fouans

Updated: May 5, 2025

Witness the Fouans, grown old, parting with their fields as if they were parting with their flesh; the Buteaus in their eager greed committing parricide, to hasten the inheritance of a field of lucern; the stubborn Francoise dying from the stroke of a scythe, without speaking, rather than that a sod should go out of the family all this drama of simple natures governed by instinct, scarcely emerged from primitive barbarism all this human filth on the great earth, which alone remains immortal, the mother from whom they issue and to whom they return again, she whom they love even to crime, who continually remakes life, for its unknown end, even with the misery and the abomination of the beings she nourishes.

Émile Zola - Doctor Pascal