Émile Zola: Madeleine Férat (1868)

 

[Donald E. Green's jacket for the 1960 reprint, rebadged as Fatal Intimacy, of Alec Brown's 1957 translation of Madeleine Férat.]

Original French text of Madeleine Férat from La Bibliothèque électronique du Québec (PDF):

https://beq.ebooksgratuits.com/vents/zola-madeleine.pdf

The jacket is based on a scene in Ch 1. Guillaume, nervously sick from the lightning flashes, has persuaded Madeleine that they should go inside. (They're at an inn in the Verrière woods.)

 

A maid carried the remains of their meal into the common restaurant. This was a large room with blackened walls. It was sparsely furnished with tables and benches. Guillaume sat in a chair with his back to the windows. Before him was a plateful of raspberries, but he did not touch one. Madeleine gobbled hers down, then went to open the window into the courtyard. Leaning her elbows on the sill, she gazed out at the inflamed sky.

The storm now broke with incredible violence, right over the woods. The air became oppressive with the smouldering weight of the clouds. Then the rain stopped again. Brusque gusts of wind rustled through the trees. Flashes of lightning followed one another so rapidly that outside it was like day, but a bluish daylight which lent the countryside the appearance of a romantic stage set. The thunder-claps did not roll echoing away down the valley, but broke off sharply, as dry and brittle as the detonations of gunfire. Trees all round the inn must have been struck. After each clap of thunder there came a terrifying silence.

At the thought of this window open at his back, Guillaume experienced painful anxiety. In spite of himself, with a sort of nervous reflex, he turned his head, to see the white figure of Madeleine outlined against the violet illumination of the lightning flashes. Her auburn hair, damped by the first drops of rain before they came in, lay loose over her shoulders, and it glowed brightly at each sudden flash. 

"Oh, isn't it lovely!" she cried. "Guillaume, do come and look. There is a tree over there which looks as if it had caught fire. The lightning flashes skip among the trees like animals run wild . . . . And the sky! . . . It really is a wonderful firework display!"

But Guillaume could no longer resist the crazy desire he felt to go and close the shutters.

"Look here," he said, getting to his feet, "do shut that window. What you are doing is dangerous."

"Don't tell me you're really afraid," she replied with a throaty laugh, one of those mocking laughs of a woman who despises. Guillaume lowered his eyes. For a moment he wavered, before, with an agonized mumble, he begged her again to shut the window and resumed his place.

(from Émile Zola's Madeleine Férat Ch 1, translated by Alec Brown.)

Some people have remarked that Green's pulpy cover is actually fairly appropriate to Madeleine Férat, and I kind of agree with them, but it isn't as simple as that. In the novel Madeleine is just leaning and gazing, not ecstatically offering her body to the energies of the storm. (Nor, by the way, is her dress particularly revealing.) To some extent Green is also thinking of a later scene in the book, in which Guillaume witnesses the sleeping Madeleine moaning with arms spread as she dreams of her former lover (Ch 11). Anyway, what the picture expresses very well is Guillaume's latent insecurities about his new girlfriend, his fear of her superior strength and his anxiety about meeting her deepest needs.

*

Chantal Bertrand-Jennings has written a useful survey of Zola's women characters*, demonstrating how for all his progressive beliefs he tends to work with misogynistic stereotypes and to portray women as the source of evil.

All the same I was rather taken aback by this: 

Femmes fatales who devour both men and their wealth and who are best represented by Nana, crowd all of Zola's thirty-one novels. Among the best-known are Madeleine Férat, Thérèse Raquin, Renée Saccard (La Curée), Christine (L'Oeuvre), and La Cognette (La Terre). These infamous nymphomaniacs exercise the most pernicious influence on men... Perverted to the marrow of their bones, they soil, debase, ruin, destroy and kill everything around them, leaving in their wake ashes and death .... (p. 29).

For after all when it comes to particulars Madeleine doesn't fit very well into that composite description. For instance she's singularly uninterested in Guillaume's wealth, and in fact takes care, when she first moves to the country, to do so on the basis of financial independence; she marries him reluctantly (Ch 5). As for nymphomania, it's true she feels an unconquerable physical responsiveness to her former lover Jacques, but to no-one else; when in desperation she (like Guillaume) considers seeking love outside their dying marriage, she can't rouse the slightest interest in the project -- that is, until she encounters Jacques, who leads her helplessly into the bedroom (Ch 12). As for the terms of moral obloquy that Bertrand-Jennings has fun with;  well, Madeleine isn't an angel, her early life was difficult and she's having to deal with that legacy, her words can be harsh and brutal, yet it's obvious she doesn't have an evil bone in her body, is scrupulously conscientious, has essentially no meanness or cruelty or greed. 

So it's a paradox that, nevertheless, you can understand why Bertrand-Jennings  puts her into the list of Zola's femmes fatales. 

Zola allots her what might appear physical marks of a femme fatale (well brought out in Green's illustration), especially her "magnificent shock of auburn hair" and "vividly scarlet lips". ("Indeed they were too red for a face so white," the narrator comments (Ch 1).) What follows in the rest of the book is a sequence of fateful accidents that increasingly pressurize the characters, Madeleine herself included, into accepting this dire categorization. 

The deranged old fanatic Geneviève (Guillaume's housekeeper) maintains a constant background rumble of horrible accusations; for her, at any rate, there's no doubt that Madeleine is the embodiment of Satan and will certainly bring destruction to her master. Guillaume is apparently impervious to Geneviève's monstrous mutterings, but his own insecurity and jealousy can lead his thoughts in similar directions. For instance when he learns that Madeleine's former lover was his friend Jacques (the late Jacques, as they had believed) his thoughts turn toxic:

... Guillaume went so far now as to persuade himself that she must feel a perverse pleasure in it all, with her past embraces playing an obbligato to her immediate union with him. ...  How was he to know that this woman was not deceiving him all the time with a ghost, using him as a mere instrument, the love-sick sighs of which recalled familiar tunes she knew of old  till he disappeared altogether, and in her heart of hearts it was with that other man that she coupled.... 

With such reflections and such shaming reverie, prompted in his heart of hearts by the nightmare of his brain, he stared at this young woman's nakedness and felt profound revulsion, thinking on the white bosom and shoulders to detect outrageous markings, where deep kisses had for ever ineffaceably marked the skin with suffusing blood.

Madeleine all this time kept stirring the fire. Her features maintained an impenetrable fixity. Little by little, each time she moved her arm to move the embers, her gown slipped farther from her shoulders,  till now Guillaume became powerless even to look away from that body, with each spasmodic movement revealed to him more and more in all its shameless plenitude. It seemed frightfully unclean to him. Every time the arms stirred, re-indicating the outline of the rich shoulder muscles  he thought he espied a lewd orgasmic leap of the flesh ... She now seemed a woman possessed by another, whom only love of debauch could have brought into his arms ....(Ch 8)

And as hammerblow follows hammerblow Madeleine too comes to see herself as a curse, someone to be condemned.

"What sort of a woman am I then?" she whispered to herself. "I went to that man [Jacques] to raise myself in his eyes, and I fell into his arms like any whore. He had only to touch me with his finger-tip, and I offered no resistance. Indeed, I found degrading enjoyment in feeling myself yield to him. .... I must be accursed, as Geneviève says. My flesh is foul! Oh, how filthy!" (Ch 12)

"... My body is cursed, it turns all about me to gall .... I have tried myself and I have condemned myself to death ..." (Ch 13)

The novel ends with her suicide and Guillaume's descent into madness.

* Chantal Bertrand-Jennings, "Zola's Women: The Case of a Victorian 'Naturalist'", Atlantis Vol 10 No 1 (Autumn 1984), pp. 26-36, available as a PDF download here:

https://journals.msvu.ca/index.php/atlantis/article/download/4447/3686/5861

*

And maybe there's another point to consider, the novel's title. Because, keeping our heads, this is a study of a relationship between two people who both contribute their destructive potential and their weaknesses. Why is the novel named Madeleine Férat and not, say, Guillaume and Madeleine (its opening words)? Not easy to answer, but part of it is that the dramatic tension, our uncertainty as we read, concerns Madeleine:

She fell into a revery, then vaguely, as if speaking to herself: "I do not know what will happen to me later," she said. "I think I have the will-power to manage my life, but it is not easy." (Ch 1)

As we read on we cling to our belief in the possibility of her life not being a catastrophe, if only fate would stop hammering. With Guillaume less so; he, we can easily see, isn't made for happiness. So which of the two is actually the fatale here?

And Madeleine, more often than not, supplies the point of view through which we see events, the most normative or at any rate least damaged perspective. The story seems pitched around making her an object (e.g. a femme fatale) but at the same time proposes her as subject. When at the end she refers to "our poor, sick minds" we can see that this true, but also that there's a stature to Madeleine's mind that's evinced by the clarity of this perception. 

When the novel was serialized, its title was La Honte (Shame). The emphasis of that title seems at first glance to be on Madeleine. It's only a more considered reflection that sees how it could be meant as a statement about others in the novel (for example the young Guillaume being jeered as a bâtard), and even about the whole of French society.

*

Madeleine Férat is Zola's fourth novel, the last one before embarking on Les Rougon-Macquart. It's distinctive among Zola's novels and part of that is because it was based on a play (uniquely,  I think). But "based on" is a slippery term, as we'll see. 

