**Nana** follows the rise and fall of a Parisian courtesan in Zola's unflinching portrait of Second Empire society. This naturalist fiction chronicles how one woman's beauty and sexuality both empower and destroy her, while exposing the moral decay beneath 19th-century bourgeois respectability.
At nine o’clock in the evening the body of the house at the Theatres des Variétés was still all but empty. A few individuals, it is true, were sitting quietly waiting in the balcony and stalls, but these were lost, as it were, among the ranges of seats whose coverings of cardinal velvet loomed in the subdued light of the dimly burning luster. A shadow enveloped the great red splash of the curtain, and not a sound came from the stage, the unlit footlights, the scattered desks of the orchestra. It was only high overhead in the third gallery, round the domed ceiling where nude females and children flew in heavens which had turned green in the gaslight, that calls and laughter were audible above a continuous hubbub of voices, and heads in women’s and workmen’s caps were ranged, row above row, under the wide-vaulted bays with their gilt-surrounding adornments. Every few seconds an attendant w…Continue reading →
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 →
Browse all Fiction · 19th Century works