Zola Before the Rougon-Macquart 9781487576035

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Zola before the Rougon-Macquart

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO ROMANCE SERIES

1. Guido Cavalcanti's Theory of Love, by J.E.

SHAW

2. Aspects of Racinian Tragedy, by JOHN c. LAPP 3. The Idea of Decadence in French Literature, 1830-1900, by

A. B.

CARTER

4. Le Roman de Renart clans la litterature fran~aise et clans Jes litteratures etrangeres au moyen ige, par JOHN FLINN 5. Henry Ceard : Idealiste detrompe, par RONALD PRAZEB 6. La Chronique de Robert de Clari : Etude de la langue et du style,

par P .

F. DEMBOWSKI

7. Zola before the Rougon·Macquart, by JOHN c.

LAPP

''La Tcntation de Saint ,\ntoinc ," c, 1870 ( Courtesy, the Thi'1rfe Collectio11 )

PAtll , CEZANNE,

Sec pages 129- 1~()

Zola before the

Rougon-Macquart

JOHN C. LAPP

University of Toronto Press

Copyright, Canada, 1964, 1ry Unittersity of Toronto Press Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN 978-1-4875-7689-9 (paper)

PREFACE

it has become possible to study Zola as a novelist, and not merely as a polemicist, a so-called pornographer, a socialist, or the defender of Alfred Dreyfus. Numerous myths have been, or are in process of being dispelled, chief among them that he lacked style. In general, the notoriety that has so long surrounded his name is being supplanted by a solid reputation as a novelist, supported by sound critical works of a general nature, and by an increasing number of monographs that treat single novels of the Rougon-Macquart series. No study has so far been made of the five novels and numerous short stories Zola wrote before La Fortune des Rougon. Undoubtedly, to many critics, he has not appeared to have sufficient eminence as a novelist to warrant automatically the critical examination of every work that came from his hand. A further reason for the critical indifference to Zola's early writings may he that in literary quality they frequently do not hear comparison with the Rougon-Macquart in the same way as the first Education sentimentale does to the finished novel, or, say, Argow le pirate and Annette et le criminel to the Vautrin cycle of the Comedie humaine. Nevertheless, my argument is that these first gropings contain the promise of Zola's great future. The modest aim of the present book-a discussion of the literary works written and published before the publication of the Rougon-Macquart-has its source in the IN RECENT YEARS

vi

Preface

belief that for a novelist of Zola's stature today a knowledge of the formative period is indispensable. I have therefore made individual studies of the early works, not hesitating to quote at length from these contes (see Bibliography) and novels that have been so little read and have so rarely received more than passing critical attention. For each work I do not necessarily follow an identical pattern of study, but analyse each on its own merits, remaining constantly aware of the later novels and their relation to their forbears. Thus, whenever, in examining a conte or a novel, I discover passages which have their counterparts in a later work, I study such passages and explore the implications of their recurrence. These implications necessarily vary in each case: they may be stylistic, thematic, or structural; they almost always have a bearing on Zola's place in the literary tradition. Although there is no attempt to undertake a systematic study of the sources, or the style, these are considered when they are relevant. In addition to the early writings, we possess other valuable clues to Zola's creative procedure. The voluminous manuscript working notes for the Rougon-Macquart deposited in the Bibliotheque Nationale show him thinking with his pen at every moment of composition. These notes, although still largely unpublished, have been used by scholars for some years. I believe that they are particularly valuable and revealing when studied in conjunction with the early works, and have exploited them as well as Zola's correspondence, published and unpublished, wherever possible. In general, however, the internal aspect of Zola's works, stretching from the earliest conte to Le Docteur Pascal, concerns me more than the external questions of sources, biography, and the like. My principal interest is the persistence of certain themes in both the early writings and the novels of the Rougon-Macquart. These themes carry with them particular character-types, situations and settings, images and metaphors, first used, often very crudely, in the early works. In studying them, the process of comparison which inevitably becomes necessary would be pointless were its only aim to prove what needs no proving: that Zola made amazing strides as a novelist between 1868 and 1878. I hope rather that these comparisons will cast light on the nature of Zola's development as well as on certain permanent aspects of his art. It has often been suggested that he was a great novelist in spite of naturalism. This book attempts to show that at the roots of Zola's naturalism lay an attitude to life which developed very early and which found its finest expression in a peculiar conjunction of the

