"Le Ventre de Paris" by Émile Zola is a novel published in 1873, the third in his twenty-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series. Set in and around Les Halles, Paris's enormous central market, it follows Florent, an escaped political prisoner who returns to his half-brother's family and finds work as a fish inspector. As he becomes entangled in a socialist plot against the Empire, the novel vividly captures working-class life and suffering in the bustling market halls of nineteenth-century Paris. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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