A Love Story

by Emile Zola

  oxford world’s classics

  A Love Story

  Émile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series with the subtitle Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, in which he sets out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range of characters and milieus. However, it was not until 1877 that his novel L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.

  Helen Constantine has published four volumes of translated stories, Paris Tales, French Tales, Paris Metro Tales, and Paris Street Tales, with OUP. Her translations also include Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin, Zola’s The Conquest of Plassans, and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education.

  Brian Nelson is Professor Emeritus (French Studies and Translation Studies) at Monash University, Melbourne, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Zola, Zola and the Bourgeoisie, and translations of Zola’s Earth (with Julie Rose), The Fortune of the Rougons, The Belly of Paris, The Kill, Pot Luck, and The Ladies’ Paradise. He was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Translation in 2015.

  oxford world’s classics

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  Oxford World’s Classics

  Émile Zola

  A Love Story

  Translated by

  HELEN CONSTANTINE

  With an Introduction and Notes by

  BRIAN NELSON

  1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  Translation © Helen Constantine 2017

  Editorial material © Brian Nelson 2017

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  First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2017

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935261

  ISBN 978–0–19–872864–1

  ebook ISBN 978–0–19–104438–0

  Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Contents

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Émile Zola

  A LOVE STORY

  part one

  part two

  part three

  part four

  part five

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

  Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot

  will prefer to read the Introduction as an Afterword

  The main achievement of Émile Zola (1840–1902) as a writer was Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93), a twenty-volume novel cycle in which the fortunes of a family are followed over several decades. The various family members spread throughout all levels of society, and through their lives Zola examines methodically the social, sexual, and moral landscape of the late nineteenth century, creating an epic sense of social transformation. The Rougons represent the hunt for wealth and position, their members rising to commanding positions in the worlds of government and finance; the Macquarts, the illegitimate branch, are the submerged proletariat, with the exception of Lisa Macquart (The Belly of Paris/Le Ventre de Paris, 1873); the Mourets, descended from the Macquart line, are the bourgeois tradesmen and provincial bourgeoisie. Zola is the quintessential novelist of modernity, understood as a time of tumultuous change. The motor of change was the rapid growth of capitalism, with all that that entailed in terms of the transformation of the city, new forms of social practice and economic organization, and heightened political pressures. Zola was fascinated by change, and specifically by the emergence of a new mass society.

  Converted from a youthful romantic idealism to realism in art and literature, Zola began to promote a ‘scientific’ view of literature inspired by the aims and methods of experimental medicine. He called this new form of realism ‘Naturalism’. The subtitle of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, ‘A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, suggests his interconnected aims: to use fiction as a vehicle for a great social chronicle; to demonstrate a number of ‘scientific’ notions about the ways in which human behaviour is determined by heredity and environment; and to exploit the symbolic possibilities of a family with tainted blood to represent a diseased society — the corrupt yet dynamic France of the Second Empire (1852–70), the regime established on the basis of a coup d’état by Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte on 2 December 1851 (treated in The Fortune of the Rougons, the first volume of the Rougon-Macquart cycle) and which would last until its collapse in 1870 in the face of military defeat by the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan (described in La Débâcle, the penultimate novel of the cycle). The ‘truth’ for which Zola aimed could only be attained, he argued, through meticulous documentation and research. The work of the novelist represented a form of practical sociology, complementing the work of the scientist; their common hope was to improve the world by promoting greater understanding of the laws that determine the material conditions of life.

  Zola’s commitment to the value of truth in art is above all a moral commitment; and his concern with integrity of representa
tion meant a commitment to the idea that the writer must play a social role: to represent the sorts of things — industrialization, the growth of the city, the birth of consumer culture, the workings of the financial system, the misdeeds of government, crime, poverty, prostitution — that affect people in their daily lives. And he wrote about these things not simply forensically, as a would-be scientist, but ironically and satirically. Naturalist fiction represents a major assault on bourgeois morality and institutions. It takes an unmitigated delight — while also seeing the process as a serious duty — in revealing the vices, follies, and corruption behind the respectable facade. The last line of The Belly of Paris is: ‘Respectable people... What bastards!’ Zola opened the novel up to entirely new areas of representation. The Naturalist emphasis on integrity of representation entailed a new explicitness in the depiction of sexuality and the body; and in his sexual themes he ironically subverts the notion that the social supremacy of the bourgeoisie is a natural rather than a cultural phenomenon. The more searchingly he investigated the theme of middle-class adultery, the more he threatened to uncover the fragility and arbitrariness of the whole bourgeois social order. His new vision of the body is matched by his new vision of the working class, combining carnivalesque images with serious analysis of its sociopolitical condition. In L’Assommoir (1877) he describes the misery of the working-class slums behind the public splendour of the Second Empire, while in Germinal (1885) he shows how the power of mass working-class movements had become a radically new, and frightening, element in human history. Zola never stopped being a danger to the established order. Representing the most liberal, reforming side of the bourgeoisie, he was consciously, and increasingly, a public writer. It was entirely appropriate that, in 1898, he crowned his literary career with a political act, a frontal attack on state power and its abuse: ‘J’accuse...!’, his famous open letter to the President of the Republic in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely accused of treason.

