La Faute de l'abbé Mouret Reading Order

La Faute de l'abbé Mouret (1875) by Émile Zola is the fifth volume of Les Rougon-Macquart and the most rapturously beautiful novel in the cycle — a deliberate departure from Zola's usual urban naturalism into something closer to myth and symbolist prose-poetry. The plot is deceptively simple: the young priest Serge Mouret, whose piety is so intense it has become pathological, suffers a mental breakdown and recovers in a vast overgrown garden called Le Paradou under the care of the free-spirited Albine, falls in love with her, returns to his religious calling, and is destroyed — along with Albine — by the conflict between natural desire and priestly vow. But the mythic structure is everything: Le Paradou is Eden, and Serge and Albine are Adam and Eve; the novel is a systematic retelling of the Fall in which the Church plays the role of God, and natural sexuality plays the role of the forbidden fruit. Zola's prose in the Paradou sections is unlike anything else in his work — sensuous, lush, cataloguing the overgrown garden's botanical abundance with an almost obsessive precision that serves his symbolic argument about the richness of natural life that the Church's system of sin and renunciation requires its servants to destroy. The novel is Zola's most direct challenge to Catholicism and his most lyrical book.