Gervaise Macquart arrives in Paris with her lover and two sons, and is soon left to make her own way. She works as a laundress, marries a roofer, and dreams of owning a small shop of her own. For a time hard work brings her a modest happiness in her working-class neighbourhood. But poverty, illness and the lure of the local drinking house press steadily on her family. Zola gives a close, unsparing portrait of Parisian labouring life, and the novel's use of everyday speech made it both a scandal and a great success.