Mathieu Froment, a draughtsman at a Paris factory, and his wife Marianne choose to welcome every child that comes, while the people around them, employers, relations and fashionable friends, limit their families for money, comfort or ambition. As the Froments turn wasteland outside the city into fertile farmland, Zola sets their growing household against the fates of those who chose otherwise.
The first of Zola’s unfinished Four Gospels (1899), a long, impassioned novel arguing against France’s falling birth rate. Download the free EPUB.