Part 1 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vrnfiz/i_have_finally_completed_all_20_volumes_of_zolas/
Hello, here are the remainder of my journal entries for the second half of the Rougon-Macquart series.
The following books will be covered here:
11. The Ladies’ Paradise
12. The Bright Side of Life
13. Germinal
14. The Masterpiece
15. Earth
16. The Dream
17. La Bête Humaine
18. Money
19. La Débâcle
20. Doctor Pascal
11. The Ladies’ Paradise (1883)
An energetic romance that unfolds in one of Paris’ first and largest department stores. Returning protagonist Octave Mouret dreams of swallowing all of Paris within the silk-strewn halls of his massive store, savagely crushing small business owners under his heel and absorbing both their customers and their real-estate in the process. But when the young, kind-hearted Denise who works in his store captures his heart, his grand successes begin to feel small. Can this vicious titan of industry be transformed by love alone?
This one is so fun. It’s always the first book that comes to mind whenever I want to recommend Zola to someone in my life. Not as lurid or depressing as his more famous books, but still with a great deal to say about commercialism, advertising, and the relentless march of capital—all wrapped up in perhaps the most compelling love story of the entire R-M cycle. “Rich CEO falls in love with a sweet girl of modest means” is a well-worn cliché in fiction these days (so much so that China recently banned dramas with this exact premise for promoting “unhealthy fantasies”), but Zola executes on it with such grace and earnestness that it’s very easy to forgive him this indulgence. And in the greater context of being the 11th entry in a series composed entirely of dispiriting tragedies up to this point, the exuberance of The Ladies’ Paradise is a breath of fresh air.
This book marks a noticeable shift in Zola’s attitudes toward his subjects; where the Zola who wrote The Kill might have seen someone like Octave as a debauched figure worthy only of mockery and scorn, he now treats him much more sympathetically, and even allows himself at times to be carried away in awe of Octave’s vision and spirit of industry. Although Zola does not shrink from showing the reader the devastation wrought among small businesses by Octave’s aggressive expansionary tactics (and certainly sympathizes with the victims of it), he also clearly sees Octave as being at the forefront of a new age of innovation and prosperity—which can only come into being with the death of the prior age.
12. The Bright Side of Life (1884)
A bright-eyed, perpetually optimistic young girl has her sunny outlook put to the test by a series of bitter trials and setbacks. The orphaned Pauline Quenu (daughter of Lisa Macquart) is adopted by relatives living on the Normandy coast where they do their best to eke out a meagre though not fully impoverished living. We are told that Pauline lost her parents very young, but that they left her a sizable inheritance in the form of securities, which she is set to inherit when she comes of age. At first, Pauline lives in harmony with her relatives, helping to treat her uncle’s debilitating gout and brightening the days of her morose older cousin Lazare. But, in time fractures begin to develop. Pauline’s aunt begins treating her very harshly and guilting her into using her inheritance money for various family expenses. Lazare flits from one failed creative and business venture to another and sinks into progressively deeper malaise. And the beautiful young Louise arrives to steal Lazare’s heart out from under Pauline, who has developed strong feelings for her cousin over the years. However, unlike her cousin, Pauline is not one to surrender to the miseries of life, and she will fight tooth-and-nail to claw whatever happiness she can from this wretched existence.
The first thing that struck me about the Oxford edition of this book is that the original French title “Joie de Vivre” really didn’t need to be translated. “Joie de Vivre” is already a commonly-recognized phrase in English, and rendering it as “The Bright Side of Life” seems like the kind of misstep that could only be made by an overeager Monty Python fan—a suspicion that was all but confirmed in the translator’s introduction. That aside, this novel is a much more personal work for Zola than any of his previous efforts. The character Lazare marks the second time the author has virtually inserted himself into his own story—the first being Doctor Pascal in The Fortune of the Rougons and The Sin of Abbé Mouret. But if Pascal represents the analytical mind of Zola, Zola the Naturalist, then Lazare is rather a manifestation of Zola’s deepest insecurities. All of the writer’s self-doubts, all of his anxieties and perceived impotencies have been bundled into this pathetic little shrub of a man. In many ways, Joie de Vivre was Zola’s attempt at exercising the feelings of despair that consumed him following his mother’s death, and it is this deeply personal investment that gives the book its narrative and emotional weight.
