by Émile Zola
Oxford World’S Classics
THE MASTERPIECE
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 sub-title 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 milieux. 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.
Roger Pearson is Professor of French in the University of Oxford and Fellow and Praelector in French at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Stendhal’s Violin: A Novelist and his Reader (1988), The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s ‘Contes philosophiques’ (1993), Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (1996), Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (2004), and Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (2005). For Oxford World’s Classics he has translated Zola, La Bête humaine, Voltaire, Candide and Other Stories, and Maupassant, A Life.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Masterpiece
Translated by
THOMAS WALTON
Translation revised and introduced by
ROGER PEARSON
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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This revised translation, and editorial material © Roger Pearson 1993
Original translation by Thomas Watson © Grafton Books
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First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1993
Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1999
Revised 2006
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Zola, Émile, 1840–1920.
[Oeuvre, English]
The masterpiece / Émile Zola : translated by Thomas Walton: translation revised and introduced by Roger Pearson.
p. cm.—(Oxford world’s classics)
Translation of: L’Oeuvre.
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Pearson, Roger. II. Title. III. Series.
PQ2511.04′5 1993 843.8–dc20 92–5293
ISBN 0–19–283963–2
ebook ISBN 978–0–19–259317–7
9
Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd., St Ives plc.
Contents
Introduction
Note on the Translation
Select Bibliography
Chronology
THE MASTERPIECE
Explanatory Notes
Introduction
Writing in November 1879 Henry James commented that ‘Zola’s naturalism is ugly and dirty, but he seems to me to be doing something’—which, in James’s view, was more than could be said for most, if not all, other novelists of the day. The prospective reader of The Masterpiece may be heartened to learn that in this particular novel Zola’s Naturalism is not especially ugly or dirty but that its author is indeed most definitely ‘doing something’.
Quite what he is ‘doing’, however, has been the subject of some debate. Many early readers, inevitably more vulnerable to the impact of topicality, were aghast. Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Zola’s childhood friend of over thirty years’ standing, wrote briefly to thank him for his complimentary copy and never spoke to him again. Claude Monet (1840–1926), too, politely acknowledged his gift but professed himself ‘troubled and uneasy’, fearing that those opposed to the new school of painting would exploit the novel to portray Edouard Manet (1832–83) and the Impressionists as no less of a failure than Zola’s doomed hero, Claude Lantier. These being what have been dubbed ‘the Banquet Years’, Monet further organized a ‘dinner of protest’ to which the likes of Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) came to share their chagrin on a filling stomach. The landscape painter Antoine Guillemet (1843–1918), who had kindly supplied Zola with technical information and asked to have this now famous writer’s latest work dedicated to him, thought he could see himself in the meretricious figure of Fagerolles. All thoughts of a flattering dedication gone, he complained bitterly to the author—who promptly spread the word that actually it was the successful artist Henri Gervex (1852–1929) whom he had had in mind. Gervex himself, on the other hand, seems to have been rather flattered by this and blithely bade his friends call him Fagerolles. Equally flattered was Zola’s wife Alexandrine, who clearly saw herself in the amiable figure of Henriette and ever after preferred The Masterpiece above the rest of her husband’s literary creations.
Now that over a century has passed since the first of eighty serial
ized instalments of the novel appeared in Le Gil Blas on 23 December 1885, it is possible to take a more distanced view of these matters. Is The Masterpiece simply an attack on Impressionism, or does Zola have wider aims in mind? When he first started to plan the Rougon-Macquart series of novels in his late twenties, he envisaged some ten volumes, the ninth of which would be devoted to the realm of art. In his preliminary notes for the series as a whole he declared his intention
to study the ambitions and appetites of a family launched upon the modern world, making superhuman efforts but always failing because of its own nature and the influences upon it, almost getting there only then to fall back again, and ending up by producing veritable moral monsters, the priest, the murderer, the artist. The times are in turmoil, and it is this turmoil of the moment which I shall depict.
