“This started everyone off, and each member of the family said their piece, as the fumes from the paraffin lamp mingled with the reek of fried onion and turned the air fouler still. No, certainly, life was hardly a bed of roses. You worked like an animal doing what used to be done by convicts as a punishment, more often than not it killed you, and still you didn’t have meat on the table come dinner-time. All right, so you did get your daily plate of mash, you did eat, but so little, just enough so you could suffer without dying, up to your eyes in debt and chased after as though you’d stolen the bread you ate. Come Sunday you slept from the exhaustion of it all. The only pleasures were getting drunk or giving you wife a baby, and even then, the beer gave you a paunch, and the child wouldn’t give a damn about you when it was older. No, it wasn’t what you’d call a bed of roses.”
Émile Zola, “Germinal”, 1885.
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