(In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris...)
In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend Laurent, but their animal passion for each other soon compels the lovers to commit a crime that will haunt them forever.
(Set in the fictitious Provençal town of Plassans, The For...)
Set in the fictitious Provençal town of Plassans, The Fortune of the Rougons tells the story of Silvère and Miette, two idealistic young supporters of the republican resistance to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état in December 1851. They join the woodcutters and peasants of the Var to seize control of Plassans, opposed by the Bonapartist loyalists led by Silvère's uncle, Pierre Rougon. Meanwhile, the foundations of the Rougon family and its illegitimate Macquart branch are being laid in the brutal beginnings of the Imperial regime.
(Serge Mouret, the younger son of Francois Mouret, is orda...)
Serge Mouret, the younger son of Francois Mouret, is ordained to the priesthood and appointed Cure of Les Artaud, a squalid village in Provence, to whose degenerate inhabitants he ministers. He has inherited the family taint of the Rougon-Macquarts, which in him takes the form of a morbid religious enthusiasm bordering on hysteria. Brain fever follows, and bodily recovery leaves the priest an amnesiac.
(L'Assommoir is the story of a woman's struggle for happin...)
L'Assommoir is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and launched a passionate debate about the legitimate scope of modern literature.
(At the center of the novel is Etienne Lantier, a handsome...)
At the center of the novel is Etienne Lantier, a handsome 21-year-old Mechanic, intelligent but with little education and a dangerous predisposition to murderous, alcoholic rage. Germinal tells the parallel story of Etienne's refusal to accept what he appears destined to become, and of the Miners' difficult decision to strike in order to fight for a better standard of life.
(Renée, bent forward, her hand resting on the low door of ...)
Renée, bent forward, her hand resting on the low door of the carriage, continued looking, awakened from the sad dream which, for an hour past, had kept her silently reclining on the back seat, as though in an invalid's easy-chair. Over a mauve dress with an upper skirt and tunic, and trimmed with broad plaited flounces, she wore a little white cloth jacket with mauve velvet facings, which gave her a very dashing air. Her extraordinary pale fawn-colored hair, the hue of which recalled that of the finest butter, was scarcely concealed beneath a slender bonnet adorned with a cluster of crimson roses.
(Piping Hot! follows the adventures of a young and ambitio...)
Piping Hot! follows the adventures of a young and ambitious man, Octave Mouret, who moves into a house on Rue de Choiseul, one of the immense Maisons bourgeoises in Paris, in which several characters of the novel live and interact.
(That morning Jean, with a seed-bag of blue linen tied rou...)
That morning Jean, with a seed-bag of blue linen tied round his waist, held its mouth open with his left hand, while with his right, at every three steps, he drew forth a handful of corn, and flung it broadcast. The rich soil clung to his heavy shoes, which left holes in the ground, as his body lurched regularly from side to side; and each time he threw you saw, amid the ever-flying yellow seed, the gleam of two red stripes on the sleeve of the old regimental jacket he was wearing out.
(On Christmas day, in the flurry of a snowstorm, the Huber...)
On Christmas day, in the flurry of a snowstorm, the Huberts discover a ragged nine-year-old girl sheltering under the neighboring cathedral porch. Childless and pious, the couple takes in and raises Angelique as their own. The girl is intensely passionate and given to rage and disobedience as well as love and religious fervor.
(Pascal, a doctor in Plassans for 30 years, has spent his ...)
Pascal, a doctor in Plassans for 30 years, has spent his life classifying the descendants of his grandmother according to hereditary ideas and developing a serum to cure hereditary disease. He represents science, while his niece Clotilde places her faith in God.
(Octave Mouret, the store's owner-manager, masterfully exp...)
Octave Mouret, the store's owner-manager, masterfully exploits the desires of his female customers. In his private life as much as in business he is the great seducer. But when he falls in love with the innocent Denise Baudu, he discovers she is the only one of the salesgirls who refuses to be commodified.
(Conceived as a representation of the uncontrollable appet...)
Conceived as a representation of the uncontrollable appetites unleashed by the Second Empire and the transformation of the city by Baron Haussmann, the novel combines into a single, powerful vision the twin themes of lust for money and lust for pleasure. The all-pervading promiscuity of the new Paris is reflected in the dissolute and frenetic lives of an unscrupulous property speculator, Saccard, his neurotic wife Renée, and her dandified lover, Saccard's son Maxime.