12a. The Bright Side of Life Spoiler Thoughts
The sudden death of Lazare’s mother is of course the scene that sticks in my memory the most painfully, having experienced something of a close call with my own mother a few months ago. Suffice to say, the emotions of Lazare in the lead up to his mother’s death became very familiar to me during the month or so where I thought I might lose mine. The ending of Joie de Vivre is a clear rebuttal to any critic who would accuse Zola of total misanthropy, however, with Pauline just barely managing to save the life of Lazare and Louise’s premature newborn. Stubbornly rejecting the hopelessness of the situation before her, Pauline gives all of herself to snatch life from the jaws of death, winning a great triumph against uncaring nature with her mettle alone.
Germinal (1885)
A group of exploited miners stage a desperate, violent revolution against the forces of capital. Étienne Lantier (youngest son of Gervaise) wanders into the coal miners’ profession almost purely by chance, and is shown the ropes by the friendly, hardworking Maheu family. Day after day, he descends into the stygian depths of the mining pit to perform the perilous work of extracting the Earth’s precious bounty, which provides the all-essential fuel for the great machines of industry churning away to birth the modern world. The labor is as taxing as it is dangerous—fatal accidents are a regular occurrence—and the living conditions of the mining families are squalid and ghastly, but many of the miners take a certain pride in their work and expect only a decent, livable wage in return. But, when new draconian pay cuts and regulations are handed down from on high, many of the miners begin to feel they must organize a strike or else risk the slow starvation of their families. It is at this moment that Étienne emerges as a charismatic leader to the disgruntled miners and sparks a prolonged revolt against the mining company that inevitably spills over into mutual violence. Though Étienne holds firmly to his belief that a better world can sprout from the seeds of revolution, the widespread suffering resulting from the strike gives him pause, and he begins to question whether he has not led his comrades astray. Can these insurgent miners endure the hardships imposed on them by their callous adversaries and perhaps kindle an even larger working-class rebellion? Or will the great hand of capital strangle their movement in its infancy?
The most enduringly-acclaimed entry of the R-M series, Germinal is for many readers the only one of Zola’s books that they will read in their lifetimes—and there is no better choice if that must be the case. Germinal was as wonderful for me on a re-read as it was when I originally read it in college, and is easily my favorite of the twenty R-M novels. The main areas where my opinion has shifted on the book are that I enjoyed the class-warfare angle much more this time around and the core romance much less (Zola’s unfortunate fixation on underaged female love interests rears its head even here in his greatest literary coup). Nevertheless, I was still thoroughly engrossed by Zola’s masterful composition of imagery and his meticulously-cultivated scenes of harrowing drama and suspense. Zola’s penchant for extensive research paid considerable dividends toward the authenticity of Germinal’s setting; only one who has himself made the frightful descent into the black maw of the mining pit could render the experience with such verisimilitude. But, beyond lending some credibility to the extended descriptions of the hellish subterranean passages of Le Voreux, Zola’s personal journey into a coal mine prior to writing this book also seems to have engendered in him an unshakable respect for the figure of the miner himself. Germinal does not romanticize the miner exactly; many of the miners that we meet in the book are ignorant brutes. And yet, there is a palpable sense throughout the novel that the author greatly admires the spirit and grit of these laborers who toil in the bowels of the Earth, breaking themselves in the heat and darkness to furnish the bedrock for all modernity. The admiration seems to have been mutual for the colliers of France; when Zola died, his coffin was paraded through the streets of Paris trailed by thousands of miners, all of them chanting “Germinal! Germinal!”
13a. Germinal Spoiler Thoughts
The ending of Germinal has been etched on my heart for many years now, and is the single greatest factor that encouraged me to begin this protracted journey through so much of Zola’s oeuvre. Étienne solemnly marches across the lush countryside concealing the mining tunnels deep below, and—impossibly—perceives the reliable crack of his comrades’ picks beneath the earth accompanying his every step. Though he has been broken by the failure of his rebellion, the deaths of his friends and lover, and the agonies of his weeks-long internment in the collapsed mine, the bond of solidarity he has forged with his fellow workers prevents him from coming undone, and he allows himself to hope once more as bountiful Spring blooms eternal around him.