Preface

vii

mytho-poetic tradition and his own ''bursting out upon" the world. I am grateful to F. W. J. Hemmings of the University of Leicester, and to J. A. Bede, of Columbia University, for carefully reading the manuscript, making many valuable suggestions, and correcting a number of errors. Whatever faults remain are my own responsibility. I should also like to thank two faithful typists, Suzanne Walleg and Marina Preussner. The University of California and Stanford University generously provided grants in support of my work, which I am happy to acknowledge here, as I do also a grant from the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press.

J.C.L.

CONTENTS

PRBPACB

I. The Teller of Tales: Zola's contes

V

3

2. The Writer as Hero: La Confession de Claude

48

3. Marking Time: Le Vreu d'une morte and Les Mysteres de Marseille

67

4. The Novel as Drama : Therese Raquin

88

5. Eternal Woman: Madeleine Ferat

121

CONCLUSION

159

BIBLIOGRAPHY

163

INDEX

169

Zola before the Rougon-Macquart

THE TELLER OF TALES

Zola's contes

resists definition almost as sturdily as the novel. But although brevity is probably the one thing that the hundreds of contes written since mediaeval times have in common, we may nevertheless venture to abstract the chief characteristics of the genre. The conte tends to present a single element from the multiplicity that go to make up an event. All of the author's resources will be brought to make the most telling presentation of this single element, using the utmost economy: character portrayal, digression, or descriptive passages will either be completely absent or exist only to that end. Finally, the conclusion of the conte assumes a great importance. Frequently a complete surprise to the reader, it is often expressed by a single word or phrase-a "whiplash"-of revelation. The author may on occasion tell the story in his own person, but usually it is told by a character specially selected for this purpose or one whom experience or situation have particularly well suited for the narrator's role; one thinks of the innkeeper in mediaeval and Renaissance tales. Although this brief definition is probably most applicable to the short stories of Maupassant, it applies almost as well to a conte by La Fontaine; what is very clear is that it bears little or no relation to Zola's early contes. The Contes a Ninon, published in 1864, and the Nouveaux Contes a Ninon, published ten years later, but all written before 1868, have nothing of the objectivity, concision and TIIE SHORT STORY

4

Zola before the Rougon-Macquart

geometric structure we have come to expect in the short story. Frequently mere observations, these stories in almost every instance conform to a process of thinking out loud, serious and humorous in turn, in which the author mingles critical speculation with the record of his personal experiences. Only in a very few cases do they contain a plot with a beginning, middle and end, and they are never built upon such carefully planned structures as his best-known tale, "L'Attaque du moulin." Zola's first contes possess, however, two dominant characteristics. First, they are deliberately and unabashedly autobiographical, inevitably taking as their subject the author's memories and observations. They even include diary-like fragments entitled baldly: "Souvenirs" and in the Preface to the Nouveaux Contes a Ninon their author calls them "la chanson des 't'en souviens-tu'." Secondly, despite their seeming formlessness, they follow a basic pattern; the "song of do-you-remember" is a lyrical exchange between the author and the imaginary Ninon, a beautiful girl from the Midi. Out of this dialogue emerges a polarity: the age-old opposition of city and country. But this contrast does not merely serve as an outlet for romantic longings, it demonstrates the aesthetic problem which very clearly confronted the young author in the mid-1860's: the nature and role of reality in art. For the Zola of Les Contes a Ninon, the Paris from which he writes stands for reality; dull, disillusioning, with its "jour blafard." Provence, and in particular the country around Aix that he knew so well, seen from afar, becomes the situs of dream and fantasy, of limitless horizons, of "les clairs soleils, les midis ardents." Later on, the outskirts of Paris replace the Midi; the pastel tones of Saint-Ouen or Bennecourt crowd out the raucous colours of Pourrieres and Le Tholonet. It is precisely these two characteristics that lend the early contes, regardless of their literary merit, a special importance for the student of Zola who attempts to lay bare the permanent qualities of his genius. The urge to confess, so evident a motive in Zola's early works, produced a conflict, equally evident, in a novelist dedicated to objectivity. The persistence of this urge perhaps explains the persistent survival of certain themes and patterns throughout the RougonMacquart. The important role of memory, on both the conscious and unconscious levels, of memories never those of the characters but always the author's, results, as we shall attempt to show, in a fusion of past and present, typical of Zola's work. The dialogue with Ninon is the first instance of the well-known

