The novel "The Fortune of the Rougons" by the greatest French writer of the 19th century, Émile Zola, opens the twenty-volume series "Les Rougon-Macquart," presenting "the natural and social history of a family during the Second Empire." It is a kind of prologue to a grandiose epic in which the development of characteristic hereditary traits, passed down from one generation to the next, is consistently traced and, in accordance with the principles of naturalism, determines the behavior of the characters in a specific historical situation.