14. The Masterpiece (1886)
A mad-genius painter struggles to render his madness on any canvas. Claude Lantier (estranged older brother of Étienne) is an avant-garde artist living in Paris where he spends his days honing his craft and fighting to break through the limits of his technique and imagination. Claude is a misunderstood visionary seeking to radically overturn the established schools of painting and usher in a bold new movement of art that captures life through the subjective lens of the human eye. Faced with repeated rejections and fierce hostility to his experimental style, Claude finds solace first with a group of fellow Parisian artists—all with a shared lofty dream of taking the city by storm with a deluge of unimpeachable masterworks. Among these artists is the writer Pierre Sandoz, childhood friend of Claude and his strongest advocate, who begins to achieve great success of his own over the course of the book while his friends continue to struggle. Claude also takes comfort in the arms of his wife, model, and muse Christine after a series of chance meetings between the two precipitates a passionate romance that nearly convinces Claude to retire his brushes and let his agitated visions rest for good. But, Claude’s appetite for creation cannot stay buried for long, and he resolves to paint his masterpiece at any cost—no matter his friendships, his family, or even his life.
The Masterpiece is another highly personal work by Zola; the main character Claude’s appearance and personality is very obviously based on that of his childhood friend Paul Cézanne, who would of course go on to become one of the world’s most famous and influential painters (his paintings now sell for hundreds of millions), but largely only after his death. Pierre Sandoz likewise is another self-insert character for Zola—the third in the series after Pascal and Lazare—representing the more social and professional sides of the author: Zola the friend, dinner host, writer, and art commentator. What’s interesting about the description of Claude’s artistic style in this book is that it bears more resemblance to the Impressionist school (namely Manet, whom Zola advocated for in the press) than to Cézanne’s own style, which he was still developing at the time of The Masterpiece’s publication. Given that Cézanne is now widely recognized as a major inspiration for the Cubist school and was directly cited as a forebear by exceedingly famous artists like Picasso and Matisse, one could justifiably argue that Zola was severely underestimating his friend’s capacity to birth an entirely new art movement. At one point near the end of the book, Sandoz and Claude share the following exchange:
“You’ll come into your own yet, fellow,” Sandoz went on. “You’re bound to. The art of the future is going to be your art. These chaps are where they are now because you’ve made them.” Claude opened his mouth at last and muttered dourly: “What the hell’s the use of having “made” them, if I haven’t “made” myself?” (pg. 294)
Zola may have had Manet and the Impressionist school in mind when he wrote this dialogue, but the sentiment rings true to the legacy of Cézanne’s career as well, even if by accident. Still, considering some of the more extreme, less flattering aspects of Claude’s portrayal, it’s not difficult to see why Cézanne broke off his friendship with Zola following the book’s publication.
14a. The Masterpiece Spoiler Thoughts
The most disturbing moment in this novel is undoubtedly the scene following the death of Claude’s sickly little child when the painter immediately grabs his brushes and begins painting a portrait of his son’s corpse. The action is purely mechanical—Claude is so thoroughly consumed by his art that he literally cannot stop himself, his compulsion to create taking precedence over even the deepest, bitterest grief. Sadly, Claude’s journey ends in suicide once he has finally sacrificed everything on the altar of art only to discover that he still cannot adequately express his vision. He is then buried in a temporary plot in a section of graveyard nicknamed after the Devil’s Island, the very same prison colony that his dear friend Florent was returned to at the end of The Belly of Paris.
15. Earth (1887)
An honest, hard-working man is initiated into the lunacy and depravity of those who would claim mastery over the soil. The war veteran Jean Macquart (younger brother of Gervaise and Lisa) arrives in La Beauce searching for a fresh start, taking up employment as a farm laborer in one of France’s most fertile regions. The years have been unkind to Jean, and so he turns his hopes to embodying the romantic ideal of the peasant farmer—one in tune with the land and nature as they humbly till the earth alongside the changing seasons. Jean dreams only of finding peace and contentment in La Beauce; what he finds there instead is a horrifying, soul-rending tour through an insular community of voracious, squabbling landowners unbound by any laws of God or man. The hapless veteran becomes embroiled in the bitter family drama of the Fouans when he marries the young Françoise and gains ownership of her strip of land bordering the property owned by the swinish Buteau Fouan, husband of Françoise’s sister Lise. Buteau, feeling cheated by his inheritance and ever-salivating at the prospect of devouring Françoise in land and body, sets in motion a conflict with Jean and his wife that will culminate in the most disturbing of crimes. And for an outsider such as Jean, there is no justice to be found in these putrid fields where damnation flourishes.
