The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fortune of the Rougons, by Emile Zola

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

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