Zola wrote his three-act play in 1865: it was called La Madeleine (i.e. "The Magdalene", a repentant sinner) and there were no takers. Retitled Madeleine, it was performed once in 1889. It appeared in Zola's Works in 1927 and you can download a PDF here: 

https://libretheatre.fr/madeleine-de-emile-zola/

Some of the information below comes from Midori Nakamura's interesting essay '“L’annonce” et “l’amorce” chez Zola: Madeleine, du théâtre au roman', Excavatio Vol 27 (2016):

http://aizen.zolanaturalismassoc.org/excavatio/articles/v27/MidoriNakamura.pdf

The rejected play isn't particularly good; Act 3 feels a bit perfunctory, Madeleine's suicide inadequately motivated. Nevertheless, it became the kernel of a far more arresting novel. Zola added to his original story, changed his original story, and even criticized his original story. The relationship of the novel to the play is to a certain extent dialectical. 

Act 1 corresponds to the novel's Ch 7 (the unexpected reappearance of Jacques). Act 2 corresponds to Ch 9 (the inn at Mantes). Act 3 corresponds to Ch 13 (Madeleine's return to the marital home and her suicide). 

Some of the play's dialogues are closely followed in the novel, for instance, in Act 1 Francis (=Guillaume) talking with Jacques about his marriage. And, as in the novel, there's a fanatical servant who relishes telling us that God the Father did not forgive.

But the differences are numerous and substantive. Here are some of the major ones. 

The play is set in about 1802 near Montpellier. (Jacques' rumoured death was at the battle of Marengo.) The novel is set in the present day and much closer to Paris. 

Different names: Guillaume was Francis. Geneviève was Marguerite originally, changed to Véronique for the 1889 performance. The fallen companion Louise was originally Laure (Laurence in 1889). In what follows I'll use the 1889 names, because they're the names in the published text.

Francis and Jacques were fellow medical students at Montpellier. Francis is a doctor now. Francis is more romantic/idealistic than Jacques, but that's as far as the contrast goes.  There is no suggestion that Francis is chronically weak, insecure, reclusive or pessimistic (as Guillaume is). Guillaume's sad history, the childhood bullying, Jacques taking him under his wing, etc, are all new material in the novel. 

Francis has a mother, Mme Hubert, who lives with them. Theirs is a respectable household. In the novel Guillaume's own background is not respectable, he has no profession, it is only his unexpected wealth that keeps tongues from wagging openly. (In Act 3 Madeleine's suicide is triggered by Mme Hubert not pardoning her faults ... This is true enough, but Véronique implies more finality than there really is, when she falsely states that Mme Hubert has fled the house with her grand-daughter.) The novel eliminates Mme Hubert entirely. In the novel the Noiraude household is much lonelier, and so is Guillaume, who clings timidly to Madeleine as to a refuge or mother. Guillaume has no living relatives since the death of his eccentric father, and the young couple's concern about respectability is limited to the judgments of provincial society (and their servant Geneviève).

Like Guillaume's, Madeleine's early history (e.g. Lobrichon's attempted rape) is all new in the novel. In the play all we're told is that she was a happy child who became a fun-loving girl and in due course Jacques' mistress.

In the play, Madeleine has no residual feelings for her former lover and never yields to him again (as in Ch 12 of the novel). There is no madcap science about the supposedly permanent imprint of a first lover and no suggestion that Madeleine's child strangely resembles Jacques. 

In the play Madeleine's suicide is prompted solely by the feeling of being unable to escape her unrespectable past, her sense that her respectable life is just a dream (e.g. after the meeting with Laurence). At the end her husband, child and mother-in-law all survive, so she's fatal only to herself. 

The novel darkens the story in many ways, adding nightmarish and gothic elements. Examples are Lobrichon's attempted rape of Madeleine, Guillaume's misanthropic father and his sinister closed up laboratory, the unspeakable de Rieu trio, the much elaborated descriptions of Geneviève and Louise, the dismal arrival at the neglected cottage, the description of Lucie's smallpox. 

In sum, the novel vastly elaborates the story -- and crucially changes it. In the play the key issue was that Madeleine couldn't maintain the respectability of her husband's household. But in the novel Madeleine and Guillaume never really have this respectability. Instead, the key issue now is Madeleine's continuing obsession with her former lover. Almost as important, the novel now charts the working out of Guillaume's vulnerabilities as well as Madeleine's: a relationship that looks doomed: unhealthy, static and isolated even in its palmy days.

As is well shown by one more difference from the play. At the end of Act 1 it's Madeleine who is determined to flee the house to avoid seeing Jacques, and Francis who says it would be better to explain things to Jacques. In the novel the roles are reversed: it's Guillaume who wants to flee, and Madeleine who sees that the only way to resolve matters is to talk with Jacques.

... The mere thought of Jacques' proximity, the idea of his old friend's approaching him and holding out his hand, now caused him increasing pain. There was one thought and one only in his mind, that of flight, that of avoiding any explanation, that of taking refuge in some lonely place where they might hide. In difficult situations his character invariably sought time and also craved solely to resume further on his dream of peace. When he raised his head, it was to whisper:

"Let us go away. My head is bursting, for the moment I cannot see what to do . . . He was only going to spend a day here anyway just now . . . When he has gone, we shall have a month ahead of us to recover and make sure of our happiness."

 But flight such as he suggested seemed repugnant to Madeleine, with her upright character. She saw too quite clearly that this settled nothing and would leave them with all their fears unrelieved.

"It would be far better to put an end to it," she insisted. 

"No, come please," he whispered, pressingly. "We'll go over to the cottage to spend the night, and stay out there all day, till he has gone. . . . You know how happy we always were there. That cosy atmosphere will soothe us, we shall forget and love each other again just as we did when I used to steal out there to see you . . . Were either of us to see him again, I feel that would be the absolute end to our happiness."

Madeleine made a gesture of resignation. She too was badly shaken, and she felt Guillaume was so upset that it was no use trying any longer to get a brave decision from him.

"Very well," she said. "Let us go. . . . Wherever you wish."

 (Ch 7)

This shows the developed dynamic of the couple at work. Madeleine is stronger and more clear-sighted than her husband, but not strong or clear-sighted enough. Both characters avoid frankness and confronting difficult situations, and together they're apt to relapse into passivity and resignation. The shadows close in around them. They seek refuge in the past (for instance, their neglected cottage) but these bolt-holes never bring the hoped-for tranquillity. 

*

The play's opening tableau was the image of a model respectable family. It went on to depict the personal tragedy of Madeleine failing to maintain her place in that image, but it didn't question the image itself; rather, it subscribes to a solidly bourgeois morality. Certainly we're not meant to agree with Véronique's view of Madeleine, but the play may well seem to confirm Jacques' worldly wisdom when talking to Francis, his view that it's not clever to marry your mistress and it always ends badly. Jacques' point, I suppose, is that a gentleman's wife should be a virgin. Mistresses are fun but they're a different breed (as Jacques, an inveterate user, should know). The play might appear to confirm his view. The figure of Laurence exemplifies the naturally downward trajectory of the loose woman's existence. When Madeleine introduces Laurence to Francis, and herself starts to speak coarsely and brazenly as in her former life, isn't she underlining the same point: this is the real me, you don't want to bring me home?

These scenes remain in the novel but conventional ideas of marriage are now sharply problematized. After all, it's the horrible old Lobrichon who is anxious to have a virginal wife (and thinks he can achieve this by preparing a child for the role). The de Rieus show how sour a society marriage can turn even if it does not begin by marrying one's mistress. Guillaume is insecure from the start, he already knows that Madeleine had a previous relationship but he doesn't want to hear anything about it. Guillaume is particularly unfitted for a grown-up relationship but his outlook and behaviour often seems like a visionary exposure of conventional assumptions about marriage. In him there's both a fear of frankness and an unrealistic idea that one should possess and control every aspect of one's wife, even her past.

I don't have much patience with Zola's scientific ideas of heredity and all the rest, but in Madeleine Férat he does at least use them to make a valid point. People always have pasts and they always have character aspects that pre-date a marriage. Guillaume's conception of marriage doesn't allow for the inevitable independence of the two people who comprise it. For Guillaume and Madeleine the upshot is a descent into the abyss. But behind their nightmare lies the glimmering of other possibilities, for instance a way of doing relationships that would be more in harmony with the conditions of life.

*

Katherine Rondou,"Madeleine Férat ou la mémoire dans la peau : l’imprégnation comme procédé mémoriel dans le roman naturaliste", e-Scripta Romanica 11 (2023), pp. 9-22

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375507991_Madeleine_Ferat_ou_la_memoire_dans_la_peau_l'impregnation_comme_procede_memoriel_dans_le_roman_naturaliste

An excellent recent article, which argues that Zola's fatalistic notions (e.g. heredity, imprint of first lover) transform the Magdalen figure from a Christian hero to a tragic hero: she may repent, but she cannot be redeemed.

*

Two earlier posts that touch on Madeleine Férat:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2023/11/horse-traffic.html

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2023/09/autumn-clearout.html

Horse traffic

I've read somewhere that a century ago almost every male adult could ride a horse; now, hardly any can. It was one of the least remarked of social revolutions.  (The author must have meant in parts of the world where there were plenty of horses, not e.g. tsetse areas of Africa where horses catch nagana.)