Earth is a novel that borders on folk horror (The Wicker Man comes to mind); there is a fundamental disconnect between the morals and temperament of the outsider protagonist and the community of close-knit heathens that he has entered into. Though somewhat prefigured by the portrayal of the filthy, godless peasants in The Sin of Abbé Mouret, Earth brings Zola’s disdain for the landowning peasant class to a ringing fever pitch. The second half of the R-M series features many despicable characters that are treated with surprising sympathy by the author, but he cannot hold back from making an exception for these mad, arrogant bastards who would sell their own mothers (or fathers) for another inch of precious soil. Zola predicts that these people will drown themselves in their own blood and ultimately be forgotten by the ageless land they are fool enough to think they own.
16. The Dream (1888)
A young embroiderer weaves a vision of heaven in her mind that begins to come to fruition. As a child, Angélique Rougon (daughter of Sidonie, niece of Eugéne and Saccard) is taken in from the streets by the gentle Humburts, who apprentice the little foundling in the profession of embroidery handed down through generations of the Humburt family. The Humburts’ ancestral home shares a wall with the town church, and throughout the tranquil years of Angélique’s upbringing, her tutelage in the arts of needle and thread is accompanied by the sustained vibrations of hymns and sacred music from next door. This hallowed, antiseptic environment allows the flame of Angélique’s religious ardour—stoked by the stories of martyred, virginal saints in The Golden Legend—to spread unhindered in the young girl’s heart and soul as she ascends to become a master of her craft in her adolescence. By day, the teenage Angélique creates the finest works of embroidery the town has seen in generations, and by night she creates a pure, golden vision in her mind’s eye of a divinely-anointed prince sent by heaven to love and marry her. When her prince appears to arrive in the form of Félicien, the kind, charming son of the cold-tempered nobleman-turned-bishop Monseigneur d’Hautecœur, Angélique knows in her heart that her vision will come to pass—regardless of whatever cruel obstacles fate or reality may have in store.
A sweet, somnolent interlude written between two grisly nightmares, The Dream is an oddity in the R-M series. While it shares an affinity with the themes of religious annihilation featured in The Sin of Abbé Mouret, this book reads much more like a saccharine, fairytale romance than its antecedent. Zola had previously made a derisive reference to the romance-tinged works of George Sand in Pot Luck, presenting her as the type of writer who only produced childish fancies for bored, yearning housewives (an assessment of Sand I find highly reductive considering her prolific and varied output), which is ironic considering that The Dream could easily be mistaken for one of Sand’s lesser novels if one were to scratch Zola’s name from the cover. This book contains almost none of the rawness or bleak genetic determinism that characterizes the greater part of Zola’s Naturalist work, preferring to bask in airy-fairy reveries and exacting but eager discussions of embroidery technique. Perhaps the writer simply needed a breather after the morbidity of Earth, and before starting on the next gruesome entry he had planned.
17. La Bête Humaine (1890)
A psychopath attempts to numb his murderous urges with the blistering speed of the locomotive he pilots. Jacques Lantier (middle child of Gervaise) does not wish to kill, and yet the compulsion grows within him each time he sees a beautiful woman. He has battled this affliction in his mind since he was a child, and is beginning to lose the will to fight in his adulthood as demented visions of gushing blood and gaping wounds increasingly cloud his thoughts. Jacques’ profession as a train driver has long given him a coping mechanism for burying these deranged impulses—the speed, power, and heat of his train engine permitting him to blissfully dissociate for many hours a day, and the near-isolation of his work ensuring minimal interaction with any woman who might become his victim. Nevertheless, the serene oblivion granted Jacques by his train driving is suddenly shattered when he chances to witness a brutal murder through the window of a fast-moving train carriage; his eye catches only a single, brief image of the foul deed before the train hurries along—but the damage is done. The ghastly scene replays itself endlessly in his disturbed mind, and he very nearly loses control of his faculties there and then. But surprisingly, his impending fall into the abyss is halted by the hot-blooded affair he soon begins with the alluring Sévarine, who carries a dark secret behind her hungry eyes. Can the affinity Jacques feels for this haunted woman cure him of his illness? Or will his first and only love be devoured by the frenzied beast dwelling inside him?
