A young priest, sickly and ecstatic, collapses and wakes with his memory gone in an enormous overgrown garden, where a girl and the summer teach him what his vocation had made him forget. Zola planned twenty volumes to trace one family; this is the fifth, his strangest, and the middle section — pure heat and vegetation — has no equal in his work. Its 79 original illustrations have been carefully restored and coloured for this edition.