The Teller of Tales

5

duality in Zola's work. Any Zola novel mingles documentary truth and imaginative speculation, reality and myth, fact and fantasy: a quality of which he was well aware, since he not infrequently referred to a particular novel as "mon poeme." A study of the contes should permit us to go deeper into these known facts, to examine certain elements of his work "in the raw," that is, to examine them as they appeared at the precise time when Zola was attempting to determine what their relative importance should be. In the following pages the categories under which I have grouped the early contes should, I believe, facilitate such an examination. I. IDYLL AND FANTASY

In all likelihood Zola's first short story was "La Fee Amoureuse" (1859), a tale of two lovers turned into Bowers, and thus an early manifestation of a favourite Zola theme, the identity and the interrelations of plant and human life. In a vaguely mediaeval setting Zola establishes at once a contrast between rough warriors and the nubile heroine, Odette. The castle where Odette grows up reminds us of Combourg; her fear of her grandfather even recalls that of the youthful Chateaubriand for his unbending parent. Despite these forbidding surroundings, love and nature do not fail to bloom: "N'as-tu jamais remarque, le ma tin, une paquerette s'epanouir aux premiers baisers du soleil parmi des orties et des ronces! Telle s'epanouissait la jeune fille parmi de rudes chevaliers." (105) The tale follows easily predictable lines: a handsome troubadour appears before the castle and is refused entrance because "il n'y a ceans que des guerriers." Immediately the Hower symbolism reappears; Odette drops a sprig of marjoram wet with her tears, which the singer retrieves, and which she later recognizes in his hand after he has gained entrance to the castle disguised as a knight. In a dream she sees the sprig change into a fairy who identifies herself as "la fee Amoureuse" and addresses the young girl in Zola's first animation of nature . . . . Odette, dit~elle harmonieusement, je suis la fee Amoureuse. C'est moi qui t'ai envoye ce matin Lois, le jeune homrne a la voix douce; c'est moi qui, voyant tes pleurs, ai voulu les secher. Je vais par la terre glanant des creurs et rapprochant ceux qui soupirent. Je visite la chaumiere aussi bien que le manoir, je me suis plue souvent a unir la houlette au sceptre des rois. Je seme des Beurs sous Jes pas de mes proteges, je Jes enchaine avec des fils si brillants et si precieux, que Jeurs creurs en tressaillent de joie. J'habite Jes herbes des sentiers, Jes tisons etinceJants du foyer d'hiver,

6

Zola before the Rougon-Macquart

les draperies du lit des epoux; et partout ou mon pied se pose, naissent les baisers et les tendres causeries. Ne pleure plus, Odette : je suis Amoureuse la bonne fee, et je viens secher tes larmes. [ I 07]