Few people in the west can now remember the time of horse-drawn vehicles, though even in the 1960s they still vied with motor vehicles in remote communities e.g. in the rural north of Sweden, as I discovered from reading Bo R. Holmberg's Dagsmeja. In cities the most dramatic decline in horse traffic followed the appearance of electric trams (from 1890). 

Through the nineteenth century some of the quintessential elements of motoring were already appearing in the car's horse-drawn predecessors. 

Their two head lamps reached out yellowish fingers of light on to the road, with its thin coating of rimy ice. The cones of illumination raced ahead, picking out the ditches on either side with jerky bounds.

Every motorist will recognize that, but it's from Zola's Madeleine Férat (1868). Guillaume and Madeleine are travelling from Vétheuil towards Paris. (The D147 joining the A13 at Mantes, I see on Google Maps, and, so to speak, nod understandingly. I was on the A13 at nightfall myself, a week ago.)

Their vehicle was "a two-seater with a collapsible leather hood". Alec Brown mistranslates it as a "brougham" but Zola's original word is "cabriolet". A brougham was a specific brand, four-wheeled with paired horses, and the passengers were enclosed with the driver outside; but a cabriolet was two-wheeled, drawn by a single horse, and it seated just two people, one of whom drove.

(Brown was anglicizing, as when he turned the inn at Mantes from the Grand-Cerf to The White Hart.)

I didn't know any of this carriage info until now. In all my years of reading nineteenth-century novels I've blanked the innumerable hansoms and gigs and dogcarts and troikas and whatever, barouche or surrey with the fringe on top, treating them all as basically interchangeable. But for contemporary readers these would have been precise terms carrying a host of connotations, like Citroën or  Mitsubishi.

Apparently Jane Austen mentions horse-drawn traffic over 400 times. 

This cabriolet has two relevant connotations in Zola's novel.  Guillaume is really starting to lose it. A cabriolet is a far from ideal vehicle for driving all the way to Paris through a winter night, it's a slightly crazy idea, verging on desperate (they were too late to get the last train). And it shows how Guillaume in acute distress always clings to the idea of solitude with his wife. Just the two of us; that's his recipe for security. 

Apart from head lamps, the horse days were also like ours in terms of traffic accidents. The vehicles didn't travel so quickly, but they had minimal protection, horses were unpredictable and so were the roads. Geri Walton has an interesting post about this:

https://www.geriwalton.com/carriage-accidents-and-remedies/

The topic often appears in local history, e.g. here from New Hampshire and Maine:

https://eu.seacoastonline.com/story/news/local/exeter-news-letter/2011/01/07/historically-speaking-dangers-horse-buggy/51322350007/

where I learned that Sarah Orne Jewett's writing career ended with a carriage accident in 1902. Her horse slipped on a loose stone and she sustained head and spinal injuries. Here's her entry on Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sarah-orne-jewett

She was one of many, I mean as regards the accident.  

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life was doubtless shortened on October 24 1776 when he got trapped between a speeding carriage and the Great Dane that was running alongside it; a head injury again. 

The profoundly deaf Ludwig van Beethoven was reported as being struck by a carriage in 1819, but this report may be rather exaggerated or even founded on a mere tumble.  

https://bibliolore.org/2011/10/15/beethovens-traffic-accident/

In July 1890 César Frank received a head injury when his cab was hit by a horse-drawn trolley (goods vehicle with a platform body). The accident is usually seen as an indirect cause of his death, four months later. 

In the days when horses were essential working animals many people found it convenient to regard them as undifferentiated disposables, like the nags in a bullring or like the contents of a burger. Some people even got off on the spectacles of cruel mistreatment at London's many horsefairs, as I learned here:

https://www.thehistoryoflondon.co.uk/horses-and-carriages-in-the-victorian-era/

But horses were also the focus of the first glimmerings of more humane sentiments, which I wrote about here: 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-silent-cry.html

Guillaume's neurotic sensitivity doesn't seemingly extend to the horse that he urges "to faster gait with flicks of the whip" and the occasional "sharp word of encouragement". It's 66 kms from Vétheuil to Paris, which is no way to treat a horse, 30 miles is usually considered the upper limit for a single horse-drawn journey, but maybe Guillaume was reckoning on changing horses. That's if he was thinking clearly at all. (In fact, the ill-fated couple will get no further than Mantes.)

The other book I've been reading recently, Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), might be regarded as a sort of apocalyptic epitaph to the horse age, amid the carnage of anachronistic French cavalry in the early days of WW2. This extract from Georges' thoughts begins with a race meeting before reverting sharply to the present.

... and she (she hadn’t turned her head either, hadn’t shown that she had seen him) sitting on one of those iron chairs in the shade, and perhaps in her hand one of those yellow or pink sheets with the last odds written on them (but not looking at that either), talking desultorily with (or listening desultorily to, or not listening to) one of those men, one of those retired colonels or commandants never seen except in such places, wearing striped trousers, a grey bowler (and probably stored away somewhere, fully dressed, for the rest of the week and taken out only on Sundays, quickly dusted off, smoothed out and set here along with the baskets of flowers on the balconies and the staircases of the grandstand, and immediately afterwards stored away in their box again), and finally Corinne standing up casually, moving calmly – her vaporous and indecent red dress swaying, swirling around her legs – towards the grandstand… 

But there was no grandstand, no elegant public to look at us: I could still see them silhouetted ahead of us (Quixotic shapes diminished by the light that gnawed, corroded the outlines), ineffaceable against the blinding sunlight, their black shadows sliding beside them on the road like their faithful doubles, now foreshortened, hunched or rather telescoped, dwarfed and deformed, now stretched, spindly and distended, repeating in miniature and symmetrically the movements of their vertical doubles to which they appeared to be joined by invisible links: four points – the four hoofs – ....... the four hoofs and the four telescoped shadows separating and rejoining in a kind of motionless oscillation, a monotonous trampling, the dusty ground the cobblestones or grass running underneath like an ink blot spreading and shrinking, leaving no trace on the rubbish, the dead, the scar, the stain, the wake of wreckage war leaves behind it, and that must have been where I saw it for the first time, a little before or a little after we stopped to drink, discovering it, staring at it through that kind of half-sleep, that kind of brownish mud in which I was somehow caught, and maybe because we had to make a detour to avoid it, and actually sensing it more than seeing it: ... (like everything lying along the road: the trucks, the cars, the suitcases, the corpses) something unexpected, unreal, hybrid, so that what had been a horse (that is, what you knew, what you could recognize as having been a horse) was no longer anything now but a vague heap of limbs, of dead meat, of skin and sticky hair, three-quarters-covered with mud – ... 

(from Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), translated by Richard Howard)

Simon's prose is endlessly quotable but interlaced in a complex way. From the midst of that passage I reluctantly omitted a wonderful and painstaking description of rain dripping from a roofline; it could have formed the centrepiece of another post.

*

Sarah Orne Jewett was an unknown author to me, and of course I couldn't leave it like that, so I've just finished her best-known novella, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), an absorbing and beautiful book. 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/367/367-h/367-h.htm

[The fir in question is the conically-shaped Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea), which along with the Black and White Spruce is a principal component of Maine's heavily wooded landscape.]

Given today's topic, I've chosen an extract where they're discussing having to borrow the grocery wagon rather than the chaise. 

MRS. TODD never by any chance gave warning over night of her great projects and adventures by sea and land. She first came to an understanding with the primal forces of nature, and never trusted to any preliminary promise of good weather, but examined the day for herself in its infancy. Then, if the stars were propitious, and the wind blew from a quarter of good inheritance whence no surprises of sea-turns or southwest sultriness might be feared, long before I was fairly awake I used to hear a rustle and knocking like a great mouse in the walls, and an impatient tread on the steep garret stairs that led to Mrs. Todd's chief place of storage. She went and came as if she had already started on her expedition with utmost haste and kept returning for something that was forgotten. When I appeared in quest of my breakfast, she would be absent-minded and sparing of speech, as if I had displeased her, and she was now, by main force of principle, holding herself back from altercation and strife of tongues.

These signs of a change became familiar to me in the course of time, and Mrs. Todd hardly noticed some plain proofs of divination one August morning when I said, without preface, that I had just seen the Beggs' best chaise go by, and that we should have to take the grocery. Mrs. Todd was alert in a moment.

“There! I might have known!” she exclaimed. “It's the 15th of August, when he goes and gets his money. He heired an annuity from an uncle o' his on his mother's side. I understood the uncle said none o' Sam Begg's wife's folks should make free with it, so after Sam's gone it'll all be past an' spent, like last summer. That's what Sam prospers on now, if you can call it prosperin'. Yes, I might have known. 'Tis the 15th o' August with him, an' he gener'ly stops to dinner with a cousin's widow on the way home. Feb'uary n' August is the times. Takes him 'bout all day to go an' come.”

I heard this explanation with interest. The tone of Mrs. Todd's voice was complaining at the last.

“I like the grocery just as well as the chaise,” I hastened to say, referring to a long-bodied high wagon with a canopy-top, like an attenuated four-posted bedstead on wheels, in which we sometimes journeyed. “We can put things in behind—roots and flowers and raspberries, or anything you are going after—much better than if we had the chaise.”

