The description of odour, frequent in Zola's work, has been little studied, most researchers having focused only on the visual description of this novelist. This dissertation, taking as its corpus Les Rougon-Macquart, explores this issue. The working hypothesis is that Zola reveals his impressionist tendencies in this type of description. The first chapter presents a brief history of the status of olfaction and description of odour in its philosophical, social as well as in literary context. The following chapter, after having defined a few concepts (notions from Hamon and Adam), presents the status of the description of odour in Zola's work. Four recurrent devices emerge: redundancy, multi-sensorial description, clausulae and turning points. The third chapter begins the study of the internal working of the description by examining the lexicon of odour. The lexicon of odour as used by Zola resorts mostly to the emotional and poetical functions of language. The final chapter continues the examination of modes of structuration, using Adam's notion of plan of text. The text concludes by maintaining that Zola's uniqueness is based on his marriage of impressionism and realism-naturalism. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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