## Metadata * Author: [[Émile Zola]] * ASIN: B01E922R0K * ISBN: 0199677875 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01E922R0K ## Highlights human behaviour is determined by heredity (race) and environment (milieu); — location: [83](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=83) ^ref-42804 --- Similarly, the descriptions of the sales in The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883), with their rising pitch and cascading images, suggest loss of control, the female shoppers’ quasi-sexual abandonment to consumer dreams, while at the same time mirroring the perpetual expansion that defines the economic principles of consumerism. — location: [117](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=117) ^ref-31235 --- Zola’s novel about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, La Débâcle (1892). — location: [166](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=166) ^ref-37920 --- Eugen Weber, in his splendid book Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976), argues that ‘very significant portions of rural France continued to live in a world of their own until near the end of the nineteenth century’ (p. xiii). — location: [324](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=324) ^ref-29939 --- ‘What! That’s what you’ve dragged me out for? Of course I can make him better. Tie a stone round his neck and chuck him in the river!’ — location: [1213](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=1213) ^ref-24846 --- bourgeois have only one ideal, to retire to the country to pick flowers, eat fruit straight from the tree, and frolic on the grass. — location: [1792](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=1792) ^ref-15048 --- Not one peasant had dared risk his écus; only bourgeois, lawyers, and financiers had taken advantage of the revolutionary measures. — location: [1882](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=1882) ^ref-26536 --- He was delighted at first, he savoured the countryside that peasants don’t see, he savoured it through remnants of sentimental reading, ideas of simplicity, virtue, perfect happiness, such as you find in little moral tales for children. — location: [1963](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=1963) ^ref-40428 --- was better to eat a crust of bread in your own home than meat in someone else’s, it tasted less bitter. — location: [3906](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=3906) ^ref-36303 --- the same detail recurred again and again, in ever longer sentences. But — location: [4017](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=4017) ^ref-60383 --- sabots — location: [5403](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=5403) ^ref-53134 --- This was the modern state of war, the actual economic battle, on the battlefield of the struggle for existence. — location: [6330](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=6330) ^ref-16043 --- ‘Certainly, if the wheat keeps coming in from America, there won’t be a single peasant left in France in fifty years’ — location: [6454](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=6454) ^ref-58465 --- If the earth was restful, and good to those who loved it, the villages that clung to it like nests of vermin, the human insects that lived off its flesh, were enough to dishonour it and blight any contact with it. — location: [7354](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=7354) ^ref-2851 --- Does our unhappiness count for anything in the great system of the stars and the sun? — location: [8734](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=8734) ^ref-28316 --- Only the earth is immortal, the Great Mother from whom we come and to whom we return, the earth we love enough to commit murder for her, and through whom life is continually renewed for its hidden ends, in which the horrors and woes of human existence have their part to play. — location: [8736](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=8736) ^ref-7084 --- Ian Littlewood, in his excellent France: The Rough Guide Chronicle (London, 2002), writes: — location: [8806](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01E922R0K&location=8806) ^ref-61132 ---