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shifts the emphasis away from the problem of alcoholism, which had been the focus of earlier film versions. This was the title that Zola himself originally meant to use; and he would have saved translators a good deal of head-scratching if only he had stuck to it.

THE DRINKING DEN
PREFACE
    The Rougon-Macquart will be made up of twenty novels: the general plan was set out in 1869, since when I have followed it with extreme precision. We have come round in due course to
The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir)
and I have written it, as I wrote the others, without deviating for a moment from my course. This is my strength: I have a goal.
    When
The Drinking Den
appeared in a newspaper, it was attacked with unprecedented savagery, it was denounced and accused of every crime. Do I really need, in these few lines, to explain my intentions as a writer? I set out to show the fatal collapse of a working family in the poisonous environment of our city slums. With drunkenness and laziness come the loosening of family ties, the filth of promiscuity and the gradual abandonment of decent feelings; then, in the end, shame and death. Quite simply, this is morality in action.
    L’Assommoir
is undoubtedly the most decent and moral of my books. I have often had to touch on quite appalling ills; but only the form has shocked. People have been angered by the words. My crime is to have had the literary curiosity to collect the language of the people and to pour it into a highly crafted mould – but the form is the great crime! Yet there are dictionaries of this language and scholars pore over them and enjoy its freshness, its vigour, its startling quality and its forceful images. It is a delight for scholarly linguists. Despite that, no one suspected that my aim was to engage in a purely philological exercise, which I believe to be of considerable historical and social interest.
    In any event, I am not defending myself. My work will defend me. It is a truthful work, the first novel about the people that does not lie and which carries the scent of the people. From that, one should notconclude that the people as a whole are bad – because my characters are not bad; they are only ignorant, vitiated by the environment of harsh labour and poverty in which they live. And one should read my novels, understand them and see them clearly as a whole, before making the kind of trite criticisms, the grotesque and repulsive assessments that one hears about myself and my works. Oh, if people only knew how much my friends laugh at the incredible myth about me that is foisted on the masses! If they could only know that the savage, bloodthirsty novelist is in reality a respectable bourgeois, devoted to scholarship and art, who lives quietly in his corner with no ambition except to leave behind him as great and as vital a body of work as he can! I am not refuting any of the fabrications, I am getting on with my work and leaving it to time and to the good faith of the public to reveal me as I truly am beneath the stupidities that have been heaped upon me.
    Emile Zola
    Paris, 1 January 1877.

CHAPTER 1
    Gervaise had waited for Lantier until two o’clock in the morning; then, shivering all over, because she had been standing in her shift in the cold air from the window, she slumped down across the bed, in a fever, her cheeks wet with tears. For the past week, when they came out of the Veau à Deux Têtes where they used to eat, he had sent her off to bed with the children and did not come back until late at night, claiming that he had been looking for work. That evening, while she was waiting for him to return, she thought she had seen him going into the Grand Balcon, 1 the dance-hall with its ten brightly lit windows, which bathed the dark stream of the outer boulevards in a sheet of flames; and, coming after him, she saw little Adèle, who worked as a polisher and dined in their restaurant, walking five or six steps behind and dangling her hands by