Gervaise wanted to wait for him in the street. However, she could not resist going through the porch as far as the concierge's room on the right. And there, on the threshold, she raised her eyes. Inside, the building was six stories high, with four identical plain walls enclosing the broad central court. The drab walls were corroded by yellowish spots and streaked by drippings from the roof gutters. The walls went straight up to the eaves with no molding or ornament except the angles on the drain pipes at each floor. Here the sink drains added their stains. The glass window panes resembled murky water. Mattresses of checkered blue ticking were hanging out of several windows to air. Clothes lines stretched from other windows with family washing hanging to dry. On a third floor line was a baby's diaper, still implanted with filth. This crowded tenement was bursting at the seams, spilling out poverty and misery through every crevice.

Each of the four walls had, at ground level, a narrow entrance, plastered without a trace of woodwork. This opened into a vestibule containing a dirt-encrusted staircase which spiraled upward. They were each labeled with one of the first four letters of the alphabet painted on the wall.

Several large work-shops with weather-blackened skylights were scattered about the court. Near the concierge's room was the dyeing establishment responsible for the pink streamlet. Puddles of water infested the courtyard, along with wood shavings and coal cinders. Grass and weeds grew between the paving stones. The unforgiving sunlight seemed to cut the court into two parts. On the shady side was a dripping water tap with three small hens scratching for worms with their filth-smeared claws.

In this excerpt from Zola's L'Assommoir, Gervaise looks out of her window at a tenement building. It ain't pretty.

Zola's novel is about characters living in the slums, and in this excerpt we get a detailed description of what those slums actually look like. There's a whole lot of poverty in this excerpt. The building's dirty, the place is falling apart, and even the chickens are filthy. Won't somebody think of the chickens?!

Zola, in other words, is giving his readers a very clear picture of what poverty looks like. Poverty, of course, is one of the big themes of the Naturalists. Naturalist writers often write about characters living in situations of poverty, because each Naturalist writer evidently had a big sign that stated "Keep Calm And Write Exclusively Depressing Books" hanging above their desks.

This passage is all about the details. Zola gives us such a clear picture of what poverty looks like by really showing it to us. We see the "The drab walls…corroded by yellowish spots." We see the window panes resembling "murky water" and the "grass and weeds" growing between "the paving stones."

Everything is falling apart, everything is dirty, and everything is utterly, utterly depressing. By showing us these details, Zola's forcing us to see what poverty looks like. Essentially, reading a Naturalist work of fiction is forcing yourself to take a good, hard look at the difficulties of life.