Les changements de la palette de Zola dans les Rougon-Macquart

This contribution aims to propose the reading of the Rougon-Macquart as a set of texts in which writing and painting, first impressionist and then expressionist, are mixed. By focusing on the author’s color choices, we aim to detect the evolution of Zola’s palette. If especially in the first novels of the cycle, the palette is extremely rich, in the second one, it is very limited and the shades of color become rare: so, where the chromatic variety represented the richness of life, the impoverishment of the colors reflects the misery of the characters’ existence.