  Zola’s ‘scientific’ representation of society corresponds to a writing method informed by systematic research and fieldwork. While preparing Germinal, for example, Zola went down a mine in northern France, and observed the labour and living conditions of the miners and their families; for La Bête humaine (1890), he arranged to travel on the footplate of a locomotive, engaged in lengthy correspondence with railway employees, and read several technical works on the railways. The texture of his novels is infused with an intense concern with concrete detail, and the detailed planning notes he assembled for each novel represent a remarkable stock of documentary information about French society in the 1870s and 1880s. But documentary detail, though it helps to create ethnographically rich evocations of particular milieux and modes of life, is not an end in itself. The observed reality of the world is the foundation for a poetic vision. In his narrative practice, Zola combines brilliantly the particular and the general, the everyday and the fantastic. The interaction between people and their environments is evoked in his celebrated physical descriptions. These descriptions are not, however, mechanical products of his aesthetic credo; rather, they express the very meaning, and ideological tendencies, of his narratives. For example, the lengthy descriptions of the luxurious physical decor of bourgeois existence — houses, interiors, social gatherings — in The Kill (La Curée, 1872) are marked syntactically by the eclipse of human subjects by abstract nouns and things, expressing a vision of a society which, organized under the aegis of the commodity, turns people into objects. Similarly, the descriptions of the sales in The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883), with their cascading images and rising pitch, suggest loss of control, the female shoppers’ quasi-sexual abandonment to consumer dreams, at the same time mirroring the perpetual expansion that defines the economic principles of consumerism. Emblematic features of contemporary life — the market, the machine, the tenement building, the mine, the apartment house, the department store, the stock exchange, the city itself — are used as giant symbols of urban and industrial modernity. Through the play of imagery and metaphor Zola magnifies the material world, giving it a hyperbolic, hallucinatory quality.

  After reading Nana (1880), Flaubert wrote enthusiastically to Zola that Nana ‘turns into a myth without ceasing to be real’ — thus identifying an important feature of Zola’s work: the mythic resonance of his writing. The pithead in Germinal, for example, is a modern figuration of the Minotaur, a monstrous beast that breathes, devours, digests, and regurgitates. Heredity not only serves as a general structuring device, but also has great dramatic force, allowing Zola to give a mythical dimension to his representation of the human condition. Reality is transfigured into a theatre of archetypal forces; and it is the mythopoeic dimension of Zola’s work that helps to make him one of the great figures of the European novel. Heredity and environment pursue his characters as relentlessly as the forces of fate in an ancient tragedy. His use of myth is inseparable, moreover, from his vision of history, and is essentially Darwinian (a complete translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species, first published in 1859, appeared in French in 1865). His conception of society is shaped by a biological model informed by the struggle between the life instinct and the death instinct: an endless cycle of life–death–life. This vision reflects an ambivalence characteristic of modernity itself. Despite his faith in science, Zola’s vision is marked by the anxiety that accompanied industrialization. The demons of modernity are figured in images of catastrophe: the collapsing pithead in Germinal, the runaway locomotive in La Bête humaine (1890), the stock market crash in Money (L’Argent, 1891). A myth of catastrophe is opposed by a myth of hope, degeneration by regeneration. At the end of Earth (La Terre, 1887), Zola’s novel of peasant life and its savagery, the protagonist, Jean Macquart, reflects, as he walks away from the peasant village, that even the crimes and violence perpetrated by human beings may play their part in the evolutionary process, humanity shrinking to relative insignificance, like so many tiny insects, within the great scheme of Nature. The novel closes as it opens, with the image of men sowing seeds: an image of eternal renewal.

