by Emile Zola
The reader will have started, I hope, to understand that my aim has been above all scientific. When I created my two protagonists, Thérèse and Laurent, I chose to set myself certain problems and to solve them. Thus I tried to explain the strange union that can take place between two different temperaments, showing the profound disturbance of a sanguine nature when it comes into contact with a nervous one. Those who read the novel carefully will see that each chapter is the study of a curious case of physiology. In a word, I wanted only one thing: given a powerful man and a dissatisfied woman, to search out the beast in them, and nothing but the beast, plunge them into a violent drama and meticulously note the feelings and actions of these two beings. I have merely performed on two living bodies the analytical work that surgeons carry out on dead ones.
One must admit that it is hard, having completed such a task and still entirely devoted to the serious pleasures of the search for truth, to hear people accuse you of having no other end except that of describing obscene pictures. I am in the same position as one of those painters of nudes who work untouched by a hint of desire, and who are quite astonished when a critic announces that he is scandalized by the living flesh in their paintings. While I was writing Thérèse Raquin, I forgot everybody and lost myself in a precise, minute reproduction of life, giving myself up entirely to an analysis of the working of the human animal; and I can assure you that there was nothing immoral for me in the cruel love of Thérèse and Laurent, nothing that could arouse evil desires. The humanity of the models disappeared as it does in the eyes of an artist who has a naked woman lounging in front of him and who considers only how to put that woman on his canvas in all the truth of her form and colour. So I was greatly astonished when I heard my book described as a pool of mud and gore, a drain, a foul sewer, and heaven knows what else. I know the little games that critics play; I’ve done the same myself. But I must admit, I was a little disconcerted by this single-minded hostility. What! Was there not just one of my colleagues prepared to explain my book, let alone defend it? In the chorus of voices proclaiming: ‘The author of Thérèse Raquin is a wretched hysteric who enjoys exhibiting pornography,’ I waited in vain for a single voice to reply: ‘No, this writer is a mere analyst, who may have turned his attention to human corruption, but in the same way as a doctor becomes absorbed in an operating theatre.’
Notice that I am not at all asking for the sympathy of the press towards a book that, apparently, revolts its delicate senses. I do not hope for so much. I am merely astonished that my fellow writers have turned me into a kind of literary sewage worker, even though their experienced eyes should detect an author’s intentions within ten pages; and I am content merely to beg them humbly to be so kind in future as to see me as I am and to discuss me for what I am.
Even so, it would have been easy for them to understand Thérèse Raquin, to consider it from a viewpoint of observation and analysis and to show me my true faults, without picking up a handful of mud and throwing it in my face, in the name of morality. It would have demanded a little intelligence and a few general notions of real criticism. In the scientific field, the accusation of immorality proves absolutely nothing. I do not know if my novel is immoral; I admit that I have never concerned myself with making it more or less chaste. What I do know is that I never for a moment thought I was putting in the filth that moral individuals find there. I wrote every scene, even the most passionate ones, with the pure curiosity of a scientist. And I defy any of my critics to find a single page that is really licentious or written for the readers of those little pink volumes, those indiscretions of the boudoir and the back stage,3 which are published in editions of ten thousand at a time and warmly recommended by the same newspapers that were so sickened by the truths in Thérèse Raquin.
So, a few insults, a lot of silliness: that is all I have read up to now about my work. I am stating it here calmly, as I would to a friend who asked me privately what I thought of the attitudes of critics towards me. A highly talented writer, to whom I was complaining about the lack of sympathy that I enjoy, replied with this profound observation: ‘You have one huge failing which will close every door to you: you cannot talk for two minutes to a halfwit without letting him know that he is one.’ This cannot be helped. I realize that I am harming myself with the critics by accusing them of lacking in intelligence, yet I cannot prevent myself from showing the contempt that I feel for their narrow outlook and the judgements that they hand down blindly, without any system behind them. Of course, I am referring to everyday criticism, which applies all the literary prejudices of fools and is unable to adopt the broadly human outlook that a human work needs if it is to be understood. Never have I seen such ineptitude. The few blows that minor critics have thrown at me in connection with Thérèse Raquin have, as always, landed on thin air. Their aim is essentially misdirected: they applaud the pirouetting of some over-painted actress and then bewail the immorality of a physiological study, understanding nothing, not wanting to understand anything, and constantly hitting out whenever their idiocy panics and tells them to hit out. It is infuriating to be beaten for a crime that one did not commit. At times, I regret not having written obscenities; I feel that I should be happier getting a beating that I deserve, amid this hail of blows stupidly landing on my head, like tiles from a roof, without my knowing why.