(A political novel set in the corridors of power and in th...)
A political novel set in the corridors of power and in the upper echelons of French Second Empire society, including the Imperial court, it focuses on the fluctuating fortunes of the authoritarian Eugène Rougon, the vice-Emperor.
(The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift th...)
The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift the world. Love and money are the only things. Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to make his way once more in Paris. Unscrupulous, seductive, and unbounded ambition, he schemes and manipulates his way to power.
(The arrival of Abbe Faujas in the provincial town of Plas...)
The arrival of Abbe Faujas in the provincial town of Plassans has profound consequences for the community, and for the family of François Mouret in particular. Faujas and his mother come to lodge with François, his wife Marthe, and their three children, and Marthe quickly falls under the influence of the priest.
(Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Pari...)
Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was a perfect target for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy and fin-de-siecle moral corruption. In this new translation, the fate of Nana, the Helen of Troy of the second Empire, and daughter of the laundress in L'Assommoir is now rendered in racy, stylish English.
Émile Zola was a French critic, political activist and the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. He was noted for his theories of naturalism, which underlie his monumental 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart, and for his intervention in the Dreyfus Affair through his famous open letter, J’accuse.
Background
Ethnicity:
Émile Zola was of mixed French and Italian parentage.
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840; the son of François Zola (originally Francesco Zolla), and Émilie Aubert. Shortly after his birth he was taken to the south of France by his father, a gifted engineer of Venetian extraction, who had formed a company to supply Aix-en-Provence with a source of fresh water. In 1847, his father died, leaving his mother on a meager pension.
Education
Zola completed his rather sketchy education and never succeeded in passing his baccalauréat examinations.
Career
For a period around his 20th year Zola lived in acute poverty, memories of which served him later in L'Assommoir (The Dram-Shop) and other novels. At the beginning of 1862 he found employment with the publisher Hachette, rising eventually to the position of advertising manager. He left this firm after four years, relying thereafter on his literary earnings to give him a livelihood.
He published his first novel, a stark, thinly disguised autobiography entitled La Confession de Claude, in 1865. The notoriety which this book gave him was aggravated by his spirited defense of Edouard Manet's paintings in a review of the art exhibition of 1866. At this time, Manet's work was unanimously condemned by art critics, and Zola's support won him the friendship not only of Manet but a number of other young artists important in the impressionist movement a decade later.
About 1868 Zola conceived the idea of writing a series of novels about a single family (named Rougon-Macquart), following its fortunes through four or five generations. The various novels were also to illustrate different aspects of social life in France under the Second Empire.
The early volumes of the series received little attention, but the seventh (L'Assommoir, 1877) was a great popular success and brought Zola both fame and fortune. He acquired a house at Medan, outside Paris, where he was able to entertain younger writers (among them J. K. Huysmans and Guy de Maupassant) who formed the short-lived "naturalist school."
Succeeding novels in the series aroused enormous interest, being as hotly denounced in some quarters as they were warmly acclaimed in others. By the time the series was completed (in 1803) Zola enjoyed a worldwide reputation and was commonly regarded, after the death of Victor Hugo in 1885, as the outstanding living French writer.
Zola died suddenly, September 28, 1902, in his Paris flat, of carbon monoxide poisoning, an "accident" very likely arranged by political enemies. The novels Zola wrote in the last years of his life comprise two further cycles: Les Trois Villes, giving the life story of a priest Pierre Froment, who eventually leaves the Church and marries; and Les Quatre Évangiles (The Four Gospels), which tell the stories of Froment's four sons. Only three volumes of this projected tetralogy were written.
Zola's political views were no less complex than his artistic personality. He gave an excellent account of himself as a parliamentary reporter after the Franco-Prussian War, but came to hate political debate for distracting the public from literary conversation. He wrote stories that exposed the misery of the working class but excoriated the Communards of 1871.
