They, poor devils, were just machine-fodder, they were penned like cattle in housing-estates, the big Companies were gradually dominating their whole… - Émile Zola

There she stood, by herself, amidst all her treasures, with a whole horde of men grovelling at her feet. Like those dreaded monsters of old whose lairs were littered with bones, she was walking on skulls and surrounded by cataclysms.

She was not shocked; it seemed to her that every woman had a right to arrange her life as she liked, when she was alone and free in the world. For her own part, however, she had never given way to such ideas; her sense of right and her healthy nature naturally maintained her in the respectability in which she had always lived.

The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.