  A Love Story

  A Love Story (Une page d’amour, 1878) is the eighth novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. The central character is Hélène Grandjean, a widow (of eighteen months) who lives in the closed world of bourgeois Passy, a Paris suburb, with her daughter Jeanne who is 11 at the start of the novel. Hélène is the daughter of Ursule Mouret (née Macquart), the illegitimate daughter of Aunt Dide, who features prominently in the first novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, The Fortune of the Rougons. The common ancestor of both the Rougon and Macquart families, Dide is the origin of the ‘hereditary lesion’ that afflicts them. Hélène is unaffected by this inheritance, whereas Jeanne — sickly, nervous, clinging — is firmly placed in the lineage of mental instability that marks the family heredity.

  Hélène and Jeanne have only ventured into Paris proper three times. From the window of their apartment, they can see the entire city, which takes on a dreamlike, foreign, romantic, yet inaccessible, character for them. On the night the novel opens, Jeanne has a violent seizure. A neighbour, Dr Henri Deberle, comes to attend her, and his ministrations save her. A few days later, Hélène goes to thank Deberle, and befriends his wife Juliette and her social circle, including Malignon, a handsome, wealthy womanizer. Hélène’s only friends, with whom she dines each week, are former friends of her husband: Abbé Jouve, the officiating priest at the local church, and his worthy but dull half-brother Rambaud, a middle-aged oil and produce merchant. The priest asks Hélène to visit one of his invalid parishioners, Mother Fétu. While Hélène is in the old woman’s squalid little attic room, Deberle pays a professional visit. They begin to see each other there regularly, and they are increasingly attracted to each other. Meanwhile, the priest urges Hélène to remarry, and relays to her his brother’s offer to wed her. This offer dismays Hélène (‘the idea that he loved her made her freeze’, p. 70), a
nd she asks for time to consider it. Juliette organizes a children’s fancy-dress ball, at which Deberle confesses to Hélène that he loves her. She leaves the party in a state of turmoil. On contemplating her life, she realizes that she has never really been in love; though she respected her late husband, she felt no love or passion for him. She finds, however, that she is falling in love with Deberle. Their relationship remains awkward. Hélène immerses herself in religious devotion. Jeanne has another seizure. Her illness lasts three weeks, during which she is attended by Hélène and Deberle alone, drawing them ever closer together. The doctor saves Jeanne a second time, by using leeches. Hélène herself now declares her love for the doctor. However, as Jeanne recuperates, she witnesses the closeness of her mother and Deberle and is consumed by jealousy. The symptoms of her illness return whenever the doctor is present, until at last Hélène forbids his visits. Hélène realizes, meanwhile, that Malignon has been pursuing Juliette and the two are planning an assignation. She learns from Mother Fétu that Malignon has rented a little apartment in her building, and she assumes it is intended as a love nest for him and Juliette. She goes out to look at the rooms. Jeanne is distressed to be left alone. Mother Fétu thinks Hélène is arranging for the doctor and herself to meet. The next day, Hélène tries unsuccessfully to warn Juliette not to keep her rendezvous with Malignon, scheduled for that afternoon. She slips through the Deberles’ letter box an anonymous note for Henri with the address and time of the assignation. That afternoon, she decides to go to the apartment and avert the rendezvous, telling Jeanne she cannot go with her. Hélène is met by Mother Fétu, who, feeling she is playing the part of Hélène’s procuress, lets her into the apartment. Hélène succeeds in averting the rendezvous, but just as the prospective lovers have departed, Deberle arrives. He thinks Hélène has arranged for them to be alone together. Hélène gives in to her feelings, and they make passionate love at last. Meanwhile, Jeanne, left alone, makes herself sick by hanging her arms out of her bedroom window in the rain. She feels betrayed, and believes her mother does not care for her anymore, especially after witnessing her mother and Deberle exchange silent, knowing glances while planning a joint family excursion to Italy. She falls seriously ill, and dies. Hélène, grief-stricken and feeling that her own actions are the direct cause of her daughter’s death, ends the relationship with Deberle. Two years go by. In the last chapter, a postscript, we see Hélène standing in the snow-covered cemetery above Passy; we learn that she has married Rambaud and that the two are about to return to Marseilles, where they now live. Her life has resumed where it had left off when the novel opens, ‘in stern tranquillity and proud respectability’ (p. 264).