In our times, there are only two or three men who can read, understand and judge a book.4 I accept criticism from them, certain that they would not speak until they had discovered my intentions and assessed the results of my efforts. They would be very careful not to mention those great empty words: ‘morality’ and ‘literary modesty’. They would recognize my right, at a time when we enjoy freedom in art, to choose my subjects wherever I please, asking me only for works that are conscientious, and knowing that only stupidity harms the dignity of literature. They would surely not be surprised by the scientific analysis that I tried to apply in Thérèse Raquin. They would recognize it as the modern method and the universal research tool that our century uses so passionately to lay bare the secrets of the future. Whatever their conclusions, they would accept my point of departure: the study of temperament and of the profound modifications of an organism through the influence of environment and circumstances. I would be faced with true judges, with men honestly searching for truth, without puerility or false modesty, who do not feel that they must appear to be sickened by the sight of naked, living anatomical specimens. A sincere study purifies everything, as fire does. Of course, my work would be very humble in the presence of this tribunal that I have imagined: I should call down on it all the severity of those critics and wish it to come away from them blackened with crossings-out. But at least I should have the great joy of having been criticized for what I tried to do, not for something that I did not do.
Even now, it seems to me that I can hear the judgement of such great critics, whose methodical and Naturalist criticism has revived the sciences, history and literature. ‘Thérèse Raquin is the study of too exceptional a case; the drama of modern life is more adaptable than this, less enveloped in horror and madness. Such cases are to be shifted to the background of a novel.5 A wish to lose none of his observations encouraged the author to foreground every detail, so giving still more tension and harshness to the whole. Apart from that, the style does not have the simplicity required by an analytical novel. In short, for the writer now to make a good novel, he will have to see society from a broader perspective, paint it in its many and various guises, and above all adopt a clear, natural written style.’
I have tried to reply in twenty lines to attacks that are annoying because of their naive bad faith, and I notice that I have started to discourse with myself, as always happens when I keep a pen in my hand for too long. I will stop, knowing that readers do not like this. If I had the will and the time to write a manifesto, I might perhaps have tried to defend what one journalist, speaking of Thérèse Raquin, called ‘putrid literature’.6 But, then, what’s the use? The
group of Naturalist writers to which I have the honour to belong has enough courage and energy to produce strong works that carry their own defence in them. One must have all the bias and blindness of a particular type of critic to oblige a novelist to write a Preface. Since, out of love for clarity, I have committed the sin of writing one, I ask pardon of intelligent folk who can see clearly without having someone light a lamp for them in broad daylight.
Émile Zola
15 April 1868
I
At the end of the Rue Guénégaud, if you follow it away from the river, you find the Passage du Pont-Neuf, a sort of dark, narrow corridor linking the Rue Mazarine to the Rue de Seine.1 This passageway is, at most, thirty paces long and two wide, paved with yellowish, worn stones which have come loose and constantly give off an acrid dampness. The glass roof, sloping at a right angle, is black with grime.
On fair summer days when the sun burns down heavily on the streets, a whitish light penetrates the dirty panes of glass and lurks miserably about the arcade. On foul winter days, on a foggy morning, the glass roof casts only shadows over the slimy paving: mean, soiled shadows.
Built into the left wall are dark, low, flattened shops which exhale the dank air of cellars. There are secondhand booksellers, toyshops and paper merchants whose displays sleep dimly in the shades, grey with dust. The little square panes of the shop windows cast strange, greenish reflections on the goods inside. Behind them, the shops are full of darkness, gloomy holes in which weird figures move around.
On the right, along the whole length of the passageway, there is a wall, against which the shopkeepers opposite have set up narrow cupboards; nameless objects, goods forgotten for twenty years, lie there on narrow shelves painted a repellent shade of brown. A woman selling costume jewellery does business from one of the cupboards, offering rings at fifteen sous,2 delicately placed on a bed of blue velvet at the bottom of a mahogany box.
Above the glass roof, the wall extends, black, crudely rendered, as though stricken with leprosy and crisscrossed with scars.
This Passage du Pont-Neuf is not a place for strolling. People use it to avoid making a detour, to gain a few minutes. Down it walk busy folk whose only thought is to march briskly straight ahead. You see apprentices in their aprons, seamstresses delivering their finished work, and men and women with parcels under their arms. You also see old men lurking in the dreary light of the glass roof, and gangs of little children who come running here after school to kick up a row, banging their clogs on the pavement. The crisp, hurried sound of footsteps on stone rings out all day long with irritating irregularity. No one speaks, no one stops; all these people are speeding past on their business, walking quickly along with downcast eyes, without sparing a single glance for the displays of goods. The shopkeepers look suspiciously at any passer-by who by a miracle happens to pause in front of their windows.
In the evening, the arcade is lit by three gaslights enclosed in heavy, square lanterns. These hang down from the glass roof, on which they cast patches of yellowish light, spreading pale circles of luminescence around them that shimmer and appear to vanish from time to time. The passageway looks as though it might really be a hiding-place for cutthroats; great shadows spread across the paving and damp draughts blow in from the street; it has the appearance of an underground gallery dimly lit by three funerary lanterns. The shopkeepers make do with nothing more than the meagre illumination that the gas lamps cast on their windows. Inside the shops, they merely set up a lamp with a shade on a corner of the counter, which allows passers-by to detect what is lurking at the back of these holes where darkness inhabits even in daytime. Along the dingy line of windows, that of a paper merchant shines out: the yellow flames of two shale-oil lamps burn into the blackness. And, on the opposite side, a candle stuck into the glass mantle of an oil lamp puts glimmering stars in the box of costume jewellery. The woman who owns the shop is dozing at the back of her cupboard, with her hands wrapped in a shawl.