Mrs. Todd looked stony and unwilling. “I counted upon the chaise,” she said, turning her back to me, and roughly pushing back all the quiet tumblers on the cupboard shelf as if they had been impertinent. “Yes, I desired the chaise for once. I ain't goin' berryin' nor to fetch home no more wilted vegetation this year. Season's about past, except for a poor few o' late things,” she added in a milder tone. “I'm goin' up country. No, I ain't intendin' to go berryin'. I've been plottin' for it the past fortnight and hopin' for a good day.”

“Would you like to have me go too?” I asked frankly, but not without a humble fear that I might have mistaken the purpose of this latest plan.

“Oh certain, dear!” answered my friend affectionately. “Oh no, I never thought o' any one else for comp'ny, if it's convenient for you, long's poor mother ain't come. I ain't nothin' like so handy with a conveyance as I be with a good bo't. Comes o' my early bringing-up. I expect we've got to make that great high wagon do. The tires want settin' and 'tis all loose-jointed, so I can hear it shackle the other side o' the ridge. We'll put the basket in front. I ain't goin' to have it bouncin' an' twirlin' all the way. Why, I've been makin' some nice hearts and rounds to carry.”

(The Country of the Pointed Firs, opening of Ch XVI.)

It's strange how randomly assembled authors may suddenly reveal curious resemblances to each other. You could say of Sarah Orne Jewett, as of Claude Simon, that she was one of those novelists who had no particular interest in or talent for making up stories, she worked with her own experiences. And what's immediately arresting about both authors is their styles, so different yet both distinguished for a certain effortless buoyancy and a constant flow of insight. 

*

Or consider this surprising crossover, when Guillaume and Madeleine reach Mantes and put up at an inn:

This room, which the innkeeper had thought he had made most comfortable by putting a mat under the round table, exuded that indefinable odour which is common to all such places. That is, it was redolent of airlessness and mould, plus a vague suspicion of old linen, threadbare upholstery and damp dust. Big, ramshackle and chilly, it was like a public hall through which the whole world had passed without anybody leaving behind anything of his heart or his habits. It had the vacant commonplaceness and the stupid bareness of a dormitory in any barracks. Here, in this narrow bed, half-way between double and single in size, men and women, old and young, had spent their passing nights, and all left it as cold as a bench in a public vestibule. No doubt both sorrow and delight had sojourned here, but the room had absorbed no trace of either any tears or laughter which had passed through it. ...

(from Émile Zola's Madeleine Férat (1868), Ch 9, translated by Alec Brown)

Cut to Claude Simon:

... and he floating in the shadows, listening to the silence, the night, the peace, the imperceptible breathing of a woman beside him, and after a while he made out the second rectangle of the wardrobe mirror reflecting the dim light from the window – the eternally empty wardrobe of hotel rooms with two or three hangers dangling inside, the wardrobe itself (with its triangular pediment framed by two pineapples) made of that urine-yellow wood with reddish veins which is apparently used only for this kind of furniture doomed never to hold anything except its own dusty void, the dusty coffin of the reflected ghosts of thousands of lovers, thousands of naked, furious and clammy bodies, thousands of embraces absorbed, mingled in the glaucous depths of the cold, unalterable and virginal mirror – and he remembering:) ...

(from Claude Simon's The Flanders Road (1960), translated by Richard Howard)

The passage from Madeleine Férat proves ironic: in this novel of ripped-down defences, Guillaume will soon learn that he is not insulated from the past, the room is not silent and its previous occupants are not without trace.

But bringing Claude Simon alongside Zola provokes another line of thought, that novels like hotel rooms are not impermeable, that every writer is unwittingly contributing to a vast communal book, and every reader's occupation consists of reading that one book to the best of their ability, and in fact all our lives are part of one single life, the subject of the one book that we can only gesture at comprehending.

Autumn cleardown

Brewer Spruce (Picea breweriana). Victoria Park, Frome, 11 September 2023.

Preparing for a road trip. Every bit of space in the van is important, so I've been emptying the accumulated cultural artefacts into self storage or giving them back to their owners. Yesterday I finished Karen Joy Fowler's 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a sort of dark family comedy that keeps disclaiming what it's doing, as it quietly unwraps the delusions and horrors of animal research. That was borrowed from Laura, and I've given it back, but I'll drag the internet for a quotation or two. The novel has touched a nerve, evidently; there are more than 30,000 Amazon reviews.

The first few chapters: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/312665/we-are-all-completely-beside-ourselves-by-karen-joy-fowler/9780142180822/excerpt

Language does this to our memories – simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture...

 

There's science and there's science, is all I'm saying. When humans are the subjects, it's mostly not science....

I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me....

The only book left in my bag right now is a miniscule Troilus and Cressida, but I reckon I've already said all I can about that.

I've reduced the CDs in the van from twenty to five; when we travel we don't listen to anything except the landscape. So it doesn't really matter that what's left is a strange unbalanced mix; Mildred Bailey, Mattias Eklundh, Duffy, The Jam, and Liszt's Années de Pélerinage (the Swiss part). (Last time I listened to "Vallée d'Obermann" I felt suddenly sure that this piano piece was the key inspiration for Wagner's Tristan and Isolde music.) It seems strange not to be carting around armfuls of Haydn, my current delight. 

It would be nice to say more about that. Alas, my classical music thoughts amount to little more than "Oh my God I bloody love Haydn..." (or Chavez, or Berio, or Andrea Torrodi, or whatever is currently playing). Maybe that's the place of music in my cultural life, an art I can truly surrender to without being the least bit preoccupied with what I'm going to say about it.

Well, if I need any Haydn there's always YouTube. But we won't be using our phones very much either, the charging is a bore and reception is fitful. The latter, at least, won't get in the way of finally finishing Claude Simon's The Flanders Road and probably immediately starting over. My Kindle download dates from last year's trip, when I found myself eating quiche outside the house of this amazing author that I knew nothing about.

[Basically, you stop at the Aire du Château de Salses on the A9, take a short walk across fields to the stupendous Fort de Salses, a massively fortified stronghold of Ferdinand and Isabella, then keep on walking into the village. Claude Simon's house is in the village square. (In Salses he was principally a winegrower, only secondarily a Nobel prize-winning author.)]

When I'd written this much, I decided I'd gone too austere. I should take at least one paper book for when I didn't want to use the phone, I thought. So I revisited self storage and picked up an early Zola novel (Fatal Intimacy (Madeline Férat)). It was published in 1869; weird to think that's only twenty years after Cousin Pons.

In the first chapter (in Alec Brown's translation), it says "Skirting under the hill where those enormous castanea Robinsonia chestnuts rear their domes, they reached Aulnay". I know this has nothing to do with the story, but I'm instantly intrigued, having totally failed to find any reference to such a tree. *

For good measure, and because it was so slim, I also grabbed Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society (1971). I hardly ever read that kind of book of ideas -- it's something to do with distrust; as soon as someone delivers their opinions in their own voice, I worry that it's a performance, or not what they really think. Consequently, such ideas as I receive from books usually come from novels or poetry. But I'm hoping that, in the bubble of travelling, I might be more receptive. 

[I read a couple of pages of Deschooling Society, enough to see that this was a most inapposite rant. Illich's book was the fruit of vast experience and its ideas emerged communally from much debate with colleagues. All the same, I left my copy in Spain and who knows when or if I'll get back to it.]

This will be the last blog post before we set off. Probably there won't be much for the next month or two.

*

* I think I've worked it out now. Alec Brown invented the quasi botanical Latin; he didn't know what else to make of "châtaigniers de Robinson" in Zola's original text. Consulting the map of SW Paris made it clear. The lovers are walking from Fontenay (Fontenay-aux-Roses) to Aulnay by a direct route avoiding Sceaux. To their right is the area still known as Robinson. It was named for a well-known guinguette (cabaret) called Le Grand Robinson, opened in 1848. Unlike most guinguettes this one didn't have a waterfront location; instead, its iconic feature was the interconnected "tree-houses" set among large chestnut trees. The guinguette's  name alludes to the tree-house in The Swiss Family Robinson (1812 novel by Johann David Wyss), whose own title is an allusion to Robinson Crusoe. Anyway, those are the chestnut trees that Zola is talking about.

Brewer Spruce (Picea breweriana). Victoria Park, Frome, 11 September 2023.

In its native Klamath Mountains (N. California,  Oregon), the striking growth form of Brewer Spruce is an adaptation to heavy snowfall.

minor Balzac

One of Picasso's thirteen etchings for a 1931 edition of Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu

[Image source: https://www.march.es/arte/cuenca/exposiciones/honore-de-balzac/?l=2 .]

One of our favourite cafés in Bath has some shelves of old books upstairs, including a dozen volumes of the Caxton Edition of Balzac in English (1897 - ).  That block of dull peridot spines probably depresses some customers, but I was thrilled. Eventually my light-fingered ways got the better of me and, just as the café was about to close, I abstracted one of the books at random (yes, I shall be returning it).

The Caxton Balzac contained 53 volumes altogether; the translators are not named and info on the internet is distinctly lacking / unreliable. The book I snatched turned out to be The Unknown Masterpiece. It contains the title story and four others, all from the early 1830s. Balzac subsequently incorporated them into the "Études Philosophiques" section of the Comédie Humaine.

