Claude's Confession

Claude's Confession, by Émile Zola, is one of the most exciting and naturalistic romances that great author has ever produced. It is founded on his own life, and he himself, under the name of Claude, figures as the hero. The book is a deep and searching analysis of human feelings, and surely the miseries of student life in the Paris Quartier Latin were never set forth in such vivid and startling fashion as in its pages. Claude, Laurence, Marie, Jacques and Pâquerette play parts in a dark drama of blasted youth and dissipation truly Parisian in all its characteristics, and the interest excited in these personages and their eventful careers is simply overwhelming. The plot is well handled, and all the incidents possess dramatic intensity. The description of the public ball is a bit of lurid word-painting which Zola has never surpassed, while that of the trip of Claude and Laurence to the country in the spring sparkles with romantic and poetic beauty. Marie's death and the dénouement are depicted in a style that is powerful in the highest degree. Claude's Confession is one of the strongest books imaginable, and will certainly fascinate all who take it up.
You knew, my friends, the wretched youth whose letters I now publish. That youth is no more. He wished to become a man amid the wreck and oblivion of his early days.
I have long hesitated about giving the following pages to the public. I doubted my right to lay bare a body and a heart; I questioned myself, asking if it was allowable to divulge the secret of a confession. Then, when I re-read the panting and feverish letters, hanging together by a mere thread, I was discouraged; I said to myself that readers would, doubtless, accord but a cold reception to such a delirious and excited publication. Grief has but one cry: the work is an incessant complaint. I hesitated as a man and as a writer.
At last, I thought, one day, that our age has need of lessons and that I had, perhaps, in my hands, the means of curing a few wounded hearts. People wish poets and novelists to moralize. I knew not how to mount the pulpit, but I possessed the work of blood and tears of a poor soul—I could, in my turn, instruct and console. Claude's avowals had the supreme precept of sobs, the high and pure moral of the fall and the redemption.