Il sogno

Finally finished it as an adult and loved it. The descriptions of Ecclesiastical embroidery by the Bishop were outstanding in their detail of thread-of-gold and how skilled one needed to be to stitch with it. Also well-done were the descriptions of Angelique's embroidery skills for the then-highest level of embroidery.

I better understood this time around the language, the love story, the descriptions of the history of the home, the family, and Angelique's finding." Zola's kindness with these characters relative to his other books is touching and once again reaches deep into the heart of characters and their motives. And it helped my French remain at the forefront of my brain."

This relatively short, simple love story is one of the quiet breathing-spaces in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, like Une page d'amour and La joie de vivre; it gives us the chance to recover and reflect a little in between the exertions of La Terre and La Bête Humaine. Zola casts the story in almost Pre-Raphaelite romantic terms: a lovely young orphan who spends her days embroidering vestments in the medieval house of her adoptive parents in the shadow of the cathedral in a sleepy country town (a fictional version of Cambrai); the handsome young artisan who falls in love with her, and turns out to be a disguised nobleman; a climbable balcony; disapproving parents; religious processions; a deathbed scene... You get the picture. Needless to say, there's more to it, although you perhaps wouldn't notice if you weren't pre-warned by the other Zola novels you've read. Angélique (we're told, but she isn't) is the illegitimate daughter of the shady businesswoman Sidonie Rougon, whom we met only 14 books ago in La curée. As such, she's guaranteed not to be 100% mentally fit, and in her case this expresses itself through her obsessive interest in the medieval saints and virgins of the Golden Legend. She manages, with Zola's active connivance, to live in a mental universe that shuts out any kind of intellectual input more recent than the early renaissance. Disguised noble suitors, balconies, inexplicable illnesses and mystical cures are all perfectly normal, but she's completely incapable of imagining any kind of story that continues beyond the wedding ceremony, with predictable (but almost metatextual) consequences. Zola is bashing religion nearly as hard as romanticism: both are part of the fatal Dream that conspires to destroy people's lives (in another world, he might almost have given this book the title The dominant ideology!). But he's also enjoying himself with lots of lyrical descriptions of the embroiderers' work, their tools, their subjects, the language they use, and he doesn't waste the opportunity to tell us about the cathedral and its stained glass, either. A fairly slight book, but with some good stuff in it.

Despite The Dream striking me as abrupt, I enjoyed the descriptions; architecture and embroidery occupy the majority of such. Again Zola tips his hat to Balzac. Still, I couldn't shake the thought upon completion, that the novel could've been Thérèse Raquin's last thoughts after she swallowed her poison.

like the fairy tales.the story of the orphan Angélique.and her dream to be saved by a handsome prince and to live happily ever after....
the end was very sad....