Émile Zola

Fire takes six of his ten planets, water three, a single one air and not one earth. The element that would hold a thing to a fixed shape is missing from the chart entirely. The record says Zola wrote twenty novels tracing one family through the Second Empire, then risked everything on an open letter about the Dreyfus affair, and that he died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney.

Five planets sit inside eleven degrees of Aries: the Moon at eleven, the Sun at thirteen, Pluto at eighteen, Mars at twenty and Mercury at twenty two, with Mercury retrograde. Both lights, speech, drive and concentrated force all crowded into the sign that goes first and is most recognisable with something to push against. For a writer who published an open letter knowing what it would cost, that is as plain a reading as this project finds.

Mercury sits in easy contact with Saturn one hundredth of a degree from exact, which is as close as this table can measure, and the reading is structured thinking without strain: organisation, patience and long concentration. For twenty novels following one family through one regime, there is no contact in the chart that fits better, and both planets were retrograde. Jupiter sits in easy contact with Uranus at a third of a degree and at an awkward angle to Pluto at three quarters.

He died in Paris on 29 September 1902, at sixty two. Mars rules his Aries Sun, and that day Pluto sat sixty degrees from that natal Mars at just under two thirds of a degree while Saturn stood square it at just under nine tenths. Saturn also stood square his natal Mercury at just over half, and Uranus square its own natal place at eleven hundredths, the closest thing in that sky. The Moon was balsamic and six per cent lit, which is the phase that finishes things and is already looking past them. Five planets in Aries with speech welded to patience, in a novelist who wrote twenty books and then one letter, is the fact to keep.