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What killed Émile Zola in his Paris bedroom on 29 September 1902?
Zola was found dead and his wife Alexandrine unconscious in their bedroom at 21 bis rue de Bruxelles. A coal fire had smoldered overnight in a poorly drawing chimney; carbon monoxide accumulated to lethal concentrations. Officially ruled accidental in 1902. A 1927 deathbed confession by the bricklayer Henri Buronfosse — surfaced in *Libération* in 1953 — claimed he had been paid by anti-Dreyfusards to block the chimney from the roof. The case has never been judicially reopened.
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The Novelist Who May Have Been Murdered by His Own Chimney Émile Zola was found dead in his Paris bedroom on the morning of 29 September 1902, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from a smoking fire. The chimney was blocked. A bricklayer's deathbed confession decades later named the man who had blocked it.
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