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Updated: June 29, 2025
La Conquete de Plassans spoke of life in the south of France. La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret treated of the results of celibacy. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon dealt with official life. L'Assommoir was a tract against the vice of drunkenness. Some think this the strongest of the naturalist series. Its success was prodigious. In this the marvellous talent of Zola for minute description is evinced.
In 1893 the figures for the principal novels of Zola stood thus: Nana, 160,000; L'Assommoir, 127,000; La Débâcle, 143,000; Germinal, 88,000; La Terre, 100,000; La Bête Humaine, 83,000; the same number for Le Rêve; Pot-Bouille, 82,000; whereas L'Oeuvre only counted 55,000; La Conquête de Plassans, 25,000; La Curée, 36,000, and La Joie de Vivre, 44,000.
As for the other personages of M. Zola's book on the one hand, Aunt Dide, Pierre Rougon, his wife, Felicite, and their sons Eugene, Aristide and Pascal, and, on the other, Macquart, his daughter Gervaise of "L'Assommoir," and his son Jean of "La Terre" and "La Debacle," together with the members of the Mouret branch of the ravenous, neurotic, duplex family these are analysed or sketched in a way which renders their subsequent careers, as related in other volumes of the series, thoroughly consistent with their origin and their up-bringing.
When Nana passed in front of l'Assommoir and saw her mother inside, with her nose in her glass, fuddled in the midst of the disputing men, she was seized with anger; for youth which has other dainty thoughts uppermost does not understand drink. On these evenings it was a pretty sight. Father drunk, mother drunk, a hell of a home that stunk with liquor, and where there was no bread.
As she glanced up and down the boulevard, she was seized with a dull dread that her life would be fixed there forever, between a slaughter-house and a hospital. Three weeks later, towards half-past eleven, one beautiful sunshiny day, Gervaise and Coupeau, the zinc-worker, were each partaking of a plum preserved in brandy, at "l'Assommoir" kept by Pere Colombe.
Virginie understood it all as she caught a sight of Lantier seated at one of Francois's tables quietly dining. The two women dragged the blacksmith along. "My ankle twisted," said Gervaise as soon as she was able to speak. At length they discovered Coupeau and Poisson at the bottom of the street inside Pere Colombe's l'Assommoir.
This would seem to prove what the critics of the French novelist have asserted: that books in which coarse themes are treated with indescribable coarseness have sold and continue to sell better than his finer work, L'Oeuvre, for example, which has only achieved 71,000. But L'Assommoir is Zola at his best; besides, it is not such a vile book as La Terre.
It is in this respect that his enormous superiority over Zola is most clearly shown. When "L'Assommoir" was published, George Moore asked Turgenev how he liked it, and he replied: "What difference does it make to me whether a woman sweats in the middle of her back or under her arm? I want to know how she thinks, not how she feels."
It must be the rotgut from l'Assommoir that was hacking away inside him. Well! his entire body had been soaked in it. The doctors had gone away. At the end of an hour Gervaise, who had remained with the house surgeon, repeated in a low voice: "He's dead, sir; he's dead!" But the house surgeon, who was watching the feet, shook his head.
Tennyson was in a cheap seven-and-six edition; then came Swinburne, Pater, Rossetti, Morris, two novels by Rhoda Broughton, Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, and Smollett; the complete works of Balzac, Gautier's Emaux et Camées, Salammbo, L'Assommoir; add to this Carlyle, Byron, Shelley, Keats, &c.
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