Emile and the moral defectives

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Zola pere, visionary and spendthrift, described in one official document as ''engineer-architect-topographer'', died when Emile was two, leaving the boy's mother with a mountain of debts and lawsuits. Several of the book's features - its half-gloating, half-appalled treatment of sexual appetite and its embrace of theoretical ideas as to human behaviour - became trademarks of the mature Zola in the 20-book Rougon-Macquart cycle, a systematic study of a family's degeneration into "moral monsters'', on which he embarked a year after Therese Raquin. The salvo of denunciations in the famous L'Aurore article of 13 January 1898, each beginning with the words ''J'accuse'', was not simply an enlightened appeal to ''the knowledge that will alleviate human woe and bring mankind the happiness to which it is entitled,'' but a mark of Zola's continuing obsession with victims and outcasts doomed by bourgeois exclusivism and hypocrisy. Everything, from Zola's short-sighted attacks on Manet for being technically incompetent, to the writer's menage a trois with the chambermaid Jeanne Rozerot and her employer, his wife Alexandrine, whom Edmond de Goncourt described as ''looking like a faded doll from a nearly bankrupt department store'', is investigated with what some may feel is excessive enthusiasm.