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Doctor Pascal

by Émile Zola

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First published: 1893
Pages: 291

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About this book

The final volume of the Rougon-Macquart cycle turns inward, to Pascal Rougon, a doctor who has spent thirty years charting his family's inherited flaws and testing his own theories of heredity and renewal. His research, and his late, tender love for his young niece Clotilde, scandalizes his relatives, above all his mother Félicité, who is determined to burn the papers that record every family secret. Zola uses Pascal to defend his own scientific method and his faith in life, work, and love against decay. It reads as both a personal creed and a summing-up of the twenty novels before it, warm where the series was often bleak.

About the author

Émile Zola

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and the leading figure of literary naturalism. His twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle traced one family under the Second Empire, and his open letter J'accuse in defense of Alfred Dreyfus reshaped the writer's role in public life.