Plassans, December 1851: the coup comes to a small Provençal town, a handful of republicans march out with rifles, and the Rougon family calculates precisely which way to jump. Zola planned twenty volumes to trace heredity through one family under the Second Empire; this is the first, the root of the whole tree, and it opens with two children in a graveyard and closes with a fortune founded on a corpse. Fifty-eight plates, from Daumier to Munch, follow the novel's course from graveyard to inheritance through images of burial, illness and the long shadow of the dead.
