A young wife, her ailing husband and his friend fall into an affair in a dark shop off a Paris passage. What they do next binds them together far more tightly than the affair did, and the rest of the novel is the two of them unable to leave the room. Zola called it a study of temperaments and refused his characters any comfort. Gaslit passages, riverside mornings and shuttered interiors fill the paintings of this Gilded Library volume, whose decoration is shop counter, cat, skiff and looking glass; Edward Vizetelly's 1901 preface and afterword are included.