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Zola welcomes us to the broad series to come with a slowly-evolving story of a splintered family in a fairly provincial French backwater, the expanding village of Plassans. The family here will be the center of everything that is to comprise twenty novels, and the genesis of the author's expansive, wide-reaching epic documentary of France during the Second Empire, roughly 1852 to 1870.

What we will see is that Plassans is France, ungainly expansion alongside ramparts falling apart, borders uncertain, a triangulated society where Monarchists, Bonapartists and Republicans all collide. Zola is writing his Les Misérables with this one but revised for the later era -- a tiny epic, a miniature of an imploding world.

The introduction in the graveyard at midnight almost couldn't be more of a 19th century opening: the lovers who meet at the secret spot of the concealed rifle, the mystery tombstone ... all converging toward the chaos and occasional splendor of Louis-Napoleon's coup of 1851. Setting the foundation for the entirety of the Rougon-Macquart cycle on ambiguous seismic ground, a deep societal fault line of uncertainty. Zola employs his 'Panorama' technique here, torrents of words that are only vaguely connected, but swept up in the rush of the coup. Character Miette is France's Marianne, waving the red flag yet somehow oblivious-- and will be the icon for the better instincts of the society, though flawed by naivete and the unreliable human nature of all the characters.

The Fortune sets all the elements into play; Zola meticulously planned his twenty-novel sequence only as he went, and this one would set the tone, introducing Rougons Pierre, Eugene, Aristide, Pascal, and Antoine Macquart, from the dark-horse side of the mixed clans. Witchy character Félicité, less a grand matron and more a Lady Macbeth, is established here, and all will play major parts in the hundreds of chapters to come.