Émile Zola's 19th-century fiction follows Claude Lantier, a struggling Impressionist painter torn between artistic ambition and personal relationships in bohemian Paris. Through Claude's tragic pursuit of the perfect masterpiece, Zola explores the tension between artistic vision and reality in this translation by Ernest A. Vizetelly.
CLAUDE was passing in front of the Hôtel de Ville, and the clock was striking two o’clock in the morning when the storm burst forth. He had been roaming forgetfully about the Central Markets, during that burning July night, like a loitering artist enamoured of nocturnal Paris. Suddenly the raindrops came down, so large and thick, that he took to his heels and rushed, wildly bewildered, along the Quai de la Grève. But on reaching the Pont Louis Philippe he pulled up, ragefully breathless; he considered this fear of the rain to be idiotic; and so amid the pitch-like darkness, under the lashing shower which drowned the gas-jets, he crossed the bridge slowly, with his hands dangling by his side. He had only a few more steps to go. As he was turning on to the Quai Bourbon, on the Isle of St. Louis, a sharp flash of lightning illumined the straight, monotonous line of old houses bordering the …Continue reading →
This is the Ernest A. Vizetelly translation, a public-domain English text. Marginalia presents it unabridged, with chapter navigation, your reading position saved, and optional AI commentary on any passage.
A French novelist and journalist (1840-1902) who pioneered literary naturalism, depicting working-class life with scientific precision and unflinching realism. His twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle exposed social injustices of industrial France, while his famous "J'Accuse...!" letter defending Alfred Dreyfus demonstrated literature's power to challenge political corruption and antisemitism. All works by Émile Zola →
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