Truth

In a quiet rural village in late-nineteenth-century France, an eleven-year-old boy is found dead in his room, sexually molested and strangled by an unknown assailant. The shocked townsfolk erupt in outrage: Who could have committed this horrible crime? Rumors immediately begin to fly and suspicion shifts from one person to another as conjecture begins to feed on itself.
At first a vagrant is suspected; he could have come in through the open window while passing through the town at night. But in a matter of days another story begins to circulate: the culprit must be Simon, the Jewish schoolmaster, and the murdered boy's uncle and guardian. Did he not resent the fact that the boy was a product of a mixed marriage? As a Jew in the midst of a predominately Christian community, Simon is vulnerable.

EMILE ZOLA?was born in Paris on April 2, 1840, the son of an Italian-Greek engineer father and a French mother. When Zola was two, his family moved to Aix-en-Provence. His father died soon thereafter, leaving his mother struggling to support herself and the boy. In 1860, after two years of study at the Lycee St-Louis, Zola returned to Paris, where he became a clerk and journalist, and began his writing career. He published a collection of short stories,?Conts `a Ninon?(Stories for Ninon), in 1864, followed by?La Confession?de Claude?(1865),?Therese Raquin?(1867), and?Madeleine Ferat?(1868).

In 1871 Zola commenced the long ?series called?Les Rougon--Macquart,?a sequence of twenty books described in the subtitle as "the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire." The series included such acclaimed works as?Nana?(1880),?Germinal?(1885),?LaTerre?(1887, Earth),?La Bete humaine?(1890,?The Beast in Man), and?Docteur Pascal?(1893).?

Zola's novel?Lourdes?was published in 1894 as part of the trilogy?Les Trois?Villes,?which included?Rome?(1896) and?Paris?(1898).

With Gustave Flaubert and others, Zola helped found the Naturalist school of French literature. Its concentration on misery and misfortune swung public taste away from nineteenth--century Romanticism to a middle road of balanced taste.

In 1898, Zola espoused the cause of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer convicted of treason in 1894. Convinced of Dreyfus's innocence, Zola published his open letter "J'accuse" in the news-paper?L'Aurore?(January 13, 1898), denouncing the French gen-eral staff. This led to Zola's own trial on charges of offending the French government, which reopened the Dreyfus case to public review. Sentenced to imprisonment, Zola escaped to England. Both Dreyfus and Zola were eventually vindicated, and Zola returned to France in 1899.

Zola died on September 28, 1902.