In his three short stories, ‘For a Night of Love’, ‘Nantas’, and ‘Fasting’, Emile Zola presents characters in search of fulfilment — romantic, religious, and financial. Read together, For a Night of Love is an extraordinary depiction of sexual mores. When the apparently angelic Thérèse commits murder, she offers sexual favours to a petty clerk if he will dispose of the body; the pregnant Flavie manipulates a neighbour’s interest in her dowry to arrange a shotgun wedding; churchgoing women find their hunger for Christianity unsatisfied by a vapid priest — these beautiful and poignant stories are united by the powerful themes of deception and dissatisfaction.