L'Inondation (The Flood) is an 1880 novella by Émile Zola. Set in the village of Saint-Jory, several miles up the Garonne from Toulouse, it is the story of a family tragedy, told by its patriarch, seventy-year-old Louis Roubieu. On a beau...
Painter Claude Lantier advocates painting real subjects in real places, most notably outdoors. This is in stark contrast to the artistic establishment, where artists painted in the studio and concentrated on mythological, historical and religious sub...
The events of Au Bonheur des Dames cover approximately 1864-1869. The novel tells the story of Denise Baudu, a 20-year-old woman from Valognes who comes to Paris with her younger brothers and begins working as a saleswoman at the department store "Au...
The novel's central character is Étienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir (1877), and originally to have been the central character in Zola's "murder on the trains" thriller La Bête humaine (1890) before the overwhelmingly positiv...
Thérèse Raquin is the daughter of a French sea-captain and an Algerian mother. After her mother's death, her father takes her to live with her aunt, Madame Raquin, and Camille, her valetudinarian son. Because her son is "so ill", Madame...
My Lord, I shall make no Apology for addressing the following Sheets to Your Lordship, who lived in a long Intercourse of Friendship with the Author; and, like him, amidst occupations of a different nature, made Religion your voluntary Study; and in...
The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended is an approximately 87,000-word composition written by Sir Isaac Newton, first published posthumously in 1728. Since then it has been republished. The work represents one of Newton's forays into the topic of...
Opticks differs in many respects from the Principia. It was first published in English rather than in the Latin used by European philosophers, contributing to the development of a vernacular science literature. The book is a model of popular science...
Part of the contents originally planned for the first book was divided out into a second book, which largely concerns motion through resisting mediums. Just as Newton examined consequences of different conceivable laws of attraction in Book 1, here h...
