No. 16 · 1888
Le Rêve
The Dream
The most deliberately gentle of the twenty novels — Zola wrote it as a conscious respite after the violence of Germinal. Angélique is an orphan of obscure birth (she is, though the novel does not stress it, a Rougon by blood) who has been taken in by Hubert and Hubertine, elderly embroiderers living in the shadow of a great Gothic cathedral in a provincial town. She grows up entirely on a diet of hagiographies — the Légende Dorée, the lives of the saints — and constructs her inner world from them, overlaying everything she sees with the luminous imagery of the books she loves. When the handsome, aristocratic Félicien de Hautecœur appears — the son of the local bishop Monseigneur de Hautecœur — she falls in love with a figure who seems to have stepped directly out of her legends. Zola traces with great delicacy the collision between the world of religious dream and the world of material fact: the bishop refuses to consent to their marriage (Angélique's obscure birth makes it impossible in his view); she falls dangerously ill; in the end the bishop relents and blesses her, she recovers, they marry — and she dies on the church steps immediately after the ceremony, as if the dream, once made real in the material world, has no further substance. Le Rêve is the cycle's one unambiguously happy ending, which is also an ending.
Le roman le plus tendre du cycle, écrit comme respiration après Germinal. Angélique, orpheline recueillie par des brodeurs au pied d'une cathédrale, grandit dans la Légende Dorée et les vies de saints. Elle tombe amoureuse de Félicien de Hautecœur, fils du monseigneur local, qui semble sorti de ses lectures. Son père refuse le mariage, Angélique dépérit, mais finit par être bénie et épouse Félicien — et meurt sur les marches de l'église, comme si le rêve réalisé n'avait plus de substance. La seule fin heureuse du cycle.
Setting: Cathedral town