In a shuttered house near Plassans, Dr. Pascal Rougon keeps a vast oak press full of papers recording the heredity of his own family. His devout niece Clotilde, who has grown up in his care, is torn between faith and his science, and between duty and a love that grows between them, while his mother schemes to have the papers burned.
The twentieth and last novel of Zola’s cycle, a summing-up of the whole Rougon-Macquart saga and its ideas of heredity. Download the free EPUB.