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      Émile Zola

      The Complete Rougon-Macquart Series (All 20 Books in One Edition)

      The Fortune of the Rougons, The Kill, The Ladies' Paradise, The Joy of Life, The Stomach of Paris...

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      2017 OK Publishing

      ISBN 978-80-272-1959-9

       THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS

       THE KILL

       THE FAT AND THE THIN

       THE CONQUEST OF PLASSANS

       ABBE MOURET’S TRANSGRESSION

       HIS EXCELLENCY EUGENE ROUGON

       THE DRAM SHOP

       A LOVE EPISODE

       NANA

       PIPING HOT

       THE LADIES’ PARADISE

       THE JOY OF LIFE

       GERMINAL

       HIS MASTERPIECE

       THE EARTH

       THE DREAM

       THE HUMAN BEAST

       MONEY

       THE DOWNFALL

       DOCTOR PASCAL

      THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS

       Table of Contents

      Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

       Contents

        AUTHOR’S PREFACE

        CHAPTER I

        CHAPTER II

        CHAPTER III

        CHAPTER IV

        CHAPTER V

        CHAPTER VI

        CHAPTER VII

      AUTHOR’S PREFACE

       Table of Contents

      I wish to explain how a family, a small group of human beings, conducts itself in a given social system after blossoming forth and giving birth to ten or twenty members, who, though they may appear, at the first glance, profoundly dissimilar one from the other, are, as analysis demonstrates, most closely linked together from the point of view of affinity. Heredity, like gravity, has its laws.

      By resolving the duplex question of temperament and environment, I shall endeavour to discover and follow the thread of connection which leads mathematically from one man to another. And when I have possession of every thread, and hold a complete social group in my hands, I shall show this group at work, participating in an historical period; I shall depict it in action, with all its varied energies, and I shall analyse both the will power of each member, and the general tendency of the whole.

      The great characteristic of the Rougon-Macquarts, the group or family which I propose to study, is their ravenous appetite, the great outburst of our age which rushes upon enjoyment. Physiologically the Rougon-Macquarts represent the slow succession of accidents pertaining to the nerves or the blood, which befall a race after the first organic lesion, and, according to environment, determine in each individual member of the race those feelings, desires and passions — briefly, all the natural and instinctive manifestations peculiar to humanity — whose outcome assumes the conventional name of virtue or vice. Historically the Rougon-Macquarts proceed from the masses, radiate throughout the whole of contemporary society, and ascend to all sorts of positions by the force of that impulsion of essentially modern origin, which sets the lower classes marching through the social system. And thus the dramas of their individual lives recount the story of the Second Empire, from the ambuscade of the Coup d’Etat to the treachery of Sedan.

      For three years I had been collecting the necessary documents for this long work, and the present volume was even written, when the fall of the Bonapartes, which I needed artistically, and with, as if by fate, I ever found at the end of the drama, without daring to hope that it would prove so near at hand, suddenly occurred and furnished me with the terrible but necessary denouement for my work. My scheme is, at this date, completed; the circle in which my characters will revolve is perfected; and my work becomes a picture of a departed reign, of a strange period of human madness and shame.

      This work, which will comprise several episodes, is therefore, in my mind, the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. And the first episode, here called “The Fortune of the Rougons,” should scientifically be entitled “The Origin.”

      EMILE ZOLA PARIS, July 1, 1871.

      CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      On

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