This early lyrical passage is revealing for a number of reasons. First of all, its author's concern for rhythm: the too carefully balanced constructions "c'est moi qui ... c'est moi qui ... ," and the announce· ment of the speaker's name at beginning and end. There are suggestions of both Sand and Hugo: the love-fairy would unite "la houlette au sceptre des rois,''1 she snares the feet of lovers with gossamer threads, and the idea of her omnipresence produces a curious identification of plant and Bame, for she dwells not only in grass hut in live coals. And indeed her next manifestation occurs in the Hames of the hearth, and later Odette dreams of "des montagnes de 8eurs eclairees par des miliers d'astres, chacun mille fois plus hrillant que le soleil" (108). These are early instances of the vegetation and Bame imagery by which Zola so frequently evoked human love in his later works. One final point is the secretive element in love: even in this schoolboyish tale Zola conceives of human love as necessarily hidden. The fairy hides Lois and Odette from the stern old Count by enveloping them in her wings, a device which is not so far a cry from the huge cloak in which Silvere and Miette, the lovers of La Fortune des Rougon wrap themselves for nocturnal walks. Love also exists in opposition to something, in this case stem parenthood and preoccupa· tion with war. "La Fee Amoureuse" is an exercise in anthropomorphism, in which a fairy animates nature with love. A related tale, "Simplice," dispenses with magic, but presents an animated forest that directly intervenes in the affairs of the lovers. Love once again appears as a protest; Simplice, a king's son, is a niais because he hates war, and instead of killing, saves women and children from slaughter; he is also a ninny because he refuses the advances of a lady-in-waiting. In the forest in which Simplice falls in love vegetation runs riot, resembling, even in occasional phrases, Chateaubriand's description of tropical America: La foret que Simplice rencontra etait un immense nid de verdure, des feuilles et encore des feuilles, des charmilles impenetrables coupees par de lThe idea of solving class conBicts 1ry marriage occurs in a number of Sand novels. The plants ensnaring the feet of lovers reappear in La Fortune des Rougon (228): "Ces herbes, qui leur liaient les pieds ••. et qui les Eaisaient vaciller, c'etaient des doigts minces, elliles par la tombe...." CE. Hugo's Crepuscule: ... L'herbe s'eveille et 1'3rle aux sepulchres dormants. Que dit•il, le brin d'herbe '? et que rq,ond la tombe '? Aimez, vous qui vivezl on a froid sous Jes ifs ...

The Teller of Tales

7

majestueuses avenues. La mousse, ivre de rosee, s'y livrait a une debauche de croissance; Jes egJantiers, allongeant leurs bras BexibJes, se cherchaient clans Jes clairieres pour executer des danses folles autour des grands arbres; Jes grands arbres eux-memes, tout en restant calmes et sereins, tordaient Jeurs pieds clans l'ombre et montaient en tumulte baiser Jes rayons d'ete. [64J

Zola of course animates where Chateaubriand revels in exoticism; he shows us mosses drunk with dew where Chateaubriand is content to portray inebriated bears. 2 The forest in "Simplice" is an obvious precursor of "Le Paradou" in La Faute de l'abbe Mouret, yet while it is extremely voluble, it is not yet the colossal matchmaker of the novel, and its voices express only warning. This warning introduces the theme of love in death. Simplice falls in love with the Undine, who becomes a beautiful waterflower with a lethal perfume. Despite the expostulations of the forest the lovers meet and expire with a kiss : "Les levres s'unirent, les ames s'envolerent" (71). The story ends on a curious note. A scientist in search of rare Bowers discovers the dead Simplice with the pink-and-white Hower pressed to his lips. Exclaiming over his find he baptizes it with a scientific name. "Ah! Ninette, Ninette," cries the author, "mon ideale Fleur des Eaux, le barbare la nommait Anthapheleia limnaia."3 This callous fellow was, of course, a naturalist. The same animism invades even the obviously autobiographical sketches, which centre on the traditional contrast between city and countryside. Such is the brief description of a strawberry-picking excursion, Les Praises, which introduces once again the themes of spring and rejuvenation : "Le silence frissonnant, l'ombre vivant qui tombait des grands arbres nous montaient a la tete, nous grisaient de toute la seve ardente du printemps" (298). In the first part of "Le Carnet de danse" we find ourselves in a sylvan setting. Yet here Zola seems determined to portray realistically the forest that so often takes on fantastic shapes and contours in his contes. He imagines that as he and Ninon walk together through the woods, they hear the music of fife and tambourine. Thinking they might surprise some forest sylphs, they creep forward, only to discover a group of dancing peasants. These present a spectacle far from idyllic; the women jump clumsily and laugh raucously, the men have thrown their coats down on the grass beside their tools, and the fife player .

