Nana was left alone with upturned face in the light cast by the candle. She was fruit of the charnel house, a heap of matter and blood, a shovelful of corrupted flesh thrown down on the pillow. The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed the grayish hue of mud; and on that formless pulp, where the features had ceased to be traceable, they already resembled some decaying damp from the grave. One eye, the left eye, had completely foundered among bubbling purulence, and the other, which remained half open, looked like a deep, black, ruinous hole. The nose was still suppurating. Quite a reddish crush was peeling from one of the cheeks and invading the mouth, which it distorted into a horrible grin. And over this loathsome and grotesque mask of death the hair, the beautiful hair, still blazed like sunlight and flowed downward in rippling gold. Venus was rotting. It seemed as though the poison she had assimilated in the gutters and on the carrion tolerated by the roadside, the leaven with which she had poisoned a whole people, had but now remounted to her face and turned it to corruption

This is an excerpt from the end of Émile Zola's novel Nana. Nana, the heroine, a high-class prostitute, is dying of smallpox… in just about the most disgusting manner possible.

This isn't exactly the happiest ending. Zola's heroine is not only dying, she's dying in a gruesome way that makes any number of pimple-popping videos (why we watch those?) look downright appetizing. It sure ain't fun to get smallpox as an adult. And to get it in 19th Century Paris? Well, back then that meant pretty much one thing: you're dead. So we know that Nana's not going to make it.

This pretty graphic and sad ending to Zola's novel is representative of the pessimism that we'll find in Naturalist literature more generally. The Naturalists certainly didn't see the glass as half-full. They generally saw it as half-empty. Or totally empty. That's why we'll find loads of unhappy endings in Naturalist literature.

Luckily, most Naturalist endings are slightly less pukesome than this bad boy.

We've mentioned before that the Naturalists tend to narrate things in a very detached voice, almost scientific or clinical in tone. We can see that narrative voice operating in this passage. The narrator gives us a lot of (super nasty) detail about Nana's condition:

The pustules had invaded the whole of the face, so that each touched its neighbor. Fading and sunken, they had assumed the grayish hue of mud; and on that formless pulp, where the features had ceased to be traceable, they already resembled some decaying damp from the grave.

Mmm! Who wants to order a pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni?

But what's interesting about this passage is that the narrator also makes a direct link between Nana's corruption (physical and moral) and her environment. Nana is a child of the streets. She grew up in an environment full of corruption. She herself grows up to be morally corrupt. And her illness, the disfiguration of her face, becomes representative of her internal corruption:

It seemed as though the poison she had assimilated in the gutters and on the carrion tolerated by the roadside, the leaven with which she had poisoned a whole people, had but now remounted to her face and turned it to corruption.

Aw, c'mon Zola. That's not very nice at all. But Zola doesn't care about nice—he cares about gross, pus-filled determinism and being a Debbie Downer.