In the mid-nineteenth century, the French novelist Emile lola announced to his publisher that he was embarking on a cycle of novels in the style of Balzac that would explore various aspects of life in France during the Second Empire. Unlike La Comedie Humaine, though, lola's cycle would focus its attentions on one family, allowing lola to explore his strong interests in heredity, evolution and genealogy at the same time as he offered a literary account of the Second Empire. What resulted was lola's twenty-novel cycle, collectively known as Les Rougon-Macquart and subtitled Histoirenaturelle et sociale d'une famille sons Ie Second Empire ('Natural and social history of a family during the second empire'). lola's work in these novels established his reputation as a pre-eminent proponent of naturalism, a literary movement that emphasised the harsh realities of life through a frank, if pessimistic, depiction of subject matter such as sexuality, corruption and disease that had previously been considered too sordid to be included in literature. Almost all of the protagonists of the Rougon-Macquart family are introduced in lola's first novel, La Fortune des Rougon. The family centres on Adelaide Fouque, a middle-class French woman from Provence with a slight mental deficiency, and her three children: Pierre Rougon, the legitimate child from her marriage to Rougon, and Antoine and Ursule Macquart, illegitimate children by her lover, the smuggler Macquart. With Adelaide at the centre-point, the novel explores the three strands of her family: the Rougons, who are upper class and well educated; the Macquarts, who are mostly blue-collar workers or soldiers; and the Mourets (the family of Adelaide's illegitimate daughter Ursule Macquart), who live a more middle-class and balanced life. lola traced each of his more than 300 characters carefully. Before even beginning to write La Fortune des Rougon, he set about creating an elaborate family tree that included each character's name, date of birth, properties of heredity (including their mental proclivities and physical likeness), details of their biography and death date. In each character, lola traces the competing influ- ences of blood and environment, set against the political, economic, cultural and artistic backdrop of France (and Paris, particularly) from 1852 to 1870. Even in closing this cycle of novels, lola accounts for the fate of all of his characters. In his final novel, Le Docteur Pascal, lola includes a long chapter that reconnects with all of his living characters, tying up loose ends in their narratives and finishing each of their stories. In this respect, lola succeeded where Balzac failed; Balzac never finished La Comedie Humaine, consisting at the time of his death of more than 90 novels, short stories and essays that represented his only cycle of novels-and, indeed, the entire literary output of his adult life.
Question: Zola'snovels are set in Paris.
Options:
A. true
B. false
C. uncertain
Answer: C