A few years ago, facing this jewellers’, there was a shop with bottle-green woodwork oozing humidity from every crack. The sign was a long narrow plank with the word Haberdashery in black; and, on one of the glass panes in the door, was a woman’s name in red letters: Thérèse Raquin. Window displays on either side reached far back into the shop, lined with blue paper.
In daylight, all that the eye could see was these windows, in a soft chiaroscuro.
On one side, there were a few articles of clothing: fluted tulle bonnets at two or three francs apiece; muslin sleeves and collars; and woollens, stockings, socks and braces. Each item, yellow with age, hung pitifully from a wire hook, so that the window, from top to bottom, was full of whitish rags that took on a mournful appearance in the transparent gloom. The brand-new bonnets shone whiter, making bald patches against the blue paper lining the window, while the coloured stockings, hanging from a rail, struck dark notes against the pale, dim emptiness of the muslin.
On the other side, behind a narrower window, were piled large skeins of green wool, black buttons sewn on to white cards, boxes of every size and colour, hairnets with steel drops stretched across circles of bluish paper, fans of knitting needles, tapestry patterns and reels of ribbon — a pile of dull, washed-out objects that had doubtless been reposing in this same spot for five or six years. All the colours had faded to a dirty grey in this cupboard rotten with dust and damp.
Around midday, in summer, when the sun’s rays burned down redly on the squares and streets around, you could make out the serious, pale face of a young woman behind the bonnets in the other window. Her profile stood out dimly against the blackness of the shop. A long, narrow, sharp nose reached down from the short, low forehead; her lips were two slender lines of pale pink; and her short but strong chin was attached to the neck by a supple, plump curve. You could not see her body, which was shrouded in gloom; only the profile of the face was visible, dull white, with a wide-open, black eye pierced in it, seeming to be crushed under the weight of a thick, dark mass of hair. There it stayed for hours on end, calm and motionless, between two bonnets on which the damp rails had left two lines of rust.
In the evening, when the lamp was lit, you could see the inside of the shop. It was longer across than it was deep. At one end, there was a little counter, while at the other a spiral staircase led up to the rooms on the first floor. Against the walls stood display cases, cupboards and lines of green boxes; four chairs and a table completed the furniture. The room seemed naked and cold; the merchandise was packed up and squeezed into corners, instead of lying around here and there with its cheerful mixture of colours.
Normally, there were two women sitting behind the counter: the young woman with the serious face and an old one who would smile as she dozed. The latter was about sixty, with a placid, chubby face that turned pale under the light of the lamp. A large tabby cat would crouch at one end of the counter, watching her as she slept.
Further on, sitting on a chair, a man of some thirty years would be reading or chatting to the young woman in a low voice. He was small, puny and listless in manner, with a thin beard and his face covered in freckles: he looked like a sickly, spoiled child.
Shortly before ten o’clock, the old woman would wake up. They shut the shop and the whole family went upstairs to bed. The tabby purred as it followed its masters, rubbing its head against each banister as it went.
Upstairs, the house consisted of three rooms. The staircase opened into a dining room that also served as a sitting room. On the left was a porcelain stove in an alcove, with a sideboard opposite. Then there were chairs along the walls and a round table, fully open, occupying the middle. At the back, behind a glazed partition, was a dark kitchen. There were two bedrooms, one on either side of this living room.
The old woman, after kissing her son and daughter-in-law, would retire to her room. The cat slept on a chair in the kitchen. The couple went into their own room; this had a second door, leading to a staircase, which opened into the arcade through a dark
, narrow alleyway.
The husband, constantly shivering with fever, would go to bed, while the young woman opened the window to close the shutters. She used to stay there for a few minutes, facing the great black wall with its crude rendering, which rose up and extended beyond the glass roof of the gallery. She would cast a vague glance at this wall and silently go to bed in her turn, with an air of contemptuous indifference.
II
Mme Raquin was a former haberdasher from Vernon.1 For nearly twenty-five years, she had lived in a small shop in that town. A few years after the death of her husband, she had grown tired of it all and sold off the business. Her savings, together with the money from this sale, gave her a capital of forty thousand francs, which she invested, so that it brought in an income of two thousand a year. This would be easily enough for her. She lived a reclusive life, knowing nothing of the agonizing joys and sorrows of this world. She had created an existence of peace and happiness for herself.
For four hundred francs, she rented a little house with a garden running down to the Seine. It was a secluded, private residence that faintly suggested a convent; a narrow path led to this retreat, which was set in the midst of wide meadows. The windows of the house overlooked the river and the empty slopes on the far bank. The good lady, who was now over fifty, buried herself in this solitude and enjoyed days of tranquillity with her son, Camille, and her niece, Thérèse.