http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/2423335

The Fortune of the Rougons

The fictional town of Plassans (loosely based on the real city of Aix-en-Provence, where Zola grew up) is established as the setting for the novel and described in intimate detail, and then we are introduced to the eccentric heroine Adelaide Fouque, later known as "Tante Dide", who becomes the common ancestor for both the Rougon and Macquart families. Her legitimate son from her short marriage to her late husband, a labourer named Rougon who worked on Dide's land, is forced to grow up alongside two illegitimate children--a boy and a girl--from Dide's later romance with the smuggler, poacher and alcoholic Macquart, while the aging Dide slides further and further into a state of mental illness and borderline senile dementia. From this premise, the next nineteen novels all get their central protagonists and to a certain extent their themes.

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