A young wife, her sickly husband and his friend fall into an affair in a dark shop in a Paris passage, and afterwards they are alone with each other and with what they know. Zola was twenty-seven; a critic called the book putrid literature, and Zola reprinted the insult in his preface, claiming he had merely dissected two human animals. Nothing supernatural appears, and it is the most haunted book he wrote. Fifty-eight plates, from Daumier's third-class carriage to Redon's evocations, trace the shadowed interiors and waterways that haunt the Paris passages.
