by Emile Zola
Zola had, as a young writer, written poetry of a romantic and idealistic bent, but quickly turned his back on it in favour of a more documentary and socially committed literature. This commitment was never, in the novels at least, jeopardized by sentimentality, and this in part is what caused many of his critics to impute a bleak and amoral vision to his Rougon-Macquart series. Zola could be doctrinaire about his method and his subjects, and gathered around him a group of disciples who took him as leader of the ‘Naturalist school’ and met at his house in Médan. In 1880, Zola and a handful of fellow Naturalists produced the volume Médan Nights (Les Soirées de Médan), showcasing short stories by six writers: Zola himself, J.-K. Huysmans, Maupassant, Henri Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The book’s great success was Maupassant’s ‘Boule de Suif’, and it is revealing that, of the writers represented, Maupassant quickly moved away from the group and refused to be circumscribed by an ‘–ism’, Huysmans was leaning in the direction that would lead, four years later, to the decadent mystical masterpiece Against Nature, and Céard, Hennique, and Alexis, who stayed true to the Naturalist ethos, are now forgotten. If there is a moral to this story, it is that writers must either create their own movements, their own ‘–isms’, or write their way beyond them. Zola defined the Naturalist style, but was not confined by it.
As well as Taine, who straddled the border between literature and social sciences, Zola was deeply influenced by more specialized scientific and medical theory, especially in his earliest work, such as Thérèse Raquin and the first Rougon-Macquart novels. He claimed to have based his writing method on Claude Bernard’s Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), and the idea of an ‘experiment’, in which the novelist arranges his materials and equipment like a scientist and observes the results of the experiment objectively in order to discover a principle or a set of laws from it, is key to Zola’s method.
Theories of heredity provide ways of talking about history and tradition, as well as medical or biological questions. The nineteenth century was a period obsessed with narratives of heredity in the widest sense: the relationship of the present to the past, the extent to which, politically, socially, intellectually, we are condemned by or chained to our pasts, able to build on them, or escape them altogether. It is not only individuals and families who must contend with what they inherit, but whole societies with their political and economic systems, their sense of nationhood, their literature, and their science. But it does not take long for a new scientific explanation to become, in its turn, another myth, and the upsurge in late nineteenth-century writing of literature that drew on medicine is evidence of this: it was not just Zola and the Naturalists who turned to medicine, but Decadent and Symbolist poets, who begin peppering their verses with words like ‘hysteria’, ‘neurosis’, ‘neurasthenia’, and other terms from medical glossaries, often improperly understood or used only for their shock value. The extent to which apparently opposing schools of literature shared—admittedly with different aims and results—a fascination with the language and models of heredity, biology, medicine, and pathology, is something that has not been sufficiently explored, but which Zola himself was fully aware of. These are not overarching theories which explain Zola’s beliefs or contain his fiction but simply ideas of his time, to which he turned, in which he delved, which he selected and shaped and fictionalized. Does Zola submit his fiction to these ‘scientific’ principles, or does he submit the science to the principles of fiction? Every reader will have their opinion, but the fact that his novels can be read and felt and understood without any reference to the theories that went into them suggests the latter.
Biological heredity gives Zola not just the material with which to create and propel characters but the framework with which to plan a cycle of novels, to think on a scale few novelists manage. It is worth casting ahead to the last novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, Doctor Pascal, where the grandson of Adelaïde Fouque, Pascal Rougon (brother of Marthe and Eugène Rougon) a doctor in Plassans for thirty years, catalogues his own family’s heredity in order to develop a serum that will cure nervous and hereditary diseases. In this novel, Dr Pascal may be seen as analogous to the novelist himself: a fearless researcher into the ills of the family (and by extension, society), but also part of it, caught up in and also the product of that family (and, also by extension, that society). Zola writes that, of all Félicité’s children, he is the one who ‘did not seem to belong to the family’, and adds, in such a way as to leave the character some leeway to escape the Rougons’ fate, that he is ‘one of those frequent exceptions to the laws of heredity’. Pascal, whom we first meet in The Fortune of the Rougons, is devoted not to money or power (much to his mother’s bafflement and his brothers’ consternation) but to science: ‘He had a particular passion for physiology. It was known in the town that he often bought dead bodies from the hospice gravedigger, which made him an object of horror to delicate ladies and certain timid gentlemen. [. . .] For two or three years, he had been studying the great problem of heredity, comparing the human and animal species with each other’ (ch. 2). Pascal’s methods are scientific, but his aim is idealistic: to free himself and them through knowledge and understanding. In this, he perhaps resembles Zola himself. The serum, which is a piece of almost Balzacian supernaturalism, and so clearly unbelievable that we must take it symbolically, is best interpreted as truth itself. Zola’s style has changed a great deal in the nearly twenty-five years between the first Rougon-Macquart novel and Doctor Pascal—it has become softer and more optimistic, more overtly symbolic and idealistic—but the cycle has returned to Plassans, where, despite the novel’s own tragedy, the ending is a hopeful one. Pascal is the novelist’s envoy into his own fictional world, and he is there both to represent a hopeful escape from the generations-long curse of heredity and to underline the novelist’s own belief that the truth, however bad, is also a kind of freedom.
