Young Octave Mouret arrives in Paris and takes rooms in a handsome bourgeois apartment house on the Rue de Choiseul, where every floor conceals adultery, money worries, scheming mothers and miserable marriages. Zola’s satire of middle-class hypocrisy under the Second Empire follows Octave’s seductions and the comedy of the tenants, with a preface by George Moore.
A ferocious comic novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle and the prelude to The Ladies’ Paradise. Download the free EPUB.