Restless house

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Zola's most acerbic fictional satire, the novel is set in a newly constructed apartment block in the Rue de Choiseul in Paris. Seemingly a place of prosperity and harmony, it is riddled with snobbery and hypocrisy. Privilege forms but a thin veneer of respectability between the bourgeois tenants, who live in comfortable, heated apartments, and their servants who live in cold, partitioned cubicles under the roof, and work in the building's filthy kitchens. Systematically exposing the contradictions that pervade bourgeois life, Zola reveals a multitude of adulteries and betrayals, a veritable 'melting pot' of moral and sexual degeneracy.