Lourdes

24 hrs. 59 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Émile Zola

Narrator Natalya Domeretskaya

After completing his twenty-volume cycle “Rougon-Macquart,” Emile Zola, in the mid-1890s, wrote and published a trilogy “Three Cities”—“Lourdes” (1894), “Rome” (1896), “Paris” (1898). The connecting thread of the novels is Abbé Pierre Froment. The first of them tells of Abbé’s five-day pilgrimage to Lourdes. The book depicts the suffering of pilgrims in their faith and “the need for the supernatural, which persists in people despite the triumphs of science.” In 1858, in a grotto here, the Virgin Mary appeared to fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubir several times, and ever since then, the local Catholic pilgrimage center has annually hosted several million pilgrims and visitors from all over the world. Zola condemns fraud in healing, rivalry among different streams of the clergy, and equating “cave fathers” with new temple traders. The reaction to the publication was immediate—this novel, like all of Emile Zola’s other works, was placed on the Index, the list of books Catholics were not allowed to read. However, the book was a huge success: in one month 120,000 copies were sold, and by 1898 it became Zola’s third best-selling novel.

1. Lourdes