Excerpt from Nana It was Zola's talent to re-assure us by showing us phases Of life which, we flatter ourselves, is less beautiful, more earthy, more wretched than our own. He is a great disillusionist, a sort Of scourge, an Attila or a chief Of the Visigoths terribly laying waste fictions grown soft and decadent through an excess Of culture. He goes about his radical prophylaxis in a brutal and peremptory fashion. He uses coarse and vulgar words. He is not gentle or pitying or sympathetic. He does not undress men and women: he tears and strips their clothing from them. He violates what we are pleased to call the sanctity of privacy. He shows us hidden sores and infections, malformations, blights, bruises and corruption. He washes away the rouge and mascara; he obliterates the pleasing surfaces Of the elaborate toilette and vain primpings Of life. He was one Of the first great diagnos ticians to pronounce upon the nature Of the maladies which cor rupt the social body. It is possible that he made mistakes, that he exaggerated, that, like all specialists in pathology, he had an Obsession with certain odious diseases and that he Often found them where they did not, actually, exist. But he did not err on the side of Optimism or on the side Of a fatuous denial Of the presence Of wasting and degenerating forces. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.