by Emile Zola
Table of Contents
From the Pages of Nana
Title Page
Copyright Page
Émile Zola
The World of Émile Zola and Nana
Introduction
Nana
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
From the Pages of
Nana
Nana, very tall and very plump for her eighteen years, in the white tunic of a goddess, and with her beautiful golden hair floating over her shoulders, walked towards the foot-lights with calm self-possession, smiling at the crowd before her. Her lips parted, and she commenced her great song: (page 17)
“When Venus takes an evening stroll—”
Everything betokened the damsel abandoned too quickly by her first genuine protector, and fallen back into the clutches of unscrupulous lovers; a most difficult debut miscarried, and trammelled with a loss of credit and threats of eviction. (page 35)
“Only fancy, I intend to sleep a whole night—a whole night all to myself!” (page 59)
The women avenged morality in emptying his coffers. (page 101)
In her dress of soft white silk, light and crumpled like a chemise, with her touch of intoxication, which had taken the colour from her face and made her eyes look heavy, she seemed to be offering herself in a quiet, good-natured sort of way. The roses she had placed in her dress and hair were now all withered, and only the stalks remained. (page 115)
As she listened to the robin, whilst the boy pressed close against her, Nana recollected. Yes, it was in novels that she had seen all that. Once, in the days gone by, she would have given her heart to have seen the moon thus, to have heard the robin and to have had a little fellow full of love by her side. Oh, heaven! she could have cried, it all seemed to her so lovely and good! For certain she was born to live a virtuous life. (page 169)
“Ah! they’re getting on well, your respectable women! They even interfere with us now, and take our lovers!” (page 212)
From that night their life entirely changed. For a “yes” or a “no” Fontan struck her. She, getting used to it, submitted. Occasionally she cried out or menaced him; but he forced her against the wall, and talked of strangling her, and that made her yield. (page 234)
Then Nana became a woman of fashion, a marchioness of the streets frequented by the upper ten, living on the stupidity and the depravity of the male sex. It was a sudden and definitive start in a new career, a rapid rise in the celebrity of gallantry, in the full light of the follies of wealth and of the wasteful effronteries of beauty. (page 294)
“All those people no longer amaze me. I know them too well. You should see them with the gloss off! No more respect! respect is done with! Filth below, filth up above, it’s always filth and company. That’s why I won’t put up with any nonsense.” (page 340)
“Do you think I shall go to heaven?” (page 365)
A lewdness seemed to possess them, and inspire them with the delirious imaginations of the flesh. The old devout frights of their night of wakefulness had now turned into a thirst for bestiality, a mania for going on all fours, for grunting and biting. Then one day, as he was doing the woolly bear, she pushed him so roughly that he fell against a piece of furniture; and she broke out into an involuntary laugh as she saw a bump on his forehead. From that time, having already acquired a taste for it by her experiment on La Faloise, she treated him as an animal, goaded him and pursued him with kicks. (page 422)
She dreamed, too, of something better; and she went off in a gorgeous costume to kiss Satin a last time—clean, solid, looking quite new, as though she had never been in use. (page 433)
Published by Barnes & Noble Books
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Nana was first published in French in 1880. Burton Rascoe’s English
translation first appeared in 1922.
Published in 2006 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction, Notes,
Biography, Chronology, Inspired By, Comments & Questions,
and For Further Reading.
Introduction, Notes, and For Further Reading
Copyright © 2006 by Luc Sante.
Note on Émile Zola, The World of Émile Zola and Nana,
Inspired by Nana, and Comments & Questions
Copyright © 2006 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.
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Nana
ISBN-13: 978-1-59308-292-5
ISBN-10: 1-59308-292-4
eISBN : 978-1-411-43274-1
LC Control Number 2005932871
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FIRST PRINTING
Émile Zola
Émile Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840. In 1843 his family moved to Aix-en-Provence, where his father, Francesco, a civil engineer of Italian origin and meager means, had found work planning a new water-works system. Four years later, he contracted a fever and died, leaving his widow, Émilie, and Émile in acute financial peril. With the help of family and friends, Émile studied at the College Bourbon in Aix, where he became a close friend of the future painter Paul Cézanne. After he and his mother moved to Paris in 1858, he continued his studies, with the help of a scholarship, at the Lycée Saint-Louis. Though he had won academic awards at school in Aix, his performance at the Lycée was undistinguished. He failed the baccalauréat exam twice and could not continue his studies, instead sinking into a grim state of unemployment and poverty.
