The Conquest of Plassans (Classic Reprint)
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120 portière: a heavy hanging placed over a door.
123 Corpus Christi procession: Corpus Christi is a moveable feast, celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. After Mass, the Sacrament is processed through the streets.
126 First Communicant: someone taking part in the ceremony of First Communion; in the Catholic Church these are usually children of 7–8 years old.
136 Rougon cousins: a reference to Eugène Rougon and Aristide Saccard, two of Félicité and Pierre Rougon’s sons. Aristide, a ruthless and greedy financier, renames himself Saccard.
141 rentiers: a rentier is a person of private means, usually living off a private nest egg or on income from investments.
143 porte cochère: many public buildings had a covered porch-like entrance for horses and carriages to pass through and allow the occupants to go indoors without getting wet.
152 Rue du Helder: a street off the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris and a haunt of the demi-monde.
“the great man”: Eugène Rougon.
159 Cain and Abel: in the Book of Genesis, Cain, the elder son of Adam and Eve, kills his brother Abel. Zola uses biblical references for the purposes of dramatic irony, as here, to evoke the violence which lurks in the family history of the Rougon-Macquarts. It also undermines the notion of the garden being Mouret’s ‘little paradise’.
191 Moniteur: the official newspaper of the Imperial regime until 1869.
204 bruised from being beaten: Zola uses case studies from the work of Ulysse Trélat (1795–1879), in particular his book La Folie lucide (Lucid Madness) of 1861. Much of Marthe’s and François’s symptoms and behaviour is based on examples from Trélat’s work.
226 for the family to see to: a law had been introduced in 1838 regarding ‘voluntary internment’ in lunatic asylums which required the family’s agreement and a medical certificate from a doctor.
230 The general election was due in October: the year is 1863, though the real elections that year were at the end of May.
Anacreon: (582–485 BC), Greek lyric poet who wrote about love and eroticism.
233 Louis-Philippe: Louis-Philippe of Orléans (1773–1850) was king of France from 1830 to 1848 in what was known as the July Monarchy.
faux-dévots: people who pretend to be devoutly religious.
235 cure: a living, or position in charge of a parish.
237 red ribbon: the Légion d’honneur, one of France’s highest decorations, uses red ribbon. These honours were given to those who advanced the interests of the ruling party, and Zola here, as elsewhere, sees the honours system as corrupt.
240 Orléanist: as well as being loyal to the Orléans pretender to the French throne (Louis-Philippe), the Orléanists were a conservative political force which, though opposed to Napoleon III, also supported him against both the Bourbon loyalists and the Republicans.
267 ‘Oh, wretched flesh!’: Zola in his notes to the novel described his intention to make Faujas’s misogyny into a central facet of his character and also his downfall.
273 crushed, bruised, and moaning: the history of Mouret’s descent into madness has parallels with Zola’s 1868 ‘Story of a Madman’, in which a woman has her husband, Maurin, committed to an asylum by pretending he has been beating her and having him pronounced insane by the doctor who is her lover. Mouret’s behaviour here closely resembles that of Maurin at the end of the story.