Novel by Zola, published 1880 and ninth in the Rougon-Macquart series. As a sequel to L' Assommoir, this famous text narrates the brilliant life and horrific death of the courtesan Anna Coupeau. Rather than developing a plot, the work consists of a series of episodes, recounting Nana's extravagant escapades, her chequered fortunes, and the fortunes that she makes and destroys. Her seduction, exploitation, betrayal, and humiliation of the religiously inclined but sensual comte Muffat does, however, provide an element of continuity in the tale. Having escaped the miserable conditions of her parents' life in the slums, Nana makes her mark first in the theatre, then becomes one of the lionnes of the Second Empire, coming to symbolize the regime itself in all its dissipations, dying of smallpox on the very day that the Franco-Prussian War breaks out. More a mythical creation than a character in a novel, she is pictured in larger-than-life dimensions, as a ‘Golden Fly’ issuing from the filth of the slums to avenge the people by corrupting the upper classes with her irresistible sexuality, as a ‘femme fatale’, a ‘man-eater’, an all-powerful Venus born of the gutters of Paris.

[David Baguley]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.