I suppose they can be considered minor pieces. Balzac was quite generous when it came to giving early ephemeral pieces a place in his grand conception. None of these stories evince the kind of intense commitment to a single artistic idea that we find in e.g. Eugénie Grandet.  Balzac's forensic, exhaustive focus on character and setting are distinctly absent here.  By comparison there's an improvised, slapdash quality. Different parts of the same story have different types of interest. In "The Maranas", for example, the account of the Diards' attempts to get on in Parisian society take us to a much more serious place than the melodramas of the story's prelude and denouement. In "The Red Inn" it's difficult to feel absorbed in the narrator's moral dilemma at the end: this is a story that has brushed tantalizingly on many themes of greater interest, but keeps swerving away from them. Does Balzac know or care what he's doing? On the basis of his wilier masterpieces you'd want to say yes. In "Master Cornelius" the ample narrative of the opening is, as it were, tossed away in the maelstrom of the later pages; the lovers' terrors now seem insignificant fripperies; but what follows absorbs us in a completely different way. Is this radical change in our point of view to be regarded as opportunism, indifference, or a supremely confident gearshift?


"Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu" / "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1832)

Balzac is relatively unusual as a novelist for having significant influence on the fine arts. He knew quite a lot about painting, as is apparent from Le Cousin Pons as well as this story, which obsessed Cézanne and Picasso -- not to mention Zola. "Frenhofer, c'est moi!" Cézanne asserted. Ironically, he certainly was the main model for Zola's Claude Lantier in L'Oeuvre. When Cézanne discovered this, he immediately, and finally, ended their long-standing friendship.

 Set in 1612-13, it recounts the case of a brilliant amateur artist and critic, Frenhofer (a fictional character), now an old man, whose earlier paintings were remarkable and who has now been working for ten years on his masterpiece, a painting of a beautiful courtesan. No-one has ever seen the picture. Frenhofer, unable to satisfy himself that his work is complete and wanting to make some final adjustments, requires a surpassingly beautiful model. His artist friends Porbus (= Frans Pourbus the younger, 1569 - 1622) and a young Nicolas Poussin (1594 - 1665) offer to let Poussin's mistress Gillette model for him, in exchange for a glimpse of the mysterious painting. They are horrified to discover that it's a chaotic daub in which no subject is discernible (except in one corner, where a tell-tale foot shows that the painting did at one time depict a woman). Frenhofer has imagined that he has achieved unmatched realization, until he perceives their scepticism and instantaneously recognizes his own delusion. "The next day, Porbus, feeling anxious concerning Frenhofer, called once more at his house, and learned that he had died during the night after burning his pictures."

Balzac's story is quite historically informed. Poussin really was in Paris learning his craft from 1612. He subsequently became a painter notable for emphasis on line. In the story, Frenhofer insists that there is no line in nature, but Porbus defends its use in art. Evidently we are to understand that Poussin takes on board Porbus' moderate advice, and rejects Frenhofer's more extreme ideas.

Margherita Gonzaga, portrait by Frans Pourbus the younger

[Image source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437325 .]

The fascination of the story is its absence of interpretation. True, Frenhofer is mad, but aren't all serious artists a bit mad? Is the story a cautionary tale about the immoderate pursuit of art-theory and perfectionism (Porbus notes that Frenhofer's wealth means he has no restraints)? Or is Frenhofer a demonic inspiration, a reproof to unserious art and a true visionary of art's possibilities? Or maybe both: a fable of genius as simultaneously life-giving and deadly, a quest that ends in both triumph and failure.

Then again, you can read it as a meditation on the mystery of finishing a painting. Lesser mortals know how easy it is to ruin a picture by incautiously trying to improve it. But Frenhofer isn't a lesser mortal, his technique is unparalleled and his perfectionism without limits, so why would he ever regard his painting as finished? Or perhaps it considers the temptations of a private art that brings perfect satisfaction to the artist but cannot bear the public gaze? (It's a tragic irony, maybe, that Frenhofer, such a pitiless critic of other artists, is himself destroyed by a few words?)

Are Gillette's the truest insights of all, because she cares least about art and most about people? Her sad acceptance that Poussin loves his art more than he loves her, and her horror when he insensitively treats as failed art something that has become to its creator a fetish, a living being, his soul companion... (The story evidently casts a glance at the myth of Pygmalion.)

St Denis the Areopagite, Poussin's earliest dated painting (1620-1621)

[Image source: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Denis_l%27Ar%C3%A9opagite_couronn%C3%A9_par_un_ange_-_Poussin_-_MBA_Rouen.jpg .]

Online text of The Unknown Masterpiece -- probably Katharine Prescott Wormeley's translation, but this isn't stated.


"Les Marana" / "The Maranas" (1832)

The story begins with the French capture of Tarragona in 1811 and two friends among the invading army, the Italian libertine Montefiore and the low-born, corrupt, Provençal quartermaster Diard. The former pursues the beautiful and closeted girl Juana, he even thinks of marrying her, until he learns that she's the daughter of a famous Venice courtesan in the immemorial line of the Maranas. The courtesan ("La Marana") had hoped to preserve this beloved daughter from following the family profession, and has had her adopted by an upright Spanish couple, but the experienced Montefiore soon recognizes the girl's inherited, though unconscious and buried, passions. But in mid-seduction Juana's mother unexpectedly arrives and chaos ensues, resulting in Montefiore fleeing for his life and Juana promising her mother to marry a perfectly willing Diard, who has just arrived on the scene in response to Montefiore's cries for help (La Marana sees this as the only way to avoid her daughter's disgrace).

Juana dislikes her husband but honours her promise and is quiescently, unhappily married. Diard expels Montefiore from the regiment and, much in love with his new wife, is at first ambitious in his plans to make headway in society (he has made plenty of money), but he lacks strength of character and finesse. The couple establish themselves in Paris: the Parisians admire Juana but, scenting the attitude of his military colleagues, are profoundly contemptuous of Diard. Juana, though unsophisticated in her ideas of society, sees all this.

"These details convey but a feeble idea of the thousand and one tortures of which Juana was the victim; they came one by one; each social unit contributed its pin-prick, and who can conceive the excruciating agony of a heart that prefers dagger-thrusts in that constant conflict in which Diard received insults without feeling them and Juana felt them without receiving them?"

Juana encourages her husband to take comfort in domestic life but he's unsettled and begins to find fault with his virtuous wife. In the end he quarrels with her over their children; he realizes that she has been concealing her preference for the eldest, doubtless not his own son but Montefiore's.  Estranged from his wife, Diard falls into dissipation, takes up gambling for high stakes and moves on to dodgy business transactions. (Ironically, society now begins to respect him.)  Juana fears some disaster; Diard fears his wife. Finally his luck and money run out. He moves the family to Bordeaux. He takes up sharpery at the spa resorts of the Pyrenees, meets Montefiore and loses to him. He invites Montefiore back to  Bordeaux on the pretext of paying his debt; then murders him. He returns to his wife, pursued by the gendarmes. Seeing that he cannot escape, she urges him to shoot himself to save his sons' honour. When he hesitates, she shoots him in the head.  Though she admits what she's done, the authorities give suicide as the cause of death and allow her to leave for Spain with her children.  On the point of departure, she's seen by her dying mother: "Die in peace, mother, I have suffered for you all!" (that is, she has expiated the sins of the Maranas).

Online text of Juana (the original title of The Maranas), translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

[In Ewa Maczka's interesting essay "La belle Juive", she claims that Balzac here appropriates the term "marranes", which meant Jews who, though converted to Christianity, clandestinely practiced Judaism. The essay shows that Balzac (influenced by Scott's Rebecca in Ivanhoe), portrays Jewesses as "oriental". And he often associates courtesans and Jews, framing an ambivalent image of the exotically beautiful but socially unassimilable: neither clearly anti-Semitic nor clearly philo-Semitic, but with the potential to go either way.]




"Un drame au bord de la mer"  /  "A Seashore Drama"  (1834)

Two lovers, holidaying at Le Croisic, encounter a tragic, silent solitary. Later they are told his story: an austere fisherman who finally killed his own worthless son.

"...they were mad over him. If their little Jacques had dirted in the saucepan, saving your presence, they would have said it was sugar. ... And when another said: 'Pierre Cambremer, do you know that your son has put out the little Pougaud girl's eye?' he replied: 'He will be fond of the girls!' -- He thought that all he did was right. And so my little rascal, at ten years of age, cudgelled everybody, and amused himself by cutting off chickens' heads; he would cut them open, too, -- in short, he rolled in blood like a polecat. -- 'He will be a famous soldier,' said Cambremer, 'he has a taste for blood.' ..."

One of the things Jacques goes on to do is rob his mother's savings; the same motif occurs in George Eliot's "Brother Jacob". The contrast between the two stories, not in condemnation of the deed, but in tone and treatment, is remarkable.

Online text of A Drama on the Seashore, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley


"L'Auberge rouge" / "The Red Inn"  (1831)

Like the previous, a boxed story with multiple frames. At its heart is an account of the young surgeon Pascal Magnan, who, staying at a Rhineland inn in 1799, during the war with Austria, is horribly tempted to commit a murder, but doesn't. When he wakes, the murder has taken place. Pascal is arrested and executed. His defence is feeble both because he feels morally guilty and because he can't countenance the obvious conclusion that his friend and fellow-surgeon must have carried out the murder.  In the outer frame, the narrator identifies the murderer (now twenty years older) as present among the audience for the story. He also learns that this stranger is father to the girl he loves and wishes to marry. Now he knows that her wealth results from an atrocious crime. What to do?

