Zola Emile. The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris)

Oxford University Press, 2007. — 320 p.Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series with the subtitle Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, in which he sets out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range of characters and milieus. However, it was not until 1877 that his novel L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.
Brian Nelson is Professor of French Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, and editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies. His publications include Zola and the Bourgeoisie and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Émile Zola. He has translated and edited Zola’s Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille), The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames), and The Kill (La Curée) for Oxford World’s Classics.