Le Rêve
1888
Émile Zola writing a fairy tale. That's the first thing to understand about Le Rêve, the unexpected poem tucked inside his monumental Rougon-Macquart cycle. Instead of the industrial squalor and brutal heredity of his better-known works, Zola offers something gentler: a cathedral town in snowbound Picardy, a nine-year-old orphan found shivering on church steps, and a love that blooms between that girl and the son of a wealthy family. But don't mistake tenderness for simplicity. This is still Zola, still obsessed with the forces that shape a life: what we're born into versus what we dream of becoming. Angélique's impossible romance is both genuine passion and a kind of waking fantasy, a girl reaching beyond her station into a world that shouldn't have room for her. The result is a strange, luminous novel that reads like a religious painting come to life: part romance, part social critique, fully a poem of longing.
