by Emile Zola
Hemmings, F. W. J., Émile Zola, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
—— (ed.), The Age of Realism, ‘Pelican Guides to European Literature’ (Brighton: Harvester and New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978).
King, Graham, Garden of Zola: Émile Zola and his Novels for English Readers (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1978).
Lethbridge, Robert, and Keefe, Terry (eds.), Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).
Levin, Harry, The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).
Mitterand, Henri, Émile Zola: Fiction and Modernity, trans. and ed. Monica Lebron and David Baguley (London: The Émile Zola Society, 2000).
Nelson, Brian, Zola and the Bourgeoisie (Basingstoke: Macmillan), includes ‘L’Argent, Energy and Order’, pp. 158–92.
—— (ed.), Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992).
—— (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Émile Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Nelson, Roy Jay, Causality and Narrative in French Fiction: From Zola to Robbe-Grillet (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1990); on Zola’s Modernist aspects.
Pollard, Patrick (ed.), Émile Zola Centenary Colloquium (London: The Émile Zola Society, 1995).
Schor, Naomi, Zola’s Crowds (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1978).
Thompson, Hannah (ed.), New Approaches to Zola: Selected Papers from the 2002 Cambridge Centenary Colloquium (London: The Émile Zola Society, 2003).
Wilson, Angus, Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of his Novels (London: Mercury Books, 1965).
Historical, Political, and Cultural Background
Baguley, David, Napoleon III and His Regime: An Extravaganza (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2000).
Bell, David F., Models of Power, Politics and Economics in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’ (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); includes a chapter on Saccard.
Brown, Frederick, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (New York: Anchor Books, 2010); includes chapter on crash of Bontoux’s bank.
Friedrich, Otto, Olympia: Paris in the Time of Manet (London: Aurum Press, 1992).
Jennings, Jeremy, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Jones, Colin, Paris: Biography of a City (London: Penguin Books, 2004).
McAuliffe, Mary, Dawn of the Belle Époque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau and their Friends (Lanham, etc.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
Ollivier, Émile, The Liberal Empire of Napoleon III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
Thompson, Victoria E., The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris 1830–1870 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
Zeldin, Theodore, France 1848–1945: Politics and Anger (Oxford: Oxford University Press; repr. 1982).
Articles and Chapters of Special Interest
Cousins, Russell, ‘The Serialization and Publication of L’Argent: The Genesis of a Literary Event in France and in England’, Bulletin of the Émile Zola Society, 14 (Sept. 1996), 9–19.
Gallois, William, ‘The Forgotten Legacy of Émile Zola’, Bulletin of the Émile Zola Society, 18 (Sept. 1998), 7–12.
Harrow, Susan, ‘Zola’s Paris and the Spaces of Proto-modernism’, Bulletin of the Émile Zola Society, 43–4 (Apr.–Oct. 2011), 40–51.
Mitterand, Henri, ‘Zola, “ce rêveur définitif”’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 38: 3, special issue: ‘Zola: Modern Perspectives’ (Sept.–Dec. 2001), 321–35 (repr. in Bloom (ed.), Émile Zola, above).
Filmography
A Danish film of L’Argent was made in 1913, and an Italian film in 1914.
Marcel L’Herbier: L’Argent, 1928.
Pierre Billon: L’Argent, 1936.
A television version in three parts was made in 1988 by Jacques Rouffio, from L’Argent adapted by Claude Brûlé.
Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics
Dickens, Charles, Little Dorrit, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith and Dennis Walder.
Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now, ed. John Sutherland.
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.
—— Nana, trans. Douglas Parmée.
—— Pot Luck, trans. Brian Nelson.
—— Thérèse Raquin, trans. Andrew Rothwell.
A CHRONOLOGY OF ÉMILE ZOLA
1840
(2 April) Born in Paris, the only child of Francesco Zola (b. 1795), an Italian engineer, and Émilie, née Aubert (b. 1819), the daughter of a glazier. The naturalist novelist was later proud that ‘zolla’ in Italian means ‘clod of earth’.
1843
Family moves to Aix-en-Provence.
1847
(27 March) Death of father from pneumonia following a chill caught while supervising work on his scheme to supply Aix-en-Provence with drinking water.
1852–8
Boarder at the Collège Bourbon at Aix. Friendship with Baptistin Baille and Paul Cézanne. Zola, not Cézanne, wins the school prize for drawing.
1858
(February) Leaves Aix to settle in Paris with his mother (who had preceded him in December). Offered a place and bursary at the Lycée Saint-Louis. (November) Falls ill with ‘brain fever’ (typhoid) and convalescence is slow.
1859
Fails his baccalauréat twice.
1860
(Spring) Is found employment as a copy-clerk but abandons it after two months, preferring to eke out an existence as an impecunious writer in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
1861
Cézanne follows Zola to Paris, where he meets Camille Pissarro, fails the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts, and returns to Aix in September.
1862
(February) Taken on by Hachette, the well-known publishing house, at first in the dispatch office and subsequently as head of the publicity department. (31 October) Naturalized as a French citizen. Cézanne returns to Paris and stays with Zola.
