Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was a perfect target for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-siècle moral corruption. Prompted by his theories of heredity and environment, Zola set out to show Nana, "the golden fly," rising out of the underworld to feed on society-a predetermined product of her origins. Nana's latent destructiveness is mirrored in the Empire's, and they...