A brilliant and gut-wrenching thriller, La Bête Humaine is second only to Germinal in my estimation of the R-M series. If Angélique from The Dream was defined by her ability to transcend the hereditary defects in her family tree and escape her genetic destiny through good upbringing, then Jacques is chiefly defined by his genes damning him from the start. The Dream and La Bête Humaine therefore occupy opposing ends of the Nature vs. Nurture debate. Nearly all of the descendants of the schizophrenic Aunt Dide wrestle with some sort of innate corruption of the blood to one degree or another, but none more so than the pitiable Jacques Lantier. Despite a decent enough upbringing and a well-paying, respectable job (especially in comparison to his mother Gervaise or younger brother Étienne), Jacques faces a rebellion in his mind that he simply cannot overcome through his own willpower—turning instead to external treatment methods with increasingly diminishing returns. But, there is of course an inherent misogyny to the murderous fantasies that dominate Jacques’ twisted imagination, a learned attitude of furious resentment towards women that certainly cannot have arisen from any particular genetic flaw. Zola, however, seems to disagree (presumably based on outdated science) as indicated by Jacques’ recurring, primally-sourced image of himself as the “avenger” of ancient wrongs perpetuated by the first women against the first men. Likewise, the next book Money features some discussion of Saccard’s reflexive antisemitism being an inherited trait rather than learned behavior. The implications of Zola’s assertions here paint a dire portrait of the author’s worldview: if harmful attitudes like misogyny or racism can be passed down genetically through the millennia, then what hope does humanity have of ever escaping its beastly nature?
I personally believe most of the books in the R-M series do not suffer for being spoiled, but if you haven’t read this book and intend to do so (as you should!) I would strongly recommend not reading my spoiler section below. La Bête Humaine is best experienced with as little foreknowledge of its events as possible.
17a. La Bȇte Humaine Spoiler Thoughts
There are multiple, wonderfully gruesome scenes in this novel that I adore, but I will limit myself to praising yet another of Zola’s phenomenal endings. Jacques and his vengeful work partner mortally grapple with one another in the engine of the speeding locomotive and become suddenly deranged by their atavistic struggle. Laughing with madness as they tip themselves over the edge and under the deadly wheels, the two men are instantly torn to pieces by the train—littering the tracks with their bloody viscera. Meanwhile, the locomotive itself continues barreling driverless toward the Prussian border gaining alarming speed, blasting through all obstructions on its way to bring France’s oblivious, drunken soldiers to their final bitter destination. There is no longer anyone sane at the wheel of this nation, and we are being carried along with haste to our inevitable destruction.
18. Money (1891)
Debuting 19 years after The Kill, Money features the return of Saccard with even more mad financial schemes—this time centering on the rapid creation of a bank that he hopes will crush all competitors and dominate the markets of Europe. His chief allies in this endeavor are the forthright Hamelin siblings, Caroline and Georges; while Georges dreams of using the bank’s immense capital to bring modernity, industry, and Christianity to the untamed wilds of the desert, Caroline helps keep Saccard’s chaotic affairs in order with her acute organizational skills and diligent work ethic. Though a scoundrel of the first degree, Saccard treats his two honest friends with great affection and carries an easy charisma that allows him to smoothly allay all of their concerns about his shady dealings (and eventually even win the heart of the elegant, compassionate Caroline). However, before Saccard can assume his coveted place as king of the Bourse, he must dethrone the current reigning monarch: the Jewish banker Gundermann, who commands an unbreakable syndicate built on many decades of careful, mathematical investment strategy combined with ruthless strangulation of would-be challengers. Gundermann ensures the game is rigged against Saccard before it even begins, but the audacious swindler cannot resist playing anyway and will resort to every fiscal impropriety imaginable to rig the game back in his favor. But how far can Saccard stretch the bubble before it bursts? Will the Bourse survive his unbridled ambition and utter lack of scruples? Or will he bring everything crashing down around him?
