The Dead Woman's Vow

On her deathbed, Blanche de Rionne extracts a promise from Daniel Raimbault, the boy she rescued and raised: that he will watch over her young daughter, Jeanne, for as long as he lives. He is a child himself when he makes the vow. He does not yet know what it will cost him.Years pass. Jeanne leaves the convent, marries, is widowed. And Daniel - who has carried Blanche's dying wish through all of it in silence - begins writing her passionate, unsigned letters. Jeanne receives them gladly. She believes they come from someone else entirely.When the truth threatens to surface, Daniel faces a choice between claiming a love that is genuinely his and honoring, one final time, the promise made at a deathbed years before. The Dead Woman's Vow is Émile Zola's second novel, serialized in 1866 when he was twenty-six years old - a story of deathbed devotion, mistaken love, and sacrifice, written in the full Romantic tradition Zola would soon spend his career dismantling. Read alongside Claude's Confession, it offers a rare glimpse of the young writer still finding his way toward the unflinching realism that would make him one of the giants of French literature.By Émile Zola. Author of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.