During the final period of Zola's life, he became caught up in The Dreyfus Affair, which divided French society into two violently opposed camps. In December 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was convicted by a court-martial of having sold military secrets to Germany and was imprisoned on Devil's Island. At first Zola paid scant attention to the affair, but finally, convinced by his conversations with Dreyfus's defenders that the man was innocent, he decided to intervene. Persuaded that a direct challenge to the government and military authorities was necessary to keep Dreyfus's case alive, he published in a Parisian newspaper an instantly world-famous open letter to the president of the republic. A tremendous uproar ensued, and Zola became a spokesperson for legal justice. After creating what historian Barbara Tuchman referred to as one of the great commotions of history, Zola was arrested for libel.
In a celebrated trial conducted by a biased judge, Zola was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of three thousand francs. He promptly appealed. A second trial took place but he fled to England without waiting for the result. The verdict this time would have been without appeal. He remained in England, writing Fecondite, until 1899, when, having heard that there was to be a review of the first Dreyfus trial, he returned to Paris.
Views
Émile Zola wrote during the intellectual and spiritual crisis brought on by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the rise of modern science. Zola's Paris, like the Roman Empire in the first century, was a boiling cauldron of philosophical and religious ideas. Like thousands of other thoughtful mid-nineteenth-century Frenchmen, the young writer spent hours wrestling with great eternal questions about the nature of reality, the problem of evil, and the meaning of life. Zola’s writing methods closely followed those of science. For every novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, he first roughed out a storyline and then began gathering documentation.
Zola was equally famous for his views about naturalism, and he asserted that the novelist could utilize the scientific method in creating characters for fiction. His theoretical criticism influenced the course of modern literature even though it is not considered profound or original. Ultimately, Zola's reputation rests upon the tremendously imaginative feat connected with the conception of the Rougon-Macquart series.
Quotations:
"If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud."
"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."
"Nothing develops intelligence like travel."
"I would rather die of passion than of boredom."
"The only basis for a living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better."
"Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."
"Man's highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty."
"Did science promise happiness? I do not believe it. It promised truth, and the question is to know if we will ever make happiness with truth."
"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work."
"Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it."
"I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul."
"The conclusion does not belong to the artist."
"Governments are suspicious of literature because it is a force that eludes them."
"The fate of animals is of greater importance to me than the fear of appearing ridiculous; it is indissolubly connected with the fate of men."
"I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion."
"Respectable people. What bastards!"
"If people can just love each other a little bit, they can be so happy."
"There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman."
"Blow the candle out, I don't need to see what my thoughts look like."
"It is not necessary that one should humble oneself to deserve assistance, it is sufficient that one should suffer."
"Violence has never prospered, you can't remake the world in a day. Anyone who promises to change everything for you all at once is either a fool or a rogue!"
Personality
Zola was an optimist, the man with an unshakable belief in human progress. He believed in capacity of the human race to make progress in a moral sense.
Quotes from others about the person
"Given Émile Zola's reputation as an agnostic and a radical thinker, he has often been avoided by scholars with a religious background." - Anthony Evenhuis
"Nurtured on romantic literature, his mind found easy to purchase at extremes, and it leaped from quaking reverence for magical forces to a belief in science holding sway over the universe. This is to say that Zola wavered between superstition and rationalism, between feelings of impotence and fantasies of omnipotence. What made him conceive the progenitor who masters virgin nature also made him sire those children, prisoners of heredity, who would soon crowd his novels." - Frederick Brown
"Zola, whose recurrent nightmare was of himself buried alive, could hardly conceive drama without a sacrificial victim or denouement that expunges some character from humankind. Identity and enclosure, the self and an abode standing island like on the margin of some larger settlement are linked again and again in disaster." - Frederick Brown
Interests
science, photography
Connections
In 1864, Zola met Éléonore-Alexandrine Meley, who called herself Gabrielle, a seamstress. He married her on 31 May 1870. She stayed with him all his life and was instrumental in promoting his work. The marriage remained childless.
Also in 1888, Alexandrine hired Jeanne Rozerot, a seamstress who was to live with them in their home in Médan. Zola fell in love with Jeanne and fathered two children with her: Denise in 1889 and Jacques in 1891. After Jeanne left Médan for Paris, Zola continued to support and visit her and their children. In November 1891 Alexandrine discovered the affair, which brought the marriage to the brink of divorce.