2Cf. the famous passage in the Prologue to Atala, and "les ours, enivr~ de

raisin."

•"Flower of the swamp.''

8

Zola before the Rougon-Macquart

watches angrily as they break all the rules of dancing. But after all, had they been forest nymphs, they would have vanished; as it is Ninon and he join the noisy dance unnoticed. At this point Zola seems concerned to demonstrate the existence of the coarse and realistic in an idyllic setting. In the second part, rather loosely linked to the first, fantasy reappears. An idealistic young girl, who is still, Zola tells us, at the age when dream and reality are indistinguishable, on the morning after her first hall engages in a dialogue with her dance programme. This trifling page deserves mention only because it represents an early attempt of Zola's to deal with time. The programme is an obvious means of evoking the past. As the girl reads the names inscribed in it, "soudain la fete renait pour elJe, les lustres brillent, I'orchestre chante amoureusement; soudain chaque nom se personnifie, et le bal, dont elle etait la reine, recommence avec ses ovations, ses paroles caressantes et Batteuses" (80). It is significant that such revery could not exist without an object to inspire it; Zola's ingenue could not simply begin to dream of the past. His animation of the dance programme, that symbol of bygone successes, suggests further that the memory and fantasy were for him indissolubly linked. In the more realistic works, whose characters live resolutely in the present, the past plays no significant role. We saw earlier that the contes frequently stress the opposition between city and country. Out of this contrast springs Zola's rather obvious use of environment: the country produces children both vigorous and wholesome, while the city product is both sickly and unnaturally precocious. Zola presents this aspect of his favourite parallel in "Lili," where he shows the sunburned Ninon ill at ease in the confining atmosphere of Paris. She, who has grown up beneath the sun of Provence, has in her youth been free of the pernicious influence of schoolmates: "Je n'ai point appris le mal a l'ecole de ces delicieuses poupees qui cachent, en pension, les lettres de leurs cousins dans leurs livres de messe" (344). She has learned nothing of coquetry, which, she observes, seems to be the most important subject in a young girl's education: "j'ai pousse librement, comme une plante vigoureuse. Gest pourquoi j'etouffe dans l'air de Paris." (344) There follows a sketch, very probably taken from life, in which the author observes two seven-year-old girls playing in the Jardin des Tuileries. One of them already resembles her mother, "avec un peu de coquetterie en plus." She practises curtsies in front of a tree, greets her playmates with adult formality, teIIs a polite lie-"eIIe sava.it

The Teller of Tales

9

mentir, comme elle savait etre belle. Elle pouvait grandir; elle n'ignorait rien de ce qui fait une jolie femme. Avec de telles educations, comment voulez-vous que les marls dorment tranquilles?" (346) Worse still, the children become coquettish when they realize the author is watching them : "Ah! filles d'Eve, le diable vous tente au berceau!" (347) Zola concludes of course that they should both be packed off to the country, dressed in gingham and allowed to play in the duck pond. "Elles reviendront betes comme des oies, saines et vigoureuses comme de jeunes arbres." At first sight it would seem pointless to draw attention to such naive Rousseauism. Yet the various elements of this brief sketch, in a combination which is peculiarly Zola's, were to constitute a dominant pattern in his mature work. Vigour and health accompany innocence and naturalness; they originate in a rural scene. Perversion and precocity are linked; frequently found in the young, they flourish in the schools. Woman is an instrument of Satan, the Eternal Courtesan, born to deceive man. These elements in various combinations serve to characterize a majority of Zola's women, Madeleine Ferat, Denise Mouret, Pauline Quenu (the latter, who grew up in Paris, flourishes when transported to the country), and Nana. In "Lili" we are very likely witnessing an