Online text of The Red Inn, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.


"Maître Cornélius" / "Master Cornelius"  (1831)

A tale of Louis XI; and Balzac makes due reference to Scott's Quentin Durward. For the first forty pages (concerning the perilous assignations of two lovers) there's indeed something of Scott's solidly grounded costume drama, but from then on the story becomes altogether more flighty. The situation at the end is ingenious: Master Cornelius, silversmith, merchant, miser and crony of king Louis, has suffered numerous robberies over the years (and hanged quite a number of his assistants as a result). The king-turned-detective discovers that his friend sleepwalks and has been unconsciously robbing himself. The waking Cornelius doesn't know where the sleeping Cornelius secretes the booty. The only way he could find out would be to allow someone else to watch him, but that's out of the question, because they'd be sure to make off with the booty themselves. And accordingly, Cornelius will never know where his treasures are. Louis, sensing Cornelius' distrust, takes his leave; the friendship between the two old men is broken.  Cornelius is so terrified of being secretly observed while asleep that he tries to stay awake night after night, and eventually, tortured by sleep deprivation, cuts his own throat.

Online text of Maitre Cornelius, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

[Eugène Scribe borrowed the somnambulism part of the plot for his libretto to Halévy's 1839 opera Le shérif  (Cornelius is transformed into Sir James Turner, High Sheriff of London).]

[Both Louis and Cornelius reappear in "The Merry Jests of King Louis the Eleventh", one of Les Cent Contes drolatiques. (As it turned out, Balzac only managed thirty.) Here's an English translation: http://www.classicreader.com/book/545/1/ . ]

*

My posts about Balzac:

Sarrasine (1830):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/01/libravoxcom.html

Le Colonel Chabert / Colonel Chabert (1832):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/12/honore-de-balzac-le-colonel-chabert.html

"Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu" / "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1832), "Les Marana" / "The Maranas" (1832), "Un drame au bord de la mer"  /  "A Seashore Drama"  (1834), "L'Auberge rouge" / "The Red Inn"  (1831), "Maître Cornélius" / "Master Cornelius"  (1831):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/03/minor-balzac.html

Le Curé de Tours / The Abbé Birotteau (1832), L’Envers de l’Histoire Contemporaine / The Seamy Side of History (1842-1847), Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau / The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau (1837), La Marâtre / The Stepmother (1848):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/03/honore-de-balzac-1799-1850.html

The Lily of the Valley (1835):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/03/honore-de-balzac-lily-of-valley-1835.html

Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées / Letters of Two Young Married Women (1842):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/02/memoires-de-deux-jeunes-mariees.html

Le Cousin Pons / Cousin Pons (1847):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/04/honore-de-balzac-le-cousin-pons-1847.html

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Old Chelsea, by John Atkinson Grimshaw

[Image source: http://www.wikiart.org/en/john-atkinson-grimshaw/old-chelsea]

Stevenson was concerned that Zola's pronouncement "I insist upon the fall of the imagination" reduced fiction to a transcript of life. He thought the writer should "half-close his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality". Stevenson was wrong, but Zola overstated the case: his great works are triumphs of the imagination. Anyway, Stevenson could only be the writer he is. His best book is possibly In the South Seas, which is the most open-eyed. But half-closure did lead him to such incomparable things - in their way - as Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde, an amazingly prescient parable. I don't know if it influenced Freud directly, but it certainly looks that way.

Jekyll insists on distinguishing his own identity from Hyde's, but under stress before Lanyon, this breaks down to some extent; Jekyll's medical "we" comes through Hyde's voice. Hyde's taunting speech to Lanyon expresses Jekyll's scientific triumph over Lanyon. Perhaps what happens in the parable, i.e. the increasing ineffectiveness of the chemical switch, amounts to Jekyll's recognition that in the end it's too much of a strain to keep up the pretence of Jekyll and Hyde being two distinct persons.

It's a world in which all the normal characters are slightly imperfect: sly (Jekyll), theatrical (Lanyon), dusty (Utterson), an idle socialite (Enfield) etc.

Utterson likes to think of Jekyll, Lanyon and himself as three old friends, but Lanyon has evidently long disliked Jekyll.

The battering down of the door compares to the body jumping in the road under Hyde's blows. Though Poole and Utterson don't know it, their own riotous act is killing Hyde (i.e. the certainty of discovery makes him take the poison).

The book's weather, fog, wine and leaping cockroaches suggest a London heavy with psychic tension seeking relief.

Hyde is of small stature. Jekyll has some rationalizing ideas about that, but we can look deeper into it:

Accounts of Hyde are beautifully varied depending on the implied consciousness of the observer. Lanyon's medical narrative is amusingly distinct - Poole's sentimental but sometimes powerful conceptions are very well worked out too. It's the maid who, we suppose, reports seeing Hyde belabour the old gentleman "with ape-like fury"; Poole speaks of "that masked thing like a monkey"; Jekyll himself of "the ape-like tricks that he would play me". This line of analogy might arise from a culture digesting Darwin. What is unspoken is that Hyde's small stature is also child-like. He has a fierce love of life, he is conscienceless but, accordingly, completely frank in his passions ("'Have you got it?' he cried. 'Have you got it?'"), he can be timid (the meeting with Utterson), he weeps. It is not only Jekyll who can feel, along with all the revulsion, a sense of pity for someone so unformed. And after all, Hyde is like a child in another respect: prior to Jekyll's draught, he has no former existence and no history.

Jekyll's analysis is not quite to be trusted. It's he who defines Hyde as all evil, other people as a mixture of good and evil;  comfortably assuming that in his own case the proportions are about 90 to 10. But the nature of his good, except as a way of repressing his evil, is not given concrete form. Perhaps one way of reading the parable is as disputing, not only his assessment of the proportions, but the adequacy of these terms good and evil.  

*

Kipling's bogey-tale "The Mark of the Beast" (1890) owes something to Jekyll and Hyde. Fleete's metamorphosis into a wolf-man, obviously, but it was particularly that beating down of the door by the righteous that stayed with Kipling: the horror that most excited him was the sober necessity, by the righteous, of tortures not to be printed (involving red-hot shotgun barrels), and the different "give" of leprous skin under your boot.

Arto Melleri on Zola

Arto Melleri in 1982

[Image source: http://www.ts.fi/kulttuuri/kirjat/257958/Aina+taysilla]

The Finnish poet Arto Melleri (1956 - 2005) “attacks Zola as a new-style writer of a media age, and invokes the poets of the past as alternative sources of insight and guides to truth.” (Contemporary Finnish Poetry, ed. Herbert Lomas). 

Melleri's career as a poet more or less came to an end in 1998, when he was hit by a car and suffered brain damage.  (He also wrote plays and short stories).  He was a Bohemian writer somewhat in the Saarikoski mode, at least as far as alcohol was concerned, but his preoccupations were quite different. Saariskoski was a displaced Karelian and his lifelong debate was with Lenin. Melleri was an Ostrobothnian with a family tradition of Laestadian mysticism; he had an antipathy to agitprop poetry and a commitment to a truth beyond history.


Essay on Melleri by Immo Pekkarinen, discussing the above Zola thought: http://www.nbl.fi/~nbl3145/eighties1.htm

To Melleri, realism only "replaced the roses of the mirror-frames with snakes" ( “vaihdoit peilinraamien ruusut käärmeisiin” – Zola, NSV: 93), leaving the principle of reflection and representation untouched. Film and television are embodiments and extensions of the representational dreams of the Enlightment. In the modern world, thus, the romantic ideal of living presence is displaced by a fascination with ever newer and better means to mediate and multiply representations. The connecting of people into the "field of electric experience" rips them violently from their traditional life worlds.

And he quotes these lines (from "The Ferris Wheel")  about the destructive coming of TV to rural Ostrobothnia:


The runaway newsreel
gallops ever new images into the room.

Silent
in a movement too fast of the Ferris wheel
sit grandpapa, Daddy, mamma,
the hand, the maid, brother, sister
and Hankkija's agricultural agent!


Wikipedia article on Conservative Laestadianism, a strict form of Lutheranism still common in western Finland.

"Conservative Laestadians often have large families due to their belief that contraception is a sin. They believe that God is the lord of birth and death. They do not have a television at home because of the showing of offensive and sinful programing. They do not drink alcohol or listen to pop music. Recently however, the Internet is blurring the line between television and no television as many watch television programming on the Internet."


Essay on Melleri by Maris Gothóni: http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1996/12/winged-fever/

Gothóni says: "Interviewed, Melleri has always spoken against stylistic trends and conceptions, things like ‘postmodernism’. The truth lies in the decomposed and the materialised. His polemical poem against Emile Zola’s naturalism asserts that perspectiveless painting is closer to reality than a photograph or a telegraph."


Poem by Arto Melleri (translator unknown), found here: http://neba.finlit.fi/booksfromfinland/bff/198/poems3_melleri.html



You experience human growth
by becoming more insignificant

By seeing clearly up ahead
how the sail of ambition
no longer lends shade

Experience human growth
by becoming lighter

When useless ballast has been tossed
overboard
it stays there, in the wake,
floats or sinks, for fish or fowl

Human growth
by not despising the sea chart, the compass

By no longer naming your ships
Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria
By knowing that America has existed
before it was found

Human growth
by not naming everything all the time

By not being so stupid
By not being stupid?


