Émile Zola published Nana in 1880, the ninth novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. Anna Coupeau, known as Nana, is the daughter of Gervaise from L'Assommoir, raised in the degradation of the working-class Parisian milieu. Discovering that her beauty opens doors to a different world, she becomes a stage performer and then the most desired courtesan of the Second Empire. The novel traces the arc of her ascent and the simultaneous ruin of the aristocratic and bourgeois men who become her clients: she does not seduce them in the traditional sense but rather allows them to destroy themselves on her, spending fortunes she barely registers and discarding them with the indifference of someone who has always been discarded herself.
Zola designed Nana not as a character study but as a force of nature, a conduit through which the rottenness of Second Empire society circulates and destroys itself. Her power is not calculated; it is mechanical. The men who ruin themselves for her are not simply weak; they are representatives of a class whose wealth, extracted from the labor of people like Nana's mother, is being returned to its source, however inadvertently. The novel's final pages, in which Nana dies of smallpox in a hotel room while the crowds below chant "To Berlin!" on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, frames her death as emblematic of an entire civilization's terminal point.
Nana is one of Zola's most sustained character creations, even given his programmatic intentions. She is observed throughout with the kind of detailed specificity, her habits, her pleasures, her indifferences, her rare moments of genuine feeling, that prevents her from remaining a thesis illustration. What the novel demonstrates is how the Rougon-Macquart framework functions at its best: the individual life is embedded in historical forces that it embodies and partially reveals, and the naturalist method allows Zola to pursue both levels simultaneously without one flattening the other.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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