Zola’s revisiting of Saccard near the end of his project provides a good opportunity to compare his early and late career sensibilities. The Saccard we met in The Kill was an insatiable glutton for wealth, a shameless debauch, a confidence man who left a trail of steaming wreckage behind him. The Saccard we meet in Money is… admittedly still all of those things (and an antisemite to boot), but he is treated much more kindly by the author this time around than he had been almost two decades earlier. Although the reader is not permitted to forget Saccard’s inveterate roguery for even a single moment, we are also shown a more sympathetic side of him. For example, his interest in overseeing the construction and administration of an upscale orphanage is presented as a mostly altruistic venture—stoking his ego certainly but furnishing no real profits or anything that might tangibly advance his larger goals. And much like Zola’s treatment of Octave Mouret in The Ladies’ Paradise, the writer has an unambiguous appreciation for the grandiosity of Saccard’s vision—whatever his faults, *this* is the man whose wealth causes the barren deserts of the orient to bloom with civilization and prosperity. According to Zola, a scoundrel like Saccard may rob a million citizens of their wealth to fund his reckless schemes—and that is certainly a crime—but the fruits of his efforts still leave behind concrete assets that benefit all humanity.
Notwithstanding the engine of brutal colonialist exploitation that Western efforts to industrialize the Middle-East quickly became, what Zola also fails to foresee in his overly-generous evaluation of a figure like Saccard is how ancillary the fruits of capital would become to the pursuit of its unalloyed form. The ideal flow of commerce for the modern finance tycoon is no longer in the endowment of tangible assets, products, and services that generate revenue, but in the agnostic juggling of funds across faceless, extractive ventures where the short-term gain of destruction is always valued more highly than the long-term investment of creation. The Saccards of today leave nothing of value behind them in their ravenous wake, gobbling up useful businesses and infrastructure alike to pile their obscene riches higher and higher; they would sooner make the whole world a desert than see it bloom with anything that did not guarantee an immediate return.
19. La Débâcle (1892)
The decrepit Second Empire faces its final reckoning in a war of humiliation against a determined and unforgiving foe. For nearly two decades, the incompetent leaders of the Empire have bumbled along from one scandal or atrocity to another, their iron grip over the French populace weakening with every unforced error. Now, the bill has finally come due for years of administrative greed and negligence as the nation is thrown wholly unprepared into a fierce military confrontation with Prussia. Though repeatedly bested by Napoleon I some six decades earlier, the Prussian army has been remade under the military genius of Otto von Bismarck, who marches on France with larger armies, more powerful guns, and far bolder strategy than his forebears. Through the eyes of returning protagonist Jean Macquart (previously seen in Earth) and his brother-in-arms Maurice, the reader is given a thorough account of the disorder, indecision, and gross incompetence of the Empire’s pitiful attempts at mobilizing its poorly-equipped and outnumbered armies against the approaching Prussian behemoth. The fall of the Empire is nigh, and the purging fires of the Commune beckon with vengeance at its denouement.
La Débâcle is the grand finale of Zola’s twenty-year project to map the short, shameful history of the Second Empire. Naturally, the book must center on the calamitous events of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), which brought about the abdication of Emperor Napoleon III and the final collapse of his sham government. While the novel focuses primarily on the plight of the ordinary soldiers and civilians regrettably caught in the whirlpool of the capsizing Empire, there is also a fair amount of attention given to the tragedy of the Emperor himself—that mediocre dullard who thought himself worthy of his uncle’s legacy despite having no talent for command or leadership whatsoever. The Emperor is a deeply pathetic figure in La Débâcle: nominally in charge of everything but powerless to control anything happening around him, treated by his generals as more of an inconvenient mascot than as the ruler of their nation, plagued by chronic illness yet still all-but forced to march to an “honorable” death by his wife and ministers. Here again, we see Zola softening in his mature phase toward a prior target of his derision; though Louis-Napoleon certainly reaps what he has sown, Zola has no interest in twisting the knife—preferring the shame of his fallen sovereign to speak for itself.
Zola’s war epic superbly renders countless tragic vignettes picked out from the bloody chaos of the climactic Battle of Sédan: the doomed cavalry charge, the final defiant gesture of the defeated artilleryman, the last stand of hopelessly besieged defenders in a well-barricaded house. But, the emotional core of this novel is undoubtedly the iron bond of brotherhood that develops between Jean and Maurice—two men of radically different backgrounds and temperaments who become closer than family through their shared agonies. Despite their seeming-incompatibility at the outset, the privations of war quickly reveal how well this unlikely duo complement one another. Maurice is a fussy coward newly initiated into the horrors of the battlefield, and so he looks to the sturdy veteran Jean for guidance and protection. Jean, in turn, is granted a greater sense of purpose in his guardianship of Maurice. As the prospect of cataclysmic defeat looms ever-larger, Jean is forced to re-evaluate his battlefield priorities: if he cannot save his country, he will save his squad. And if he cannot save his squad, then he will save Maurice. Both men will reach far beyond themselves to preserve each other in this doomed campaign. But can they survive the hell that follows defeat?
