that made good, and stands at the pinnacle of power, at the very ear of the Emperor. But power carries with it its own perils, and so Eugene must face all manner of downturns and reversals to his fortune, and must encounter obstacles of all kinds, the chief of which being Clorinde Dalbi, an Italian beauty with the ambition and deviousness to match his own. - Summary by Mark Leder

Zola’s La Terre (The Earth) proved highly controversial on publication in 1887 and still retains the power to shock. It follows the fortunes of the Fouan family in the years leading up to the Franco-Prussian War. Old Fouan, the patriarch, draws up a legal contract to divide his farmland between his three children in exchange for an allowance that will support him and his wife through a comfortable retirement.