With a man's brutality he had just spoiled their love. And she remembered the days when he had been in love with her without being cruel enough to tell her so, those times spent at the bottom of the garden in the serenity of the coming spring.

I haven’t read any prior novels from the Rougon-Macquart series and I only started the series because it was available in my library. As a shot in the dark novel, I enjoyed it with an assumption that the enjoyment comes from the language of the novel itself. Helen Constantine’s translation makes the novel vibrant and keeps me from abandoning it midway on account of my low tolerance towards cheating plot lines. But I can’t help but understand the novel in its didactic message; that adultery is a bourgeois occupation and has the capacity to damage relationships beyond repair.