*

Herbert Lomas' translation of Melleri's poem "Zola" appears both in Contemporary Finnish Poetry (Bloodaxe, 1991), and in the more ample selection in Three Finnish Poets (London Magazine Editions, 1999).

In the earlier part of the poem, Melleri contrasts the poet of former times:

The poet
     lit by his secret lantern
         did what your brilliant gaslight
              could never accomplish, Émile.

Later on, he writes:

The radiotelegraph and the photograph
     have told more lies
         than perspectiveless painting
             or the gossip steaming
in old biddies' skirts from washhouse to washhouse.

*

But still, I can't agree with Melleri about Zola, though I've pondered this thought (at least in its reported form) for many years.

I believe that naturalism is what we need most and is what we writers have been resisting ever since. Something in naturalism.

The deficiencies of electronic media are still understood to be deficiencies only because of a naturalistic standard, namely, the standard of our consciousness which believes in truth.

Émile Zola: La Débâcle (1892)

Battle of Sedan, 1st September 1870

[Image source: http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/battle-of-sedan-napoleon-iiis-empire-in-the-balance/]


Here the omniscient narrator shades into being a historian, and is then not omniscient, because he hasn't invented what he tells us about. However, we rarely dissent from him; he does not choose to put the principal political or military decision-makers on stage and does not claim an understanding of the motives of Macmahon or Thiers, only reports what was said about them. The battle of Sedan is seen from the perspective of troops and civilians who are generally bewildered by the apparent decisions of their leaders. On the other hand the brutal realities of war on the ground are exposed as perhaps in no previous novel. Since no individual can see much of the whole canvas there is quite a lot of the narrator, and even in the character's accounts and conversations he is often secretly present, this is certainly not naturalism in the sense of people only talking about what they could have seen in their own words. Consider e.g. Silvine's second-hand account of the Prussians passing through Beaumont. The characters are devices, sometimes viewpoints, sometimes broadly symbolic, coincidental meetings abound, and these fairly overt manoeuvres need not cause unease since all that really matters is that figures are ready to hand in order to build the terrifying pictures by which the book proceeds, the shambles of a hospital in Sedan, the starvation on the Iges peninsula, the boat-trip through a burning Paris. Ultimately what drives the narrative is not the characters but our desire to be shown exactly what happened, shown this admittedly in a Zola manner, but the emotive colouring does not seem exaggerated in view of the enormity of the events. A more subtle artistry does not seem required here, Zola had anyway sufficiently proved himself at that, and he is quite fluidly willing to employ devices of popular fiction to advance his story.

A little fall of plaster made him look up. It was a bullet that had chipped a bit off his house, one side of which he could see over the party wall. This annoyed him very much, and he fumed:    'Are those bastards going to demolish it for me?' Then he was startled by another little thud behind him. He looked round and saw a soldier, who had been shot through the heart, falling on his back. The legs made a few convulsive movements, the face stayed young and calm, suddenly still. This was the first man killed, and Weiss was particularly upset by the crash of his rifle as it fell on the cobbles of the yard.

The experience of the real beginning of the battle of Sedan is fascinating to Zola. Having built up to it so slowly all through Part 1, he replays the beginning three times in the first three chapters of Part 2. First we have Weiss and Delaherche at Bazeilles, as above. Then we have Jean Macquart's company on the plateau of Floing. Then in the third chapter we go right back to the middle of the night with Henriette inside the town of Sedan, and move forward again. There is a desperate poignancy in this last flashback, knowing as we already do what is so soon to come; Conrad learnt from this technique. The three sequences can all be synchronized with each other through the sudden outburst of sustained gunfire that takes place at exactly four in the morning.

The curious matter-of-factness with which, for each observer, the sundry events of existence, however uncomfortable or foreboding, suddenly transform into the full-on horror of a battle: that's what Zola is after. The misery and exhaustion of the campaign up to that point has been emphasized to the full, but only to point up that this, after all, is as nothing compared to the brutal frenzy of killing that is to follow. Brief, paradoxical lapses still interrupt the widening conflict. It is still strangely local. Delaherche, at serious risk of being killed on the way from Bazeilles, suddenly "made up his mind and ran all the way to Balan, whence he regained Sedan at last without too much trouble." Suddenly the fighting in Bazeilles seems unreal, something the mind finds hard to accept. Or  Maurice, just after witnessing this: "Just then a piece of shell smashed in the head of a soldier in the front rank. Not even a cry - a jet of blood and brains, that was all." - Just after witnessing this, "As he looked round he was very surprised to see down in a lonely valley, isolated by steep slopes, a peasant unhurriedly ploughing, guiding his plough behind a big white horse. Why lose a day's work?"

These chapters ought to make interesting reading for a new soldier. It's a paradox of La Débâcle that while it seems to provide all the material anyone would require for an utter repudiation of war in any shape, it also allowed its nation of readers a strong surge of indignant patriotism and the message that France ought to be better armed and better led, more ready for modern conflict.

Émile Zola: L’Assommoir (1877)

Wood engraving of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's drawing of working girls for the illustrated edition of 1878

[Image source: http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/renoir-illustrates-emile-zolas-gritty-novel-lassommoir.html. For more about this amazing edition see http://en.paperblog.com/pierre-auguste-renoir-as-a-book-illustrator-34579/ ]

L’Assommoir is the seventh of the Rougon-Macquart sequence and the first that is still widely read, though Thérèse Raquin (1867) precedes all of them. Sometimes being a part of a larger sequence prevents due recognition. L'Assommoir is one of the supreme European novels and it really stands alone in Zola's work, despite such jaw-dropping successors as Germinal (1885) and La Terre (1887).

In English you have no choice but to read L’Assommoir through a haze of jerky interference, even in Leonard Tancock’s translation. That’s unfortunate if only because of Zola’s huge importance in the history of the British novel. If you have ever wondered why, around 1875, the amazing fertility of its own glory days, masterpiece after masterpiece, seems to yield incomprehensibly to a trifling loss of confidence, then this is why. Zola, above all, made our authors understand themselves as incapacitated (Ibsen was possibly the second most potent author in this respect – i.e the reproof was publically felt).

Thus in April 1866, Wilkie Collins wrote this, in his Foreword to Armadale:

Estimated by the Clap-Trap morality of the present day, this may be a very daring book. Judged by the Christian morality which is of all time, it is only a book that is daring enough to speak the truth.

Ten years later (January 1877), Zola’s Preface says:

L’Assommoir is without doubt the most moral of my books... It is a work of truth, the first novel about the common people which does not tell lies but has the authentic smell of the people.

In these combative prefaces the two novelists used almost the same language, but once Zola had done it you’d be laughed at if you spoke that way about books like Armadale.

There is thus a Zola-shaped recess in the English novel, and in the next generation it’s followed by a Zola-shaped idea of what a serious novel is, by now so ingrained and so coloured by the individuality of good authors (Conrad, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence..) that we sometimes mistake it for their own idea. I’m sorry to say that they were, on the whole, very ungrateful.

Tancock sometimes succeeds brilliantly, but at such a long distance in time and place from the rue de la Goutte d’Or, he knew he had an impossible mission. At its worst the prose looks clunkily bolted together out of stock expressions that don’t quite fit, e.g.

she pitied her brother, that ninny whose wife deceived him up hill and down dale, and it was understood that the only reason why she still set foot in such a madhouse was for her poor old mother’s sake, who was obliged to live in the midst of all these abominations.

At least Zola’s text was speaking the same language as its characters – French, I mean. But then Zola’s project had intrinsic impossibilities of its own. He appropriated the speech of the streets, an essentially oral form, and tried to use it to make paragraphs in a novel, the wrong tool for the wrong job.     

“Up hill and down dale” is a phrase that you’ll never hear in real life except in some connection with transport, this being the only context where its powerful old image flames into life. There is a decorum in common speech that resists transferred usage, unless it is instantly seen to be natural (in which case it just as instantly ceases to be transferred usage, and becomes a part of the common inheritance in its own right). Extension of usage, the pressure of words placed in new contexts, is a literate practice intrinsically alien to the language of the Goutte d’Or and to any other common neighbourhood, where speech is a highly conservative medium and tiny deviations mark the outsider, the person who can never be “one of us”.

This ill-chosen phrase is presumably Tancock’s fault, but he’s not helped by having to slip these oral ready-mades into a syntactic framework that consists of essentially literary language like “deceived”, “it was understood”, “who was obliged to live”, expressions that are only used in educated settings. That has to be Zola’s responsibility, the basic contradiction in his method, which is something every novel needs to have. Fortunately for the world he had the necessary drive and insensitivity to carry it through. 

When it operates as a kind of continuous unattributable commentary the method does have a slippery potential. As the paragraph continues, we drift away from Mme Lorilleux’s thinking into wider seas:

The whole district fell upon Gervaise. She must have been the one to lead the hatter astray. You could see it in her eyes. Yes, in spite of the ugly stories, that artful dodger Lantier got away with it, because he went on with his gentlemanly airs in front of them all, strolling along the pavements reading the paper, full of gallant attentions to the ladies, always giving them sweets or flowers. After all, he was only behaving like a cock among hens, a man’s a man, and you can’t expect him to resist women who throw themselves at him, can you? But there was no excuse for her; she was a disgrace to the rue de la Goutte d’Or.