In 1862 Zola was hired by the publisher Hachette, and he rose quickly through the ranks of the advertising department to earn a decent living. At the same time, he began to write journalistic pieces and fiction. In the latter, he sought to truthfully depict life and not censor the experiences of brutality, sex, and poverty. His explicit autobiographical novel, Claude’s Confession (1865), created such a scandal that the police searched his house for pornographic material. Zola left Hachette in 1866 to work as a freelance journalist, and he inflamed readers with his opinionated critiques of art and literature. In 1867 he published his first major work, Thérèse Raquin. In his preface to this novel about adultery and murder, Zola introduced the term “naturalist” to describe his uncompromisingly “clinical” portrayals of human behavior.
A year after his marriage in 1870 to a former seamstress, Gabrielle Alexandrine Meley, Zola began publishing a series of novels that was to occupy him for more than twenty years. Under the umbrella name Les Rougon-Macquart, the series details the fortunes of three branches of a French family during the Second Empire (1852-1870). Among the twenty volumes are several masterpieces, including The Drunkard (1877), Germinal (1885) , Earth (1887), and Nana (1880) . As Z
ola’s fame grew, he often retired to his second home in the countryside, where he was surrounded by fellow writers and literary disciples. As he claimed in his aesthetic manifesto, The Experimental Novel (1880), he and his friends created groundbreaking narratives that proudly defied the conventions of Romantic fiction.
While Zola was at work on a new series, The Three Cities, France was shaken by a scandal in the highest ranks of the military. In 1894 a Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of leaking secret military information to a German military attache. When it became clear that Dreyfus had been framed by French officials under a cloud of anti-Semitism, Zola wrote “J’Accuse”—an open letter excoriating the military and defending the wrongfully convicted officer. Then Zola himself was convicted of libeling the military and sentenced to prison; he fled to England but returned the next year for Dreyfus’s second court martial. The subsequent years were relatively much quieter for Zola as he worked to finish a new series of novels, The Four Gospels.
In 1902 Emile Zola died from carbon monoxide poisoning that some said was planned by fanatics offended by his role in the Dreyfus Affair. At Zola’s funeral, which was attended by some 50,000 people, Anatole France eulogized him as “a moment in the history of human conscience.” Zola was buried at Montmartre Cemetery, but in 1908 his remains were moved to a place of honor in the Panthéon in Paris.
The World of Émile Zola
and Nana
1840 Émile Zola is born on April 2 in Paris, to Francesco Zola, an Italian civil engineer, and Émilie Zola, née Aubert.
1843 The Zolas move to Aix-en-Provence, where Francesco engineers and executes a plan to supply drinking water to the town.
1844 Le Comte de Monte Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo), by Alexandre Dumas (père), is published.
1847 Francesco dies of illness brought on by work-related exposure- to bad weather, leaving his wife and son in dire financial straits.
1848 The Revolution of February 24 leads to the fall of the July Monarchy and the establishment of the Second Republic . Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte is elected president.
1852 Émile enrolls at the College Bourbon in Aix, where he wins prizes in several subjects. He and fellow student and future painter Paul Cézanne form what will be a longstanding friendship. A love of the work of Alfred de Musset and Victor Hugo reflects Émile’s early affinity for Romanticism. Louis-Napoleon becomes emperor as Napoleon III.
1853 Baron Georges Haussmann begins his large-scale redesign of Paris. The Crimean War begins.
1856 Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary is published.
1857 Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) is published.
1858 When they can no longer afford to live independently in Aix, Émilie and Émile move to Paris, hoping for assistance from friends. Émile receives a bursary (scholarship) that allows him to begin school at the prestigious Lycée Saint-Louis.
1862 Zola is hired as a clerk by the publisher Hachette and advances in the advertising department. In his free time, he reads contemporary fiction and writes journalistic pieces and fiction. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (The Miserable Ones) is published.
1863 Édouard Manet’s painting Déjeuner sur l‘herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), which depicts a nude woman and a partially nude woman picnicking with two dressed men, is exhibited in the Salon des Refusés and creates a scandal.
1864 A book of Zola’s short stories, Les Contes à Ninon (Tales for Ninon) , is published. The author corresponds with the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who publish the naturalistic novel Germinie Lacerteux (Germinie). The International Workingmen’s Association is founded.
1865 Zola meets and sets up a household with his future wife, Gabrielle Alexandrine Meley, a working-class seamstress . He publishes a sexually explicit fictional memoir, La Confession de Claude (Claude’s Confession), to considerable scandal and a great deal of publicity. A book that will substantially influence Zola’s thinking, Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine) is published. Zola later argues that the novelist, like the scientist, can bring the scientific method to his work, and that the novelist can experiment with as well as observe his characters.
