Journalist turned novelist and the son of an Italian engineer, Paris-born Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a committed social reformer and the main proponent of naturalism, a French literary school which, in reaction to the romantics, held that the novel should be scientific in a strict sense. Naturalism died with him, yet some of the twenty novels of the Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-93), a vast panorama of French society under the Second Empire teaming with more than 1 200 characters, are well-worth reading, in particular L’Assommoir (1877, The Grogshop/Drunkard), on working-class life in Paris, Nana (1880), on prostitution, Germinal (1885), on the life of miners in northern France, and La Bête humaine (1890, The Beast in Man), along with the earlier Thérèse Raquin (1867). Attacked in his time for the frankness and ‘sordid detail’ of his novels, Zola added to controversy in 1898 when he published the open letter ‘J’accuse’ in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, a (Jewish) army officer wrongly convicted of treason. Sentenced to prison, he fled to England, was granted amnesty a few months later but died (from carbon monoxide poisoning of possibly criminal origin) before Dreyfus was officially exonerated.
   ‘The Flood’ is unavailable in French on the Net. Even though the English version bears no mention of date or translator, it was too powerful a story to be ignored.