The commentary doesn’t speak with a single voice, since for the space of a brief shimmy it seems to admit the “artful dodger” Lantier’s culpability. We’ve seen what happened between Gervaise and Lantier, or we think we have, so this commentary about Gervaise we assume to be a cloud of commonplace-sexist prejudice and something that Zola doesn’t intend us to accept. At the same time it has its influence on us, because its pattern is at least comprehensible. We have not after all seen Gervaise’s eyes. She didn’t mean to trap Lantier, but then you can argue that Lantier, pace Virginie’s conspiratorial fantasies when he turns up, is a sponger and a drifter rather than a Macchiavelli. He wasn’t really responsible for Coupeau fouling the marriage bed with lakes of vomit. And didn’t Gervaise tacitly accept what was bound to happen from the moment Lantier moved in? Goujet thought so. The neighbourhood view, unlike the one that we take as bourgeois readers of a bourgeois form, at least acknowledges Gervaise’s rare moment of triumph, even if the neighbourhood condemns it. 

You need a pattern, even if it’s far from accurate, and in the next paragraph we see Gervaise working out her own changed circumstances on the basis of more or less accepting the neighbourhood myth. It’s like a communal thought-process.

Amid the general indignation Gervaise lived on, calm, indolent, half asleep. At first she had felt very guilty, very dirty and disgusted with herself. When she left Lantier’s room she washed her hands and then wetted a cloth and wiped her shoulders hard enough to take the skin off, as though to wash away her shame. If on such occasions Coupeau tried on any funny tricks with her she would fly into a temper and run off shivering to dress in the shop. Similarly she would not let Lantier touch her if her husband had embraced her. She would have liked to change skins when she changed men. But gradually she got used to it. It’s too tiring to have a bath every time! Her laziness melted away her scruples, and her longing to be happy made her get as much pleasure as she could out of her troubles. She was as indulgent towards herself as towards others, and was only anxious to arrange things so that nobody was too put out. After all, you see, so long as her husband and her lover were happy, and the home went on in its regular routine and everything in it was fun and games the livelong day, and everybody was nice and comfortable and pleased with life, there was nothing to complain about, was there? And besides, when all was said and done, what she was doing couldn’t be all that terrible, since it was all working out so well to everybody’s satisfaction, and you are generally punished if you do wrong. So her lack of shame had turned into a habit. It was now all as regular as mealtimes; whenever Coupeau came home drunk she popped over to Lantier’s bed, and that happened on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays at least. She shared out her nights, and had even taken to leaving her husband in the middle of his sleep when he snored too loud, so as to finish off her own sleep quietly on the lodger’s pillow. It wasn’t that she felt more attached to the hatter. No, it was simply that he seemed cleaner and she could sleep better in his room – she felt she was having a bath. In fact she was rather like a dainty cat who loves curling up on nice white linen.

The paragraph begins firmly and makes its way to the phrase about changing skins as one changes men. In the same way the end of the paragraph suddenly crystallizes into the picture of the dainty cat. Both of these are things that we see Gervaise thinking, and they act like searchlights into her mind with their common emphasis on cleanliness and bathing (by the end of the paragraph, this has ended up meaning being in Lantier’s bed).

But between these illuminations the central part of the paragraph is cloudy with parallel syntax and dithering qualifications like “after all, you see... and besides, when all was said and done...”. Coincidentally or not, “fun and games all the livelong day” is another judder of the Tancock/Zola phrase-bolting machine. One of the difficulties Zola makes for himself is that he hasn’t worked out a way of representing the silences of consciousness. His Gervaise is compelled by the methodology of the novel into a discursive and verbal awareness of her situation that is exactly how she wouldn’t think or choose to think, and this is compounded by her being made to employ the street-language designed for a different social context, which is bound to make her discursiveness seem silly. She is not a novelist or a debater, and Zola has to make her into one, even when she’s sick and starving in the twelfth chapter. Nevertheless his method does lead to a dreadful effect in the final pages, when Gervaise is wandering in her mind and the prose gradually withdraws from her consciousness, eventually objectifying her as a huddled body under the stairs in Bru’s kennel.

Still from Albert Capellani's silent film of 1908

Where the method really catches fire it becomes a brilliant expression of excited awareness – this is when Zola is going with the strength of the street-talk and not trying to make it do things it was never intended to do. This is Gervaise giving way to the thrill of the pawnshop:

Gervaise would have gladly sold up the whole lot; she was seized with a frenzy for popping everything, and would have shaved her own head if they would have advanced something on her hair. It was all too easy; you couldn’t help going there for some money when you were longing for a four-pound loaf. The whole shoot went that way – linen, clothes, even tools and furniture. In the early days she took advantage of good weeks and got things out of pawn, only to pop them again the following week. But later she couldn’t be bothered about her belongings and just let them go and sold the pawn tickets. Only one thing broke her heart,....

The prose does wonderfully with this dire over-heating, and it is still doing it near the end, e.g. in Gervaise’s fascinated participation in Coupeau’s death:

Seeing the doctors laying their hands on her husband’s body, Gervaise wanted to touch him too. She went up timidly, put her hand on his shoulder, and kept it there a minute. Good God, whatever was going on inside there? The dance seemed to be going on right down deep in his flesh, the very bones must be jerking about. From some remote source tremors and waves were flowing along under the skin like a river. When she pressed a little harder she could sense, as it were, cries of pain coming from the very marrow of his bones. All you could see with the naked eye was wavelets hollowing out tiny dimples, as on a whirlpool, but beneath there must be frightful commotion. What a sinister job was going on down there, like a mole boring away! Old Colombe’s poison was wielding the pickaxe on that job. The whole body was soaked in it, so what the hell – the job had to be finished, crumbling Coupeau away in a general, non-stop shaking of his whole carcase.

At such moments Gervaise ceases to be a case, the barriers come down, commentary gets left behind; it’s me and you, hellbent.

The novel begins in 1850 and ends some twenty years later. Zola has seamed so far into previously unworked chambers that we can easily overlook his cop-outs, but there are one or two. Generally his over-arching scheme of the Rougon-Macquart families does no good to the novels. Here, it leads Zola into beginning his book by taking the familiar path of introducing an outsider, Gervaise from Plassans, into a new neighbourhood. This has the initial advantage that he can describe that neighbourhood through an outsider’s fresh eyes, but it also means that he largely fails to confront working-class experience as seen from within the structure of a family. Zola wishes to reserve Claude and Étienne for other books, with the odd effect that Gervaise appears to have no consciousness of her sons after they have been relocated. At the time of her lonely death, she has two sons (or, as he later decided, three sons) in the prime of manhood. These sons were born to her and Lantier before the novel begins. Its difficult to decide whether Gervaise’s lack of emphasis on her own motherhood is a novelist’s insight into the reality of dispersed families or whether it’s just a convenience that frees her up to play out her tragic decline on the stage that Zola has assigned to her. It’s a matter of observation that families near the foot of the social ladder are often divided by longstanding separations that no-one feels it’s possible to overcome – it only makes more trouble – so you learn with surprise of children or brothers who live in the next street but are totally out of contact. Many people lead such extremely circumscribed lives, maintaining them with such difficulty or lassitude, unable to accept even the most minimal derangement that any leg-up necessarily entails, that contact with relations soon founders. But these observations are misplaced; such family separations occur because of distress and Zola nowhere concerns himself with Gervaise’s feelings about her sons, distressed or otherwise; in the early pages they are quietly children, and then they disappear, but this ought to mean more in the book than it does. Gervaise also has a sister in Paris, whom she never contacts.

Nana is a different matter, and yet not altogether. Conflicts between Nana and her parents are dealt with at length, but in these striking pages there remains a sort of vacuum, at least to my eyes. Coupeau’s rages and his sentimentality are comprehensible expressions of drunken feeling, but there is a blankness where we look in vain for Gervaise, elsewhere so implausibly verbal, to show some awareness of herself as a mother and Nana as her daughter. It’s understandable that Nana should be experienced by Gervaise primarily as a trouble, but what’s odd is that she seems to be only the same kind of trouble that you might incur by taking in someone else’s teenage child. For whatever reason, the bond on which all animal society is founded seems to have gone missing from Zola’s novel. What I end up thinking is that the novel is falsifying its account by omitting daily hours in which Gervaise and Nana must have interacted in undramatic ways that would in fact have seriously complicated the catastrophic image that Zola is trying to project.      

But no matter. All reservations aside, L’Assommoir directly confronts the most concealed of society’s existences with an amplitude that even now few other novels have ever managed. For hundreds of pages, unbroken by the entrance of even a single educated person, it operates outside bourgeois limits in the nearest yet most intractable of territories. Now that we are not exactly bourgeois ourselves, and a clearer understanding of the world around us at last seems possible, it ought to be one of the dog-eared books we do more than read. 

Rue de la Goutte d'Or in 2012

[Image source: https://soundlandscapes.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/le-quartier-de-la-goutte-dor/ , a wonderful post collecting the 2012 images and sounds from the neighbourhood of Zola's novel. Its present-day inhabitants are mainly N. African immigrants.] 

Jacket of a reissue of the 1895 Arthur Symons translation (Elek Books 1957, reprinted in the Bestseller Library in 1958.)