The priest, having lost Lourdes and Rome, comes to Paris and finds his brother making bombs in a workshop, while ministers, financiers and newspapers arrange a scandal above them. Zola finished the trilogy in 1898, the year of the Dreyfus letter that sent him into exile, and the anarchist chapters draw on the bombings and trials of the early 1890s. Faith is not restored at the end; something else is put in its place.
