In "The Downfall" Zola tells the story of a terrific land-slide which overwhelmed the French Second Empire: It is a story of war, grim and terrible; of a struggle to the death between two great nations. In it the author has put much of his finest work, and the result is one of the masterpieces of literature. The hero is Jean Macquart, son of Antoine Macquart and brother of Gervaise. After the terrible death of his wife, as told in "La Terre" ("The Soil"), Jean enlisted for the second time in the army, and went through the campaign up to the battle of Sedan. After the capitulation he was made...

Emile Zola's novel Le Reve (1888) is a love idyll concerning a poor embroideress, Angelique, and the son of a wealthy aristocratic family, set against the backdrop of a sleepy cathedral town in northern France. A far cry from the seething, teeming world evoked in Zola's best-known novels, it may at first seem a strange interlude between La Terre and La Bete humaine in the twenty-volume sequence known as the Rougon-Macquart Novels."