The drunkard

Zola published his novel "The Drunkard" in series in a French newspaper, and it received severe attacks from literary and religious circles alike. He responded to his attackers with an article in which he said, "The Drunkard" is a novel that came at its time, and I wrote it, as I will write other novels after it, without... I deviate one bit from the straight line that I have drawn for myself. What constitutes my strength is that I have set for myself a goal from which I do not deviate. Here I find it necessary for me, as a writer facing such a fierce attack, to clarify my goal in writing this novel, and to explain my goals as a writer. I wanted to I depict in it the disastrous decadence in which a family of workers lives wandering among our pestilent suburbs. At the end of the path of drunkenness and idleness there is a loosening of family ties, there is corruption resulting from disorderly mingling, a gradually rising oblivion of virtuous and noble sentiments, and in the end there is disgrace and death."