Une page d'amour is the eighth novel in the 'Rougon-Macquart' series by Émile Zola, set among the petite bourgeoisie in Second Empire suburban Paris.

When the novel begins, Hélène has been widowed 18 months, living in what was then the Paris suburb of Passy with her 11-year-old daughter Jeanne.

From the window of their home, they can see the entire city, which takes on a dreamlike, foreign, and romantic, yet inaccessible, character for them throughout the novel.

Eventually, she begs her neighbour Dr Henri Deberle to come attend Jeanne, and his ministrations save the girl's life.

Later that week, Hélène goes to thank Dr Deberle, and befriends his wife Juliette and her circle of friends, including Monsieur Malignon, a handsome, wealthy man-about-town who is exceptionally comfortable in female society.

Meanwhile, Jeanne, left alone, furious and confused and jealous, makes herself sick by hanging her arms out of her bedroom window in the rain.

Eventually, she falls seriously ill, and Deberle diagnosis her with galloping consumption (the same disease her grandmother Ursule died of) and gives her three weeks to live.

The novel is unusual among Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, with an uncharacteristic absence of social critique, and an intense focus on Hélène; even Dr Deberle remains a sketchy figure.

Zola's plan for the 'Rougon-Macquart' novels was to show how heredity and environment worked on the members of one family over the course of the Second Empire.

In Une page d'amour, he specifically links Jeanne with her great-grandmother, the family ancestress Adelaïde Fouque (Tante Dide), who was possessed by the same seizures, and her grandmother Ursule, who died of the same disease.

In Le docteur Pascal, Zola described the influence of heredity on Hélène as 'innateness', a 'chemical blending in which the physical and moral natures of the parents are so amalgamated that nothing of them seems to subsist in the offspring'.

Jeanne probably also inherited her grandfather's (Ursule's husband, the hatter Mouret) tendency to obsession (Mouret hanged himself, a year after his wife's death, in a cupboard where her dresses were still hanging), a characteristic she also shares with her uncle François in La conquête de Plassans.

In Le docteur Pascal, Zola tells us that Hélène and Rambaud continue to live in Marseilles (this novel is set in 1872).