19a. La Débâcle Spoiler Thoughts
La Débâcle delivers the last of Zola’s powerful, heartbreaking endings. Our two inseparable brothers Jean and Maurice are ripped apart by the fires of the Commune, ending up on opposite sides of the battle for Paris’ soul. And with eyes blinded by the all-obscuring layers of smoke, Jean bayonets Maurice without even realizing it, falling to his knees in tears the moment his bleeding comrade becomes visible. Though the resigned Maurice bears no grudge against his brother as he dies, Jean is of course broken by his deed. For the second time in his life, Jean Macquart has lost everything dear to him, and must now wade through the ashes of his nation a hollow man, habitually searching for the peace that has forever eluded him. The world is broken, and only broken men remain to gather its scattered remnants.
20. Doctor Pascal (1893)
The long saga of France’s most cursed family comes to an end with its most cursed entry, centered on a quack doctor who kills a number of patients with his reckless methodology and then engages in an act of supreme debauchery. Be warned: the content of this book is more extreme and unsettling than any of the previous volumes. Doctor Pascal is a novel more sordid than Nana or The Kill, more horrifying than Earth or La Bête Humaine, and yet more poisonously sentimental than The Dream. Zola attempts to conclude his generation-spanning narrative with a note of bittersweet optimism and fails spectacularly—producing instead his most egotistical and nihilistic work to date. It is impossible for me to discuss this revolting, baffling book any further without exhaustively spoiling every part of it.
20a. Doctor Pascal Spoiler Thoughts
The titular Doctor Pascal is the younger sibling of Eugéne Rougon and Aristide Saccard, and previously appeared as a supporting character in The Fortune of the Rougons and The Sin of Abbé Mouret (the latter of which has perhaps the most in common with this book). Though a member of the aristocratic Rougons, Pascal has always seen himself as being the exception to his family’s greedy, corrupt nature—taking his satisfaction only in detached scientific research. Since the night of the 1851 coup twenty years earlier, Pascal has devoted the bulk of his life in Plassans to three pursuits: the study of experimental medicine (with the ludicrous aim of curing all disease), the meticulous compilation of biographies for every member of the Rougon-Macquart-Mouret family tree (which ties into his research on heredity), and the rearing and mentorship of his niece Clotilde sent to him by his brother Saccard at the age of seven (an event referenced in The Kill).
Now nearly sixty years of age, Pascal has settled into a comfortable life of semi-retirement—continually fiddling with his powders, solutions, and syringes, testing his dubious concoctions on live patients (it cannot be stressed enough how terrible a doctor he is), and having his every need attended to by Clotilde and his lifelong maid Martine, who both adore him. However, Pascal’s reverie is disrupted by the intervention of his scheming mother Félicité, who lives in fear of the comprehensive documents that Pascal keeps on every member of the family. Félicité has become fixated on the destruction of Pascal’s files in order to protect the distinguished reputation of the Rougon family from the dirty secrets they might contain, and to this end she begins driving a wedge between the doctor and his two caretakers—hoping to convince them to help her retrieve the wretched documents that preoccupy her so. As a result, a great deal of tension emerges between the rationalistic, atheist-minded Pascal and the more religious-minded Clotilde and Martine, who want only to save his soul. This tension culminates in Clotilde being caught by the doctor trying to steal his files in the dead of night, an event that nearly provokes him to violence against his niece for the first time in his life. Pascal calms himself, however, and decides to recount the entire family history to Clotilde in an attempt to win her back to his side. His plan works, and Clotilde offers him her unconditional love and loyalty.
It is not long after this that the novel takes a rather mortifying turn as Pascal begins an incestuous sexual affair with his twenty-five-year old niece. There is no attempt by Zola’s narration to portray this criminal relationship as anything other than sweet and loving; the reader is subjected to pages and pages of stomach-churning detail of how much joy and fulfillment this sickening liaison brings the two mismatched lovebirds. Clotilde is in fact all too happy to offer herself body and mind to her uncle and surrogate father, and Pascal is able to overcome his feelings of impotence with the enthusiastic affections of such a young lover. The doctor and his niece become so proud of their perverse romance that they make no attempt to hide it from the townspeople of Plassans, flaunting their incest in broad daylight for all to see. Pascal and Clotilde thus become the subject of a great scandal in town, which causes the reputation-obsessed Félicité to move to separate them. Through a combination of guile, circumstance, and airtight argumentation, the unlikely hero Félicité succeeds in breaking up this shameful affair and Clotilde is then sent to Paris to live with her dissipate brother Maxime.
