Books with author Emile Zola

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

His 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-en-Provence. It also presents a well-documented account of the turbulent Bohemian world in which the Impressionists came to prominence despite the conservatism of the Academy and the ridicule of the general public.

Nana is a novel by the French naturalist author Émile Zola. Completed in 1880, Nana is the ninth installment in the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, which was to tell "The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire."The novel was an immediate success. Le Voltaire, the French newspaper that was to publish it in installments from October 1879 on, had launched a gigantic advertising campaign, raising the curiosity of the reading public to a fever pitch. When Charpentier finally published Nana in book form in February 1880, the first edition of 55,000 copies was sold out in one day. Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt were full of praise for Nana. On the other hand, a part of the non-reading public, spurred on by some critics, reacted to the book with outrage. While the novel is held up as a fine example of writing, it is not especially true to Zola's touted naturalist philosophy; instead, it is one of the most symbolically complex of his novels, setting it apart from the earthy "realism" of L'Assommoir or the more brutal "realism" of La Terre (1887). However, it was a great deal more authentic than most contemporary novels about the demimonde.Nana is especially noted for the crowd scenes, of which there are many, in which Zola proves himself a master of capturing the incredible variety of people. Whereas in his other novels -- notably Germinal (1885) -- he gives the reader an amazingly complete picture of surroundings and the lives of characters, from the first scene we are to understand that this novel treads new ground.Flaubert summed up the novel in one perfect sentence: Nana tourne au mythe, sans cesser d'être réelle. (Nana turns into myth, without ceasing to be real.)

Wenn die üppige blonde Nana auf der Bühne des Pariser Varietétheaters steht, spürt jeder: sie hat keinen Funken Talent. Doch das macht nichts, denn sie hat etwas anderes ... Nana, das Kind aus der Gosse, Tochter einer Wäscherin, ausgestattet mit großen sinnlichen Reizen, steigt auf zur begehrtesten Kurtisane der Pariser Gesellschaft. Sie wird zum Idol, dem sich die Männer zu Füßen werfen. Bankiers bringen ihr ein ganzes Vermögen zum Opfer, Aristokraten ihre Würde, Jünglinge nehmen sich ihretwegen das Leben. Nana in ihrer grenzenlosen Gier und Verschwendungssucht schreitet ungerührt über sie hinweg, schön wie eine Sumpfblüte, Sinnbild einer untergehenden Ära.

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That morning Jean, with a seed-bag of blue linen tied round his waist, held its mouth open with his left hand, while with his right, at every three steps, he drew forth a handful of corn, and flung it broadcast. The rich soil clung to his heavy shoes, which left holes in the ground, as his body lurched regularly from side to side; and each time he threw you saw, amid the ever-flying yellow seed, the gleam of two red stripes on the sleeve of the old regimental jacket he was wearing out. He strode forward in solitary state; and behind him, to bury the grain, there slowly came a harrow, to which were harnessed two horses, driven by a waggoner, who cracked his whip over their ears in long, regular sweeps. The patch of ground, scarcely an acre and a quarter in extent, was of such little importance that Monsieur Hourdequin, the master of La Borderie, had not cared to send the drill-plough, which was in use elsewhere. Jean, then journeying due north over the field, had the farm-buildings exactly in front of him, a mile and a quarter off. On reaching the end of the furrow, he raised his eyes with a vacant look as he paused for a moment to take breath. Before him were the low farm walls, and a patch of old slate, isolated on the outskirts of the plain of La Beauce, which stretched towards Chartres. Under a dull, late October sky lay ten leagues of arable land, where, at that time of year, great ploughed squares of bare, rich, yellow soil alternated with green expanses of lucern and clover; there was here not a slope, not a tree; the plain extended into the dim distance, curving down beyond the horizon, which was level as at sea. Westward, a small wood just edged the sky with a band of russet. In the centre a road—the road from Châteaudun to Orleans—of chalk-like whiteness, stretched four leagues straight ahead, displaying as it went a geometrical row of telegraph-posts. Nothing else but three or four wooden mills on log foundations, with their sails at rest; some villages forming islets of stone; and a distant steeple emerging from a depression in the landscape, the church itself being hidden among the gentle undulations of the wheat-fields.

The camp was pitched in the centre of a fertile plain at a mile or so from Mulhausen, in the direction of the Rhine. In the twilight of a sultry day in August, under the dull sky, across which heavy clouds were drifting, the rows of shelter-tents could be seen stretching out amid a broad expanse of ploughed land. At regular intervals along the front gleamed the piles of arms, guarded by sentinels with loaded rifles, who stood there stock-still, their eyes fixed dreamily on the violet-tinted mist which was rising from the great river on the far horizon. The men had arrived from Belfort at about five o' clock. It was now eight, and they had only just received their rations. The firewood, however, had apparently gone astray, for none had been distributed, so that there was neither fire nor soupe. The men had been obliged to munch their hard, dry biscuit, washing it down with copious draughts of brandy, which had dealt the last blow, as it were, to their failing legs, already nerveless through fatigue. Near the canteen, however, beyond the stacks of arms, two men were stubbornly endeavouring to light some green wood—a pile of young tree trunks, which they had cut down with their sword-bayonets, and which obstinately refused to blaze. Merely a coil of thick black smoke of lugubrious aspect ascended from the heap into the evening air. There were here only 12,000 men, all that General Félix Douay had with him of the Seventh Army Corps. The first division, summoned by MacMahon the day before, had started for Frœschweiler; the third was still at Lyons; and the general had resolved to leave Belfort and advance to the front with merely the second division, supported by the reserve artillery and an incomplete division of horse. Camp fires had been signalled at Lorrach, and the Sub-Prefect of Schelestadt had telegraphed that the Prussians were about to cross the Rhine at Margolsheim. The general, who realised how dangerous was his isolated position at the extreme right of the other army corps, with none of which he was in communication, had hastened his advance to the frontier the more rapidly, as news had reached him, the day before, of the disastrous surprise of Weissenburg. Even supposing he did not have to resist an attack on his own lines, it was now to be feared that he might at any moment be called upon to support the First Army Corps. That very day—that disquieting, stormy Saturday, August 6—there must have been fighting somewhere, most probably near Frœschweiler. There were signs of it in the air, in the heavy, restless sky across which there now and again swept a chilly shudder—a sudden gust of wind which passed by moaning, as if with anguish. For the past two days the troops had been convinced that they were advancing to battle. They one and all expected to find the Prussians in front of them at the end of their forced march from Belfort to Mulhausen.