Fortune of the Rougons

Excerpt from Fortune of the Rougons: A Realistic Novel
I had been collecting documents for this vast work for about three years, and the present volume was, indeed, already written, when the fall of the Bonapartes which was essential to complete my picture, and which, with a kind of fatality, always turned up at the end of the drama - came to my aid, though I had not dared to expect it so near, to supply the terrible and necessary issue of my work. The latter is now complete; it moves in a finished circle; it becomes the picture of a defunct reign, of a strange epoch of folly and shame.
This work, which will comprise several episodes, embodies in my mind the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire. And the first episode, The Fortune of the Rougons, may, for scientific pur poses, be very aptly entitled The Origin.
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