Description
This, the last of the Rougon-Macquart series, is the most personal of Zola's novels. Not only is Pascal, the scientist at logger-heads with religious bigotry, a mouthpiece for so much of Zola's own philosophy, but his niece, Clotilde, with whom he falls in love as he wins her over to his views, is an idealised portrait of Jeanne Rozerot, Zola's mistress, who was over twenty years his junior.
Pascal's life work, his study of heredity as exemplified in his own family, is threatened with destruction by his mother, the eighty-year-old Madame Rougon, determined to preserve the legend of the Rougon-Macquarts' glory. Pascal foils her attempt to play on the religious susceptibilities of his niece and amanuensis, and the story develops as a tale of reciprocated, idyllic love constantly threatened from without by fear, hatred and the unavoidable tragedies and disasters of life.
ISBN:9781718621695
