ELIZA

no history’. They showed Soeur Philomène (1861) battling against horrific hospital conditions and turned Germinie Lacerteux (1864) into an early ‘pathological’ case-history of a servant-girl. After the death of Jules, Edmond continued with La Fille Éliza (1877), one of the century’s many prostitute novels, and Les Frères Zemganno (1878), set in a circus. This approach yielded more cool, document-based accuracy than imaginative understanding, a dichotomy which is echoed in the gap between their below-stairs