Les Personnages des Rougon-Macquart

Published in 1901, eight years after Le Docteur Pascal had brought the novel cycle to a close, Les Personnages des Rougon-Macquart presents itself materially as a true continuation of the series, although it is the work of F.-C. Ramond, an admirer of Zola who undertook to record and organize the deeds, characters and relationships of the some twelve hundred characters who populate the twenty novels of the Rougon-Macquart.

Ramond’s work had initially been conceived as a personal tribute intended for the writer; Eugène Fasquelle, to whom the manuscript was entrusted, decided to make it into a book, a veritable human cartography of the Rougon-Macquart. The characters are identified, placed within their family and social relationships, and described both physically and psychologically. It thus reveals, almost anatomically, the extraordinary architecture that Zola devised for his Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire.

This volume is often sought after to complete the twenty volumes of the series.