Le Rêve Reading Order

Le Rêve (1888) by Émile Zola is the sixteenth volume of Les Rougon-Macquart and the most surprising departure in the cycle — a novel of medieval spirituality and visionary experience set in the shadow of a Gothic cathedral in the fictional town of Beaumont, which is so unlike the typical Naturalist method that many readers of the time and since have wondered whether Zola had abandoned his principles. The heroine Angélique is a young woman raised on a medieval book of lives of the saints (Jacopo da Voragine's Golden Legend), and she lives so deeply inside the world of those legends that she eventually becomes, in Zola's ironic but tender treatment, something like a saint herself — or at least a figure whose interior life is more medieval than modern. She falls in love with Félicien, the son of the local bishop, whose wealth and position seem insuperable obstacles to marriage, but the novel is structured like a medieval romance in which the worthy heroine's goodness eventually overcomes the worldly obstacles — only for the ending to reveal the characteristic Naturalist truth: Angélique dies at the moment of her happiness, the body finally expressing its determined dissolution just when the spirit has achieved its desire. Le Rêve is Zola at his most tender and his most formally experimental — a deliberate testing of Naturalism's capacity to render subjective interior experience rather than objective social reality.