Paris

The priest, having lost Lourdes and Rome, comes to Paris and finds his brother making bombs in a workshop, while ministers, financiers and newspapers arrange a scandal above them. Zola finished the trilogy in 1898, the year of the Dreyfus letter that sent him into exile, and the anarchist chapters draw on the bombings and trials of the early 1890s. Faith is not restored at the end; something else is put in its place. Fifty-nine plates of Paris boulevard life by painters including Béraud and Caillebotte run from 1851 to 1911, catching the street crowds the novel's plotters move through unseen.