Money (Oxford World’s Classics)

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

ÉMILE ZOLA

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
VALERIE MINOGUE

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

É
MILE
Z
OLA
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 subtitle
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 milieus. 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.

V
ALERIE
M
INOGUE
is an Emeritus Professor of French of the University of Wales, Swansea. She is a co-founding editor, with Brian Nelson, of
Romance Studies
, and edited the journal in various capacities from 1982 to 2004. She has published widely in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature, including critical studies of Proust’s
Du Côté de chez Swann
, Zola’s
L’Assommoir
, and the novels of Nathalie Sarraute; she co-edited the Pléiade edition of Sarraute’s works. She has been President of the London Émile Zola Society since 2005.

I
T
was in 1868, at the age of twenty-eight, that Émile Zola hit on the idea of a series of novels based on one family,
Les Rougon-Macquart, Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire
(‘Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’), in which he would trace the influence of heredity on the various members of a family in their social and political setting. Zola was already the author of two volumes of short stories, several novels, poetry, and a good deal of journalism when he embarked on what was to become a total of twenty novels, of which
Money
(
L’Argent
) is the eighteenth.

Setting out to do for the Second Empire what Balzac had done for an earlier age in
La Comédie humaine
, Zola intended to give as complete a view as possible of French society from the
coup d’état
of 1851 to the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870—a time he called ‘a strange period of human folly and shame’.
¹
He had denounced the corruption and excesses of the imperial regime in articles for republican newspapers; in his novels he would do so on a grander scale. The series would constitute a
natural
history, in so far as it took account of genetic and physiological features, and a
social
history in its coverage of all classes of French society. Louis-Napoleon’s
coup d’état
in December 1851, which founded the Second Empire, also founded the fortunes of the Rougon-Macquart family, as Zola relates in the first novel of the series,
The Fortune of the Rougons
(1871).

As a realist and self-styled ‘naturalist’, Zola intended to present the unvarnished truth of life in the Second Empire. ‘Naturalism’ followed on from the realist traditions of Balzac and Flaubert, but with a new emphasis on science. Zola’s account of his fictional family would be supported by study of contemporary scientific discoveries and theories. His earlier novel,
Thérèse Raquin
, was strongly influenced by the determinist theories of Hippolyte Taine, stressing heredity, environment, and historical context as major factors in the
shaping of human destiny. Further studies—including Darwin’s theories of evolution, Letourneau’s
Physiologie des passions
(1868), Prosper Lucas’s work on heredity (
Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle
, 1847)—were added to the scientific basis for Zola’s work. When he read the physiologist Claude Bernard’s work on Experimental Medicine (
Introduction à l’étude de la médécine expérimentale
, 1865), he was so impressed by its innovative vigour that he adopted its ideas to make a new theory of the novel, which he outlined in
The Experimental Novel
. This theory was greeted with some ridicule in so far as he appeared to be attempting to endow the novel with scientific authority, but Zola made it clear that he was well aware that a novel is not a laboratory, and that the ‘results’ of situations created by the writer’s imagination were not at all the same thing as the results of laboratory tests. However, if the writer takes due account of available scientific data in setting up his ‘experiments’, that is, in his creation of characters and situations, then his ‘results’ should be at least plausible outcomes. Like the scientist who examines his material, however ugly, in order to analyse and heal, so the novelist would observe and accurately represent social ills in the hope that they might be remedied.

Zola’s scientific and physiological studies provided him with a foundation and a discipline for his imaginative vision, but despite all his stress on the scientific approach, Zola’s poetic imagination would obstinately make what he called ‘the leap to the stars from the springboard of exact observation’. That ‘exactitude’ is itself open to question, for even in the act of observation his eye is inherently transformative, as is clear even in the preparatory notes for his novels, where metaphor and analogy constantly slide in to make each detail expressive rather than merely noted.

Throughout the Rougon-Macquart series Zola portrays the interaction of hereditary traits with external forces, creating a drama in which heredity plays an important role but does not work in straight lines, as is evident, for instance, in the shared heredity but very different characters of the three brothers Eugène, the government minister, Aristide (‘Saccard’), the extravagant banker of
Money
, and Pascal, the doctor of the final volume,
Dr Pascal
(1893). Members of the family resist, or succumb to, the pressures of their environment, and that environment is the social, political, and economic reality of life in the Second Empire.