Publisher's Synopsis
'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.' Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a celebrity, rapidly conquering society, ruining all men who fall under her spell-especially Count Muffat, Chamberlain to the Empress. Nana herself meets a terrible fate, consumed by her own dissipation and extravagance, just as the disastrous war with Prussia is declared. Nana is the ninth instalment in the twenty volume Rougon-Macquart series. The novel opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan élite, was la Ville Lumière, the glittering setting-and object-of Zola's scathing denunciation of society's hypocrisy and moral corruption. Nana comes to symbolize the Second Empire regime itself in all its excesses; but in the final chapters, the narrator seems to suggest that the coming disaster is not so much a result of the corruption of the Empire, as of rampant female sexuality.
 
The Franklin Library; 1981. A Limited Edition. 'The 100 Greatest Books of All Time'. Full blue leather binding with gold lettering and stampings on the spine and covers. Blue silk Moire end papers. Attached silk ribbon marker. With the illustrations of Allan Mardon. Translated by George Holden. Notes from the Editors included.More photographs on request. Slightly musty smell due to previous storage but in near fine condition. Preowned. No ISBN.