chunk: The novel is essentially the story of Gervaise Macquart, who was featured briefly in the first novel in the series, La Fortune des Rougon, running away to Paris with her shiftless lover Lantier to work as a washerwoman in a hot, busy laundry in one of the seedier areas of the city. L'Assommoir begins with Gervaise and her two young sons being abandoned by Lantier, who takes off for parts unknown; she later takes up with Coupeau, a teetotal roofing engineer, and they are married in one of the most famous set-pieces of Zola's fiction; the account of the wedding party's chaotic trip to the Louvre is perhaps the novelist's most famous passage. Through a combination of happy circumstances Gervaise is able to raise enough money to open her own laundry, and the couple's happiness appears to be complete with the birth of a daughter, Anna, nicknamed Nana (the protagonist of Zola's later novel of the same title).