The artist in question would exemplify a ‘singular effect of heredity’ whereby his ‘genius’ would be inherited from illiterate working-class parents (eventually Gervaise and Lantier in L’Assommoir (1877)). Where other offspring of the illegitimate Macquart branch of the family would suffer for the intemperance and insanity of their forebears through being ruled by insatiable physical appetites and the need for alcohol, this one would have unbridled ‘intellectual’ appetites of such a violent kind that ultimately they render him powerless to create. Thus he would constitute a focal point in the novel’s depiction of the contemporary passion for art, of ‘what is called decadence [this in 1868] and which is but the result of wild mental activity’. In short, the work would present a ‘poignant study of the artistic temperament in a contemporary context’ and ‘the terrible drama of a mind devouring itself’.
In time the Rougon-Macquart series evolved into a collection of twenty novels tracing the ‘natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire’, and several other areas of ‘activity’ were added to the original list, notably mining (Germinal (1885)) and the land (Earth (1887)). But Zola never wavered in his determination to devote one novel to art, nor did his original conception of the central character essentially change. He introduces Claude Lantier in The Belly of Paris (1873) as an art student who chances on many a paintable scene as he wanders through the markets of Les Halles (the Covent Garden of Paris); and in the family-tree of the Rougon-Macquart published with the preface to A Page of Love in 1878 he describes him as ‘born in 1842—a mixture, a fusion’, taking mostly after his mother Gervaise both physically and mentally and serving as the living example of ‘an inherited neurosis turning into genius’.
When in 1885 Zola began to write The Masterpiece, now the fourteenth novel in the series, the emphasis on heredity had faded, and the work was intended principally to depict the pain and suffering involved in creative endeavour. ‘In Claude Lantier’, Zola observed in his preparatory notes, ‘I want to depict the artist’s struggle with reality, the sheer effort of creation which goes into every work of art, the blood and tears involved in giving of one’s flesh, in trying to make something that lives: the endless battle to achieve truth, and the endless defeats, the struggle with the angel.’ No longer is this simply the condition of a flawed genius, for now it is the lot of every artist, not least Zola himself. ‘In a word, I shall tell the intimate story of my own efforts to produce, this endless, painful process of giving birth.’ And childbirth figures repeatedly in the many titles which Zola envisaged for this novel before he finally settled for the less specific L’Œuvre, meaning literally ‘The Work’.
In the first instance, therefore, far from being specifically an attack on Manet, Cézanne, or the Impressionists, The Masterpiece is a confessional work and by far the most autobiographically based of the Rougon-Macquart novels. The childhood paradise of Plassans shared by Pierre Sandoz, Claude Lantier, and Louis Dubuche corresponds to the happy times enjoyed by Zola, Cézanne, and Baptistin Baille in Aix-en-Provence as they, too, roamed the hills and read Hugo and Musset to each other. The regular forgatherings of young hopefuls intent on conquering the world of Parisian art and their swaggering progress along Baron Haussmann’s new and spacious boulevards recall similar meetings of Zola, Cézanne, Pissarro, the sculptor Philippe Solari (1840–1906), and others. More importantly, in the characters of Lantier the failed genius and Sandoz the successful novelist, the champion of supposedly objective Naturalism is evidently portraying two sides of his own personality.
In Sandoz we have the thinly disguised self-portrait of Zola the impecunious journalist struggling to make his way, the budding novelist with an ambitious masterplan and the belief that literature must learn from the natural sciences, the dutiful son of an ailing mother, the husband of a path-smoothing wife, the host of Thursday dinner-parties for his old (artistic) chums, and the man who finally makes it, largely perhaps by virtue of dogged persistence and pedestrian self-discipline. In Lantier, on the other hand, we have the man ahead of his time, who has the originality to see the direction in which his art should best develop (as, to a lesser extent, Sandoz also has) but who lacks the patience and technical accomplishment to put his own ideas successfully into practice, the man who is looked up to as the leader of a school but who is gradually deserted or betrayed by his followers, as Zola felt he had been by Joris Huysmans (1848–1907) and Guy de Maupassant (1850–93). On the one hand, then, the new type of writer, the nine-to-five professional with a ‘scientific’ approach to literature and, on the other, the traditional Romantic seeker after an impossible ideal.
Nevertheless one should not exaggerate this confessional aspect of the novel. It was central to Zola’s aesthetic of Naturalism that literature should convey ‘the truth’, describe how things really are and not how things are conventionally perceived or traditionally idealized. As Sandoz puts it: ‘All … exactly as it is, not all ups and not all downs, not too dirty and not too clean, but just as it is …’ (p. 37). It would have been surprising, therefore, if in a novel about artistic endeavour Zola had not drawn upon his own experience of the labour of art. Given the conscientious zeal with which he gathered documentary evidence for his novels, visiting mines, interviewing the staff in a department store, drinking with farmers, or lurking in the Gare Saint-Lazare, it must have been something of a welcome convenience merely to look in the mirror and consult his memory. For Jory the young art critic he had only to remember his own articles on the 1866 Salon and the scandal that ensued—though for the womanizing he had (being as yet the faithful husband) to refer to the model of his close friend Paul Alexis. For Bongrand, the acknowledged master overtaken by a new generation and finding it more difficult to live up to his reputation than to have acquired it in the first place, he had only to reflect on the rise of Symbolism and his own misgivings in following the great successes of L’Assommoir, Nana (1880), and Germinal. What those other old masters Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) and Gustave Courbet (1819–77) had suffered, so now perhaps would he.
The determination to base his fiction on the solid foundation of observed fact explains why Zola drew so heavily on his knowledge of contemporary painters for much of the novel. As Monet acknowledged, he made sure that no single character exactly resembled ‘any person living or dead’, but essentially he was ready to risk giving offence in the interests of authenticity. Thus Claude Lantier is largely an amalgam of Cézanne, Manet, and—as the Christian name suggests—Monet (though Claude also figures as the eponymous hero of Zola’s first published novel, the partly autobiographical Claude’s Confession (1865)). As well as being the model for Lantier’s Provençal childhood, Cézanne also provides his physical appearance, his obstinate and volatile temperament, his timidity with women, his vaulting and obsessive artistic ambition, his murderous self-doubt (and tendency to put a fist through his canvases), his growing isolation from his fellow painters and a reputation for being a ‘madman’, his failure to have a painting accepted for the Salon except once (in 1882) as an act of ‘charity’ on the part of a lesser, derivative artist (here Antoine Guillemet is indeed the model for Fagerolles), and—in common with Manet and the Impr
essionists—his enduring lack of public recognition as an original and talented artist.
While Cézanne is now considered a key pioneer in the development of modern art, he was not so considered in 1885, least of all by Zola. Perhaps the odds against one’s best friend at school turning out to be an original and influential genius are so heavily stacked that he may be forgiven for rejecting the notion on the grounds of probability alone. But even if a complete stranger had painted like Cézanne, Zola’s taste in art was simply not sophisticated or knowledgeable enough for him to have seen his friend as the potential founder of a school of painting. For this aspect of the portrait of Claude Lantier he drew on the model of Edouard Manet.
In 1863 the complaints lodged against the members of the Selection Committee for that year’s Salon were so numerous and so vociferous that the Emperor Napoleon III intervened in the row and decreed that the rejected works should be exhibited in an adjacent gallery. This exhibition was soon dubbed the Salon des Refusés, and all Paris flocked to laugh and be outraged. The picture which caused the most hilarity was Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and onlookers vied with one another in ribald explanation of quite what this naked lady was up to with two fully, if casually, dressed young men. Originally entitled Le Bain (‘Bathing’) this picture was at once a tour de force of colour harmony and a provocative debunking of the conventions of the École des Beaux-Arts (the French Academy’s School of Fine Art). The painting which Claude Lantier exhibits at the Salon des Refusés bears a considerable resemblance to it, and its reception is no less cruel. In the early days of the so-called École des Batignolles (after the name of the Paris district) when young painters, most of them future Impressionists, congregated in the Café Guerbois, Manet was looked upon as leader just as Lantier in the earlier part of the novel is the principal figure at the Café Baudequin. Compulsive strolling around the streets of Paris and a desire to decorate the Hôtel de Ville are among several other features of Claude’s existence which Zola has borrowed from the life of the artist who died in 1883, two years before The Masterpiece was begun.