May 2025 The Dream Chapters 3-6

Thoughts & Comments

Chapter 4--Angelique's notion of ideal (noble) love and her devotion to it is obsessive. I think it's almost like a detachment from reality.

The descriptions of embroidery.......sometimes I'm not sure if it is embroidery or a history. He could give Dickens a run for his money in its description.

I love the embroidery descriptions!

Angelique's notion of ideal (noble) love and her devotion to it is obsessive. I think it's almost like a detachment from reality.

She mainly strikes me as a bored and high-strung teenager, ready to fall in love! All the reading about the saints is a little much, but it does help set the tone for the sort of ideas that Angelique is obsessing about.

>3 japaul22: Surprising what teens will obsess over! Poor girl dreaming about 100% perfect romantic love! That's right, I'm over 70 and cynical!

Zola sets up the tension here between religious idealism and earthly reality. I'm only in chapter 3, but I would sense foreshadowing here when Angelique's two worlds come crashing together.

Love at first sight........almost fairytale-like.

>2 Tess_W: I think Zola’s vestment research was somewhat inadequate—-he doesn’t get the colours right for the chasubles, for one thing. Fortunately for my enjoyment my knowledge of embroidery technique is nil.

>6 booksaplenty1949: I'm thinking he had to have help/advice for the detailed embroidery work.

>7 Tess_W: Yes, I found this very interesting note: https://voltairefoundation.wordpress.com/2018/10/

>8 booksaplenty1949: Great article!

>9 Tess_W: Let me take this random opportunity to thank you for this challenge. I had heard of the R-M series of novels and read a couple but most of the titles were unfamiliar to me, let alone unread by me. Getting so much out of this systematic approach and opportunity to discuss.

Thank you for joining! Oftentimes there just seems to be me and you! However, I'm reading for pleasure and I think you are a bit more serious; which is forcing me to be, also! The every other month is working for me. I've dropped out of most other challenges because they are too much.

I'm reading this book and am currently about half way through chapter 7. I don't generally comment on individual chapters of a book, so I have not generally contributed to these threads, except for the concluding one when I have finished the book.

It's been nice to have a bit more plot in the last chapter or two, after several chapters of long descriptions of the cathedral and the Golden Legend.

The Lemballeuse family of beggars reminds us that we are not entirely in a fairy tale. Can Angélique survive any significant contact with the real world? She is conscious, the narrator tells us, of the demon of hereditary evil which would have made her “une mauvaise fille” if she had been left in her native soil rather than growing up under the Hubert’s roof. The competitive charity with Félicien would almost be funny if we did not have to speculate about her future.

>12 john257hopper: Went out on public transit today and could not schlep Les Rougon-Macquart IV so decided to start the Golden Legend which I own in a set of 7 petite vols. So far, just account of Our Lord’s life—no one has been decapitated or disembowelled—so quite enjoying.

This novel seems like an exploration of nature vs nurture. Given Zola's interests in heredity, I fear it will not end well.

>14 booksaplenty1949: no one has been decapitated or disembowelled—so quite enjoying

Between the text and author's notes on the Golden Legend, I am getting quite enough of this to last me a while!