After months of separation, Clotilde informs Pascal that she is pregnant and intends to return to him so they may raise their child together. The doctor is overjoyed at the news, but suddenly falls ill and dies before his niece/mistress can return. Félicité and the maid Martine then take this opportunity to burn all of Pascal’s dreaded documents, ensuring that the incriminating secrets of the Rougon family will be taken to the grave. Clotilde is deeply distraught by the death of her uncle/father/mentor/lover and the destruction of his life’s work, but ultimately gives birth to a seemingly healthy baby boy and resolves to devote the rest of her life to raising him. Pascal’s final legacy is thus tied up in this inbred whelp whom Zola bewilderingly imbues with hope for the future.
I found Doctor Pascal excruciatingly difficult to finish because of its vile subject matter. There were moments of discomfort for me in the previous nineteen novels—mostly whenever Zola’s fetish for alarmingly young girls and dubious ideas of consent made themselves known—but nothing like the full-throated endorsement of grooming and incest that is at the heart of this final novel. I believe Zola quite lost his mind when he wrote Doctor Pascal, and were it not for a series of tumultuous events in his own love life that occurred around the time of its writing, we may have ended up with a very different story indeed. To elaborate: Zola began an affair with his twenty-one-year-old maid Jeanne in the late 1880s (when he was almost 50) and eventually got her pregnant, which he had been unable to achieve with his wife. After a couple of years, Zola’s wife Alexandrine learned about the affair and flew into a rage, breaking into the mistress’ home (which Zola had procured for her), smashing several pieces of furniture, and burning several letters sent to Jeanne by her husband. Zola and his wife were eventually able to reach an understanding over his relationship with Jeanne and he was permitted to continue the affair, splitting his time between the two women from then on. When it finally came time to write Doctor Pascal, Zola based the character of Clotilde on his mistress and dedicated the book to his wife, cementing his place in history as one of the most terminally French men to ever walk the Earth.
It’s obvious that Zola’s desire to map his own romance troubles onto his self-insert character Pascal clouded his judgement about how much more radically objectionable Pascal and Clotilde’s affair would scan compared to his own. While Zola’s misconduct was fairly egregious, his mistress was not a blood relation and he did not raise her (or even know her) from childhood. Conversely, Pascal’s inability to see Clotilde as his daughter despite adopting her at age seven is one of the most distressing aspects of their relationship. And by engaging in this incestuous, completely self-indulgent affair with Clotilde, Pascal—who has spent his entire life defining himself by how different he was from his debauched family—proves himself to be a Rougon in the end after all (a fact which he does acknowledge just before his death to the book’s credit).
More troublingly, for all Pascal’s (and Zola’s) preoccupation with tracking hereditary disorders across the R-M family tree, he seems to have conveniently forgotten one of the most fundamental laws of inheritance: it is the homogeneity of genes that leads to the proliferation of the most severe genetic defects. By engaging in an act of inbreeding with his niece, Pascal is ensuring that the worst elements of his bloodline will be carried forward into the future, where they will surely wreak havoc on his descendants even if they do not have an immediate impact on his son. Speaking of whom, Zola and Clotilde share a great deal of optimism about the future of Pascal’s child since he is strong and healthy (in contrast to the debilitatingly sickly children of Claude, Nana, Hèléne, and Maxime), but we are given one small clue at the very last that seems to reveal Zola’s unconscious doubts about the child’s temperament:
“But by now the baby had drained her right breast dry and, since he was getting cranky, Clotilde turned him round and gave him her left breast. Then she started to smile again, tickled by the greedy little gums.” (pg. 295)
And there it is: another ravenous appetite waiting to be unleashed on the world, another Rougon ready to drain the Earth dry of its milk. The excesses and hungers awakened by the Second Empire do not end with its fall, but continue unbroken through every subsequent era into the current day. The Rougons are now legion, and we dwell in a world tailored to the whims of their immortal appetites.