L' Assommoir: Saloon

Zola's classic tale about Gervaise Macquart, featured in the first novel in the series, The Fortune of the Rougons, and her escape to Paris to work amongst the lower class in a laundry. The novel chronicles Gervaise's life, including marriage, opening her own business, and having children, and later the downward trajectory of her time in Paris. This being one of Zola's most famous novels, his shocking descriptions of conditions in working-class 19th-century Paris garnered him further fame and recognition. Saloon remains one of the most important works of French literature.