1863
(31 January) First literary article published. (1 May) Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, which Zola visits with Cézanne.
1864
(October) Tales for Ninon.
1865
Claude’s Confession. A succès de scandale thanks to its bedroom scenes. Meets future wife Alexandrine-Gabrielle Meley (b. 1839), the illegitimate daughter of teenage parents who soon separated, and whose mother died in September 1849.
1866
Resigns his position at Hachette (salary: 200 francs a month) and becomes a literary critic on the recently launched daily L’Événement (salary: 500 francs a month). Self-styled ‘humble disciple’ of Hippolyte Taine. Writes a series of provocative articles condemning the official Salon Selection Committee, expressing reservations about Courbet, and praising Manet and Monet. Begins to frequent the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles quarter of Paris, the meeting-place of the future Impressionists. Antoine Guillemet takes Zola to meet Manet. Summer months spent with Cézanne at Bennecourt on the Seine. (15 November) L’Événement suppressed by the authorities.
1867
(November) Thérèse Raquin.
1868
(April) Preface to second edition of Thérèse Raquin. (May) Manet’s portrait of Zola exhibited at
the Salon. (December) Madeleine Férat. Begins to plan for the Rougon-Macquart series of novels.
1868–70
Working as journalist for a number of different newspapers.
1870
(31 May) Marries Alexandrine in a registry office. (September) Moves temporarily to Marseilles because of the Franco-Prussian War.
1871
Political reporter for La Cloche (in Paris) and Le Sémaphore de Marseille. (March) Returns to Paris. (October) Publishes The Fortune of the Rougons, the first of the twenty novels making up the Rougon-Macquart series.
1872
The Kill.
1873
(April) The Belly of Paris.
1874
(May) The Conquest of Plassans. First independent Impressionist exhibition. (November) Further Tales for Ninon.
1875
Begins to contribute articles to the Russian newspaper Vestnik Evropy (European Herald). (April) The Sin of Father Mouret.
1876
(February) His Excellency Eugène Rougon. Second Impressionist exhibition.
1877
(February) L’Assommoir.
1878
Buys a house at Médan on the Seine, 40 kilometres west of Paris. (June) A Page of Love.
1880
(March) Nana. (May) Les Soirées de Médan (an anthology of short stories by Zola and some of his naturalist ‘disciples’, including Maupassant). (8 May) Death of Flaubert. (September) First of a series of articles for Le Figaro. (17 October) Death of his mother. (December) The Experimental Novel.
1882
(April) Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille). (3 September) Death of Turgenev.
1883
(13 February) Death of Wagner. (March) The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames). (30 April) Death of Manet.
1884
(March) La Joie de vivre. Preface to catalogue of Manet exhibition.
1885
(March) Germinal. (12 May) Begins writing The Masterpiece (L’Œuvre). (22 May) Death of Victor Hugo. (23 December) First instalment of The Masterpiece appears in Le Gil Blas.
1886
(27 March) Final instalment of The Masterpiece, which is published in book form in April.
1887
(18 August) Denounced as an onanistic pornographer in the Manifesto of the Five in Le Figaro. (November) Earth.
1888
(October) The Dream. Jeanne Rozerot becomes his mistress.
1889
(20 September) Birth of Denise, daughter of Zola and Jeanne.
1890
(March) The Beast in Man.
1891
(March) Money. (April) Elected President of the Société des Gens de Lettres. (25 September) Birth of Jacques, son of Zola and Jeanne.
1892
(June) La Débâcle.
1893
(July) Doctor Pascal, the last of the Rougon-Macquart novels. Fêted on visit to London.
1894
(August) Lourdes, the first novel of the trilogy Three Cities. (22 December) Dreyfus found guilty by a court martial.
1896
(May) Rome.
1898
(13 January) ‘J’accuse’, his article in defence of Dreyfus, published in L’Aurore. (21 February) Found guilty of libelling the Minister of War and given the maximum sentence of one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. Appeal for retrial granted on a technicality. (March) Paris. (23 May) Retrial delayed. (18 July) Leaves for England instead of attending court.
1899
(4 June) Returns to France. (October) Fecundity, the first of his Four Gospels.
1901
(May) Toil, the second ‘Gospel’.
1902
(29 September) Dies of fumes from his bedroom fire, the chimney having been capped either by accident or anti-Dreyfusard design. Wife survives. (5 October) Public funeral.
1903
(March) Truth, the third ‘Gospel’, published posthumously. Justice was to be the fourth.
1908
(4 June) Remains transferred to the Panthéon.
MONEY
CHAPTER I
THE clock on the Bourse* had just struck eleven when Saccard walked into Champeaux’s,* into the white and gold dining-room, with its two tall windows looking out over the square. He cast his eye over the rows of little tables, where busy customers were huddled elbow to elbow, and he seemed surprised not to see the face he was looking for.
As a waiter went bustling by, loaded with dishes, he asked:
‘Tell me, hasn’t Monsieur Huret come in?’
‘No sir, not yet.’
