Émile Zola Quotes

Nana was a great coquette. She did not always wash her feet, but she wore such tight boots that she suffered a perfect martyrdom; and if anyone questioned her, seeing her face grow purple, she answered that she had a stomach-ache, so as not to confess her coquetry.

As they were all rather short of breath by this time, it was the camembert they could smell. This cheese, with its gamy odour, had overpowered the milder smells of the marolles and the limbourg; its power was remarkable. Every now and then, however, a slight whiff, a flute-like note, came from the parmesan, while the bries came into play with their soft, musty smell, the gentle sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine. The livarot launched into an overwhelming reprise, and the géromé kept up the symphony with a sustained high note.

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed, "she’s been more than an hour in there! When the priests set about cleansing her sins, the choir-boys have to form in line to pass the buckets of filth and empty them in the street!"

Cependant Quenu se rappelait une phrase de Charvet, cette fois, qui déclarait que « ces bourgeois empâtés, ces boutiquiers engraissés, prêtant leur soutien à un gouvernement d’indigestion générale, devaient être jetés les premiers au cloaque. » C’était grâce à eux, grâce à leur égoïsme du ventre, que le despotisme s’imposait et rongeait une nation.

At that hour she desired sin, the sin which no one commits, the sin which would fill her empty life, and finally set her in that hell of which she was still afraid, just as she had been when she was a little girl.

À cette heure, elle voulut le mal, le mal que personne ne commet, le mal qui allait emplir son existence vide et la mettre enfin dans cet enfer, dont elle avait toujours peur, comme au temps où elle était petite fille.

Vice, coming from above, flowed along the gutters, spread itself out in the sheets of ornamental water, re-ascended in the fountains of the public gardens to fall again on to the roofs in a fine penetrating rain.

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.

Those harlot eyes were never lowered; they courted pleasure, a pleasure without fatigue which one summons and receives.

He was twenty, and already there was nothing left to surprise or disgust him. He had certainly dreamt of the most extreme forms of debauchery. Vice with him was not an abyss, as with certain old men, but a natural, external growth.

The Empire had just been proclaimed, after that famous journey during which the Prince President had succeeded in arousing the enthusiasm of some Bonapartist departments. Silence reigned both at the tribune and in the press. Society, saved once more, was congratulating itself and indolently resting, now that a strong government was protecting it and relieving it even of the trouble of thinking and of attending to its own business.

She never spoke of her husband, nor of her childhood, her family, or her personal concerns. There was only one thing she never sold, and that was herself.

Endless love and voluptuous appetite pervaded this stifling nave in which settled the ardent sap of the tropics. Renée was wrapped in the powerful bridals of the earth that gave birth to these dark growths, these colossal stamina; and the acrid birth-throes of this hotbed, of this forest growth, of this mass of vegetation aglow with the entrails that nourished it, surrounded her with disturbing odours. ... But amid this strange music of odours, the dominant melody that constantly returned, stifling the sweetness of the vanilla and the orchids' pungency, was the penetrating, sensual smell of flesh, the smell of lovemaking escaping in the early morning from the bedroom of newlyweds.

Then the hour of separation came, and Miette climbed the wall again and threw him a kiss. And he saw her no more. Emotion choked him at the thought: he would never see her again—never!

Puis le moment de la séparation sonnait, Miette remontait sur son mur. Elle lui envoyait des baisers. Et il ne la voyait plus. Une émotion terrible le prit à la gorge: il ne la verrait plus jamais, jamais.