Book Club: Les coquillages de monsieur Chabre by Emile Zola

Monsieur Chabre, a wealthy retired corn merchant, has married a young woman – Estelle Catinot – and it is Chabre’s dearest wish that they would have a child. Zola writes of Estelle, Madame Chabre was acknowledged as a young woman of perfect breeding, adequately pious and incapable of giving rise to the slightest breath of scandal, brought up, indeed, in the soundest of middle-class principles by a strict mother.