So Saccard made up his mind and sat down at a window-table that a customer was just leaving. He thought he was probably late, and while the tablecloth was being changed, he started to look outside, peering at the passers-by on the pavement. Even when the table had been relaid for him, he didn’t order straight away, but waited a while, gazing out at the square, so pretty on this bright sunny day in early May.* At this time of day, when everybody was having lunch, it was almost deserted. Under the fresh green of the chestnut trees the benches were all empty, and along the railings where the carriages pull up, a line of cabs stretched from one end to the other, and the Bastille omnibus stopped at the kiosk on the corner of the garden without a single passenger getting on or off. The sun was beating down and the great monument of the Bourse was bathed in sunshine, with its colonnade, its two statues and its imposing flight of steps, at the top of which there was, as yet, just an army of chairs, drawn up in neat ranks.
But turning round, Saccard recognized Mazaud, the stockbroker,* at the table next to his. He held out his hand:
‘Ah! it’s you, Mazaud! Good-day!’
‘Good-day,’ Mazaud replied, with a perfunctory handshake.
Small, dark, and very lively, he was a good-looking man, who, at only thirty-two, had just inherited the business of one of his uncles. He seemed totally engrossed in the guest facing him across the table, a large gentleman with a florid, clean-shaven face, the celebrated Amadieu, revered by the Bourse ever since his famous coup on the Selsis Mines. When the Selsis shares had fallen to fifteen francs,* and only a madman would have been buying, he had put his entire fortune into them, two hundred thousand francs, quite haphazardly, with neither calculation nor flair, but only the pig-headedness of a lucky brute. Now that the discovery of real and substantial seams had raised the share-price to over a thousand francs, he had made about fifteen million francs, and his idiotic venture, for which he could have been locked up as a lunatic, now caused him to be regarded as one of the great financial masterminds. He was admired and, above all, consulted. Besides, he no longer did any buying, content now to sit enthroned upon his sole and legendary stroke of genius. Mazaud must be longing to acquire him as a client.
Saccard, having failed to get so much as a smile from Amadieu, greeted the table opposite where three speculators of his acquaintance were gathered, Pillerault, Moser, and Salmon.
‘Good-day! Everything going well?’
‘Yes, not bad… Good-day!’
He sensed a certain coldness, almost hostility, in these men too. Pillerault, however, very tall, thin, jerky in his movements, and with a razor-sharp nose in a bony face like that of a medieval knight, usually had the familiar air of a gambler who made a principle of recklessness, swearing that when he tried any serious thinking he just tumbled into disaster. He had the exuberant nature of a bull trader,* always expecting victory, whereas Moser, by contrast, short with a yellowish complexion, ravaged by a liver complaint, was always moaning, forever prey to fears of disaster. Salmon, a very handsome man, looking decidedly younger than his fifty years, and displaying a fine inky-black beard, was regarded as an extraordinarily clever fellow. He never spoke, he replied only with smiles. You couldn’t tell what he was speculating in, or even if he was speculating at all, and his manner of listening made such an impression on Moser that after telling him something, disconcerted by his silence, he would often go dashing off
to change an order.
Meeting with so much indifference, Saccard continued his tour of the room with fiery, challenging eyes. And the only person with whom he exchanged a nod was a tall young man sitting three tables away, the handsome Sabatani, a Levantine with a long, brown face, lit up by magnificent, dark eyes and marred only by a poor and rather disturbing mouth. The friendliness of this young man further exasperated Saccard: he was a defaulter from some foreign Stock Exchange, one of those mysterious fellows that women love. He had made an appearance on the market the previous autumn, and Saccard had already seen him acting as frontman in some banking disaster, but he was gradually winning the trust of both the trading-floor and the kerb market* by his studied correctness and untiring graciousness even towards the most disreputable.
A waiter was now standing over Saccard:
‘What can I get for Monsieur?’
‘Ah, yes… Whatever’s going, a cutlet, some asparagus.’
Then he called the waiter back:
‘You’re quite sure Monsieur Huret didn’t come in before me, and then leave?’
‘Oh, absolutely sure.’
So that’s how things now stood, since the disaster last October when he had once again been forced into liquidation and had to sell his mansion in the Parc Monceau* and rent an apartment. Now only people like Sabatani would greet him; his arrival in a restaurant where he had once ruled the roost no longer made every head turn and every hand stretch out towards him. He was a good loser and felt no resentment over that last scandalous and disastrous land-deal,* in which he had only just managed to save his skin, but a fever of revenge was awakening within him. The absence of Huret, who had solemnly promised to be there at eleven to let him know the result of the approach he’d undertaken to make on Saccard’s behalf to his brother Rougon, now the powerful government minister,* made him furious above all with the latter. Huret, a docile member of Parliament,* a mere creature of the great man, was but an emissary. But Rougon, with all that power, could he really just abandon him? He had never been a good brother. It was quite understandable that he’d been angry over the disaster, and had broken with him to avoid being compromised himself; but after six months shouldn’t he secretly have come to his aid? And would he now have the heart to refuse this last bit of support that he was having to seek through an intermediary, not daring to see him in person for fear of an explosion of rage? Rougon had only to say the word and he could set him back on his feet again, with the whole of great, cowardly Paris under his heel.