The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fortune of the Rougons, by Emile Zola
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Title: The Fortune of the Rougons
Author: Emile Zola
Editor: Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #5135]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS ***
Produced by Dagny; John Bickers
THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS
By Emile Zola
Edited With Introduction By Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
INTRODUCTION
"The Fortune of the Rougons" is the initial volume of the
Rougon-Macquart series. Though it was by no means M. Zola's first essay
in fiction, it was undoubtedly his first great bid for genuine literary
fame, and the foundation of what must necessarily be regarded as his
life-work. The idea of writing the "natural and social history of a
family under the Second Empire," extending to a score of volumes, was
doubtless suggested to M. Zola by Balzac's immortal "Comedie Humaine."
He was twenty-eight years of age when this idea first occurred to him;
he was fifty-three when he at last sent the manuscript of his concluding
volume, "Dr. Pascal," to the press. He had spent five-and-twenty years
in working out his scheme, persevering with it doggedly and stubbornly,
whatever rebuffs he might encounter, whatever jeers and whatever insults
might be directed against him by the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the
hypocritical. Truth was on the march and nothing could stay it; even as,
at the present hour, its march, if slow, none the less continues athwart
another and a different crisis of the illustrious novelist's career.
It was in the early summer of 1869 that M. Zola first began the actual
writing of "The Fortune of the Rougons." It was only in the following
year, however, that the serial publication of the work commenced in
the columns of "Le Siecle," the Republican journal of most influence
in Paris in those days of the Second Empire. The Franco-German war
interrupted this issue of the story, and publication in book form did
not take place until the latter half of 1871, a time when both the war
and the Commune had left Paris exhausted, supine, with little or no
interest in anyt
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