Complete and unabridged, with 51 full-page plates by Ivan Shishkin, Vasily Polenov and Vasily Vereshchagin. The Franco-Prussian war from Sedan to the Commune - the retreat, the surrender of an army, and Paris burning. Zola walked the battlefield of Sedan before he wrote it, and this was the best-selling volume of the whole Rougon-Macquart, two hundred thousand copies in a year. This edition binds fifty-one plates of painting with the text, among them works by Ernest Meissonier, Christian Sell and Wilhelm Camphausen, alongside two illustrations restored and coloured, in the translation of Ernest Alfred Vizetelly.