1866 Zola meets Édouard Manet, whose portrait of Zola will eventually hang in the Musée d‘Orsay in Paris. Zola resigns from Hachette and writes highly opinionated art and literary criticism for the newspaper L’Événement. Mes Haines (My Hates) and Mon Salon, two volumes of essays on art and literature, are published.
1868 Paris opens. In the novel Madeleine Férat, published this year, Zola explores the concept of heredity.
1869 Gustave Flaubert’s L‘Éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education) is published. Zola writes a letter introducing himself to the author. Zola presents the master plan of Les Rougon-Macquart, his richly detailed twenty-novel portrait of a family, to his publisher.
1870 eley and Zola marry. The Franco-Prussian War begins, which leads to the Siege of Paris and the fall of the Second Empire. During the 1870s, Zola will meet often with influential authors Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and Ivan Turgenev.
1871 Zola returns to Paris and publishes La Fortune des Rougon (The Fortune of the Rougons), the first of the Rougon- Macquart cycle; the novel enjoys only modest success. The Franco-Prussian War ends. Adolphe Thiers, president of France’s newly formed Third Republic, suppresses the Commune of Paris.
1872 Zola publishes La Curée (The Kill), a novel about real estate dealings during the years when Paris was being redesigned
1873 Zola publishes Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris), a novel that takes place in the central food markets of Paris. Arthur Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) and Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) are published. Napoleon III dies, and Patrice de MacMahon becomes president of the French republic, following the resignation of Thiers.
1874 La Conquete de Plassans (The Conquest of Plassans), the fourth novel of the Rougon-Macquart series, is published. The first Impressionist art exhibition is held.
1876 Another novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon (His Excellency Eugène Rougon), is published.
1877 Zola’s L‘Assommoir (translated as The Drinking Den, The Dram Shop, and The Drunkard) , an authentic portrait of working-class life and the effects of alcoholism, is denounced by the left and the right but meets with great commercial success. Now financially well-off, the Zolas move to the rue de Boulogne.
1878 Une Page d Amour (A Love Affair), about the guilty passions of an adulterous couple, is published. The Zolas buy a cottage at Médan, near Paris.
1879 A theatrical production of LAssommoir is a huge success. Jules Grévy, a moderate, is elected president of the Third Republic. Jules Guesde founds the French Socialist Workers Party.
1880 Zola has his greatest commercial success with his ninth Rougon-Macquart novel, Nana. His influential treatise on naturalism, Le Roman Expérimental (The Experimental Novel), is published. Les Soirées de Médan (Evenings at Médan), a collection of stories by Zola and fellow authors, is published. Zola’s mother dies. Flaubert dies.
1882 Zola publishes the novel Pot-Bouille (Restless House) .
1883 Au Bonheur des dames (A Ladies’ Paradise) , about how a new enterprise, the department store, affects smaller merchants, is published. Guy de Maupassant’s Une Vie (A Life) is published.
1884 Zola’s novel La Joie de vivre (The Joy of Life) is published. The Waldeck-Rousseau law legalizes labor unions. J.-K. Huysmans publishes A rebours (Against the Grain), an attack on naturalism.
1885 Germinal, thought by many to be Zola’s greatest work, is published; it depicts the hard life of coal miners in northern France.
1886 L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece) is published; the novel describes an Impressionist painter resembling Cézanne.
1887 The next Rougon-Macquart novel, La Terr
e (Earth or The Soil), is published.
1888 A “fairy tale” novel, La Rêve (The Dream), is published. While still married, Zola begins an affair with a young housekeeper, Jeanne Rozerot, that will continue until the end of his life.
1889 Rozerot gives birth to Zola’s first child, Denise. Construction of the Eiffel Tower, begun in 1887, is completed.
1890 La Bête Humaine (The Beast in Man) , considered by some to be Zola’s most pessimistic book, is published.
1891 Jacques, Rozerot and Zola’s second child, is born. Zola and his wife travel through the Pyrenees. L‘Argent (Money) is published.
1892 La Débâcle (The Debacle or The Collapse), a war novel that also traces the rise of the Paris Commune, is published.
1893 Zola publishes Le Docteur Pascal (Doctor Pascal), the final Rougon-Macquart work.
1894 Lourdes, the first installment of Zola’s idealistic trilogy Les Trois Villes (The Three Cities), is published. Sadi Carnot, president of the French republic, is assassinated, and Jean Casimir-Périer becomes president. Spurred by virulent anti-Semitism in the military, the public, and the press, the French government without clear justification convicts Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the French army, of giving secret information to a German military attaché.
1896 Rome, the next book in the Three Cities trilogy, is published.
