About the book: 2024 / Emile Zola is one of the pillars of world realistic literature, the founder and theorist of naturalism, a keen researcher of everyday life, a passionate human rights activist and publicist who influenced everything realistic the direction of literature of the 20th century and, above all, the school of “new journalism”: Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer. His most famous work is the epochal twenty-volume cycle “Rugon-Macquart”, revealing to the reader an endless panorama of human vices and virtues in the scenery of the Second Empire. This is a true encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces using the example of several generations of one family, which gave birth to the strangest fruits. This illustrated edition includes novels that, according to the reading order prescribed by the author, occupy the ninth and tenth places in the cycle. Against the backdrop of Zola’s large-scale panorama of Parisian life, where greed daily confronts selflessness, love for one’s neighbor - animal passions, sublime aspirations - stultifying everyday routine , where pride, cruelty, cynicism and violence rule, and the movement of life is directed by the rise and fall of the strong and weak of this world, the novels “The Misdemeanor of Abbé Mouret” and “Page of Love” suddenly place the reader in the lyrical chamber world of forbidden love, vague yearnings, “small "tests of the soul and the inevitable search for a place in the world for every destiny.