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-en-Provence....

Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he discovers that his fellow miners are ill, hungry, and in debt, unable to feed and clothe their families. When conditions in the mining community deteriorate even further, Lantier finds himself leading a strike that could mean starvation or salvation for all....

L'essentiel de La Bête humaine, c'est l'instinct de mort dans le personnage principal, la fêlure cérébrale de Jacques Lantier, mécanicien de locomotive. Jeune homme, il pressent si bien la manière dont l'instinct de mort se déguise sous tous les appétits, l'Idée de mort sous toutes les idées fixes, la grande hérédité sous la petite, qu'il se tient à l'écart : d'abord des femmes, mais aussi du vin, de l'argent, des ambitions qu'il pourrait...

Émile Zola was one of the most important, though controversial, French novelists of the late nineteenth century, and founder of the Realist movement. In 1871 Zola began to write his most notable series of novels, the "Rougon-Macquart Novels", that relate the history of a fictional family under the Second Empire. As a strict naturalist, Zola was greatly concerned with science, especially the problems of evolution and heredity vs. environment. However,...

"The Downfall (La Débâcle)" is Émile Zola's 1892 novel, the penultimate in the Rougon-Macquart series, which is a story set against the background of the Franco-Prussian War, the Battle of Sedan and the Paris Commune, events that led to the end of the reign of Napoléon III and the Second French Empire in 1870. The novel follows Jean Macquart, a corporal in the French army corps, as they are driven back by the Prussians deeper and deeper into France....