In these three short stories, E mile Zola presents characters in search of fulfillment-romantic, religious, and financial. Read together, they give us an extraordinary depiction of sexual mores. When the apparently angelic The re se commits murder, she offers sexual favors to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbor's interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; and churchgoing women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest. These are beautiful and poignant stories unified by the powerful themes of deception