One of Zola’s most wonderfully descriptive (and least known) titles. The locale is the newly-built food markets of Paris. Into this extravagance of food, which Zola describes in set pieces that wet the tongue, stir the belly, excite the ear, he places his young hero, half-starved Florent, who has just escaped imprisonment in Cayenne. Florent finds himself at odds with a world he now knows is unjust. Gradually he takes up with the local Socialists, who are more at home in bars than on the revolutionary streets.