The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) (3 page)

Meanwhile, Faujas colonizes the garden, and even the Mourets’ housekeeper, Rose, is suborned by the Faujas clan. As the Mourets’ home is invaded and its inhabitants manipulated and turned against each other, so Plassans too is ‘conquered’. The two spaces reflect each other: public life and domestic life are infiltrated and undermined by the same forces and in a sort of symmetrical movement. This symmetry is designed not just to show the close collaboration, a collaboration seen by Zola as born of self-serving and based on hypocrisy, between the Imperial regime and the religious establishment, but also to emphasize the link between the characters’ inner life and the world which they both shape and are shaped by. It also, on the more practical level, helps to hold together the various plots and subplots of the story. Zola was often called, by admirers and critics alike, a ‘constructeur de romans’, a ‘builder of novels’, and in a book with so much intrigue, so many characters, and so many different parts, Zola’s deep understanding of how to structure complex narratives is impressive. This sturdiness of plotting complements something else too: a profound understanding of how to deploy a symbolic structure and a poetic, not to say lyrical, style. Zola choreographs symbolically charged scenes in which, for instance, a game of shuttlecock between children becomes an opportunity for Faujas to bring the (self-)interests of the two opposing factions into line with his own plan. Later in the novel, Mouret’s insanity and fall is symbolized by the way he returns to find his beloved vegetable garden has been pulled up and turned by Trouche, Faujas’s brother-in-law, into a vulgar and showy flower garden. Though Zola relied on documentation and textbooks to plot the different madnesses of Marthe and François Mouret, and even uses examples from contemporary medicine when he has Doctor Porquier cite case files of insane people, there is a powerful symbolic meaning to the couple’s fates. Mouret dies in the fire he starts which destroys his house, the place he loves, and has, in his insane way, reclaimed by killing the Faujas clan, while Marthe dies in her mother’s house, catching sight of her son Serge’s soutane in the red light of the flames as they flicker across the room. These are tragic homecomings, but they are homecomings nonetheless: they
fit together, and we might even say they ‘rhymed’. Even the novel’s ending casts ahead: Serge himself, drawn to religion by Faujas and his mother’s favourite child, will return with his own tragedy in the novel that immediately follows this one:
The Sin of Abbé Mouret
(1875). Like many of Zola’s books, this one thus ends on the cusp of the next instalment: people beget people, novels beget novels.

The Scientific Novel

‘Heredity, like gravity, has its laws,’ wrote Zola in the preface to
The Fortune of the Rougons
, for which he proposed, revealingly, an alternative ‘scientific title’ with a deliberately Darwinian flavour: ‘Origins’.
⁵
Zola believed that art had a responsibility to understand its period and to show solidarity with its times. Later, Zola’s solidarity would become overtly political, with his famous ‘J’Accuse’ pamphlet during the Dreyfus case, in which he showed that political idealism was by no means incompatible with a deep and often pessimistic understanding of reality. Zola was also a materialist in the specific sense that he believed that what happened in the world was explicable by means of that world. This does not, as we have seen, prevent him from bringing his novels to melodramatic and symbolic climaxes—on the contrary, it suggests that these great melodramatic denouements, for all their excess, are firmly fixed in causes and effects that are rooted in sturdy plotting.

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.

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.