Heredity, and the vast family tree Zola creates, is necessary for the kind of cycle he has in mind: it offers both a series of stories—a roadmap of narrative, we might say—and an opportunity to think on a wider canvas than the single novel. It ensures continuity, but also contiguity, letting the novelist choose which path he will follow, which characters he will focus on, and enabling him to write not just in a linear way, with one novel following from the other, but also in a parallel way, with novels unfolding side by side in time. Every novel in the cycle connects up to the others, but each is also independent, and can be read alone. Characters or branches of the family can be promoted from walk-on parts in one book to full-blown centrality in another; they can fade into the background, be mentioned only in passing, or not appear at all, and then they and their offspring can suddenly emerge as the focal point of a novel of their own. Rather in the manner of soap operas, which must both depict an ongoing series of intertwined stories and be accessible for viewers to join with each and every episode, so Zola’s novels are designed as part of a tableau of interconnected narratives, projecting ahead to new storylines or back-projecting to past dramas, and made to be read on their own terms.
The Conquest of Plassans works on all these fronts: it is a novel about a particular place and time, which encompasses characters and dramas that can be found in any place and time; it is part of a whole but it is also a whole in and of itself. Like all of Zola’s novels in the Rougon-Macquart series, it gives the reader a starting point from which to go backwards or forwards in time, and the scale and spread of Zola’s total twenty-novel conception adds to, rather than detracts from, the novel’s ability to stand alone. However much the project as a totality is underpinned by research, by observation, by notes and references and data, what drives it, book by book and page by page, is the human drama, the tightness of the plotting, and the dynamic variety of the writing.
————
1 For the full text of Zola’s preface, see The Fortune of the Rougons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
2 Zola was
born in Paris in 1840, the son of an Italian civil engineer and his French wife. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence when Zola was 3, and he lived there until he moved back to Paris in 1858. Among his school friends was the painter Paul Cézanne, whose work he would later passionately advocate in his art criticism.
3 Taine, A History of English Literature (1863), vol. i, p. xv.
4 Zola often addresses the theme of religious hypocrisy in Second Empire France, and had written three short stories on the subject for the Republican newspaper La Cloche in the early 1870s, at roughly the same time as he was writing The Conquest of Plassans.
5 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had appeared in French in 1865.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
La Conquête de Plassans, from the Rougon-Macquart family saga, is not one of Zola’s best-known novels. This is because, although its narrative force is almost unsurpassed, it has only twice been translated into English. The first translation, The Conquest of Plassans or The Priest in the House, was by the remarkable Ernest Vizetelly, who, with others, translated Zola’s novels during the 1880s. In his preface (1887) he refers mysteriously to ‘late disclosures’ in London about ‘the priest in the house’, implying that the novel and his translation are very topical. The second translation was by Brian Rhys (Elek Books, 1957) who called it simply A Priest in the House. The novel is in many ways a sequel to the first of the Rougon-Macquart series, La Fortune des Rougon, translated by Brian Nelson for Oxford World’s Classics, which has filled a large gap in the Englishing of Zola. I hope this book will do the same for Zola’s many fans among English readers.
I started my translation at the Centre for Literary Translation in Arles, where the staff were, as usual, unfailingly kind and helpful. I am grateful to them, as well as to the Institut Français in London and the director of the Centre National du Livre who gave me a generous grant to finish translating the book in Paris. I should also like to thank my friend Béatrice Roudet-Marçu, who clarified some of the trickier idiomatic expressions for me and encouraged me along the way. And I am most of all grateful to my husband, David Constantine, who has read it all with immense patience and, as ever, offered his invaluable suggestions and comments.
The text I have used is the Classiques de Poche edition of 1999 with an introduction and notes by Colette Becker. Included in that edition are four stories and three critical articles by Zola which have some bearing on the novel.
H. C.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Conquest of Plassans was first published in 1874 and, like The Fortune of the Rougons, serialized in the Republican newspaper Le Siècle between February and April 1874 before being published by Charpentier the same year. It is the fourth volume of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and is included in the first volume of A. Lanoux and H. Mitterand’s Pléiade edition of Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–7). There exist also the following notable paperback editions: La Conquête de Plassans, ed. E. Carassus (Garnier-Flammarion); La Conquête de Plassans, ed. M. B. de Launay and H. Mitterand (Gallimard Folio); and La Conquête de Plassans, ed. Colette Becker (Livre de Poche). The first English translation, by Ernest Vizetelly, appeared in 1887 (London: Vizetelly and Co.).
Biographies of Zola in English
Brown, Frederick, Zola: A Life (London: Macmillan, 1996).
Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Emile Zola (London: Elek, 1977).
Schom, Alan, Emile Zola: A Bourgeois Rebel (New York: Holt, 1986).
Studies of Zola in English
Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: CUP, 1990).
—— (ed.), Critical Essays on Emile Zola (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).
Bloom, Harold (ed.), Emile Zola (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004).
Hemmings, F. W. J., Émile Zola (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
Lethbridge, R., and Keefe, T. (eds.), Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).
Lukács, György, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others, trans. Edith Bonee; foreword by Roy Pascal (London: Hillway Publishing, 1950).
Mitterand, Henri, Zola, Fiction and Modernity, trans. and ed. Monica Lebron and David Baguley (London: The Émile Zola Society, 2000).
Nelson, Brian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Zola (Cambridge: CUP, 2007).
—— Zola and the Bourgeoisie: A Study of Themes and Techniques in Les Rougon-Macquart (London: Macmillan, 1983).
Thompson, Hannah (ed.), New Approaches to Zola (London: The Émile Zola Society, 2003).
Walker, Philip, Zola (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).
Wilson, Angus, Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of His Novels (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952).
Background on the Period
Baguley, David, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
Plessis, Alain, The Rise and Fall of the Second Empire, 1852–1871 (Cambridge: CUP, 1985).
Price, Roger, Napoleon III and the Second Empire (London: Routledge, 1997).
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
Zola, Émile, L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Robert Lethbridge.
—— The Belly of Paris, trans. Brian Nelson.
—— La Bête humaine, trans. Roger Pearson.
—— The Fortune of the Rougons, trans. Brian Nelson.
—— Germinal, trans. Peter Collier, ed. Robert Lethbridge.
—— The Kill, trans. Brian Nelson.
—— The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson.
—— The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton, revised by Roger Pearson.
—— Money, trans. Valerie Minogue.
—— Nana, trans. Douglas Parmée.
—— Pot Luck, trans. Brian Nelson.
—— Thérèse Raquin, trans. Andrew Rothwell.
A CHRONOLOGY OF ÉMILE ZOLA
THE CONQUEST OF PLASSANS
CHAPTER 1
DÉSIRÉE clapped her hands. She was a girl of fourteen, big for her age, with a laugh like a five-year-old.
‘Maman, Maman!’ she cried. ‘Look at my doll!’
She had got a piece of cloth from her mother and for the last quarter of an hour had been trying to make it into a doll, wrapping it round and round and tying the end tightly with a piece of thread. Marthe looked up from the stocking which she was darning with exquisite skill, as though embroidering. She smiled at Désirée.
‘That’s a little boy-doll!’ she said. ‘Why not make a girl-doll? You should give her a skirt, you know, like a lady.’
She gave her a scrap of printed calico she found in her work table; then she applied herself to her stocking again. The two of them were seated at one end of the narrow terrace, the daughter on a stool at her mother’s feet. The setting sun, a September sun, still warm, bathed them in a peaceful glow; the garden below, already in grey shadow, was making ready for the night. Not a sound came from elsewhere in this deserted corner of the town.
And so they went on working for a good ten minutes without speaking. Désirée took infinite pains with the skirt for her doll. Now and again Marthe looked at the child, tenderly and a little sadly. Since she could see that she was struggling, she said:
‘Wait. Let me do her arms.’
She took the doll just as two big lads of seventeen and eighteen descended the steps. They came over and gave Marthe a kiss.
‘Don’t scold us, Maman,’ said the cheerful Octave. ‘I took Serge to hear the band… There was a crowd on the Cours Sauvaire!’*
‘I thought you’d been kept behind at school,’ his mother answered quietly, ‘or I should have been very worried.’
But Désirée, with no more thought for the doll, had flung herself at Serge, crying:
‘One of my birds, the blue one, has flown away, the one you gave me for a present.’
She was on the verge of tears. Her mother,
who had supposed this woe forgotten, tried unsuccessfully to draw her attention back to the doll. She clung to her brother’s arm and, leading him into the garden, urged over and over again:
‘Come and see.’
The gentle, sympathetic Serge followed, trying to console her. She took him to a little glasshouse, with a cage placed on a stand in front of it. There she explained that the bird had escaped just as she had opened the cage door to stop him fighting another bird.
‘Heavens above, it’s no wonder,’ said Octave, sitting on the balustrade of the terrace. ‘She’s always there handling them and examining them to see what they have in their throats that makes them sing. The other day she carried them around in her pockets for the whole afternoon, to keep them nice and warm.’
‘Octave!…,’ Marthe said reproachfully, ‘don’t torment the poor girl.’
But Désirée wasn’t listening. She was telling Serge in great detail how it was that the bird had escaped.
‘He slipped out like this, you see, and went and perched next door on Monsieur Rastoil’s big pear tree. He hopped from there on to the plum tree at the bottom. Then he flew back over my head and into the tall trees in the gardens of the sub-prefecture,* and I couldn’t see him any more, not anywhere.’
Tears welled up in her eyes.
‘Maybe he’ll come back,’ Serge risked.
‘Do you think so?… I’d like to put the others in a box and leave the cage open all night.’
Octave couldn’t help laughing; but Marthe called Désirée back to her.