For a Night of Love

In his three short stories, 'For a Night of Love', 'Nantas', and 'Fasting', Emile Zola presents characters in search of fulfilment - romantic, religious, and financial. These stories explore themes of deception and dissatisfaction, as well as depicting the sexual mores of Zola's age.

When the apparently angelic Thérèse commits murder, she offers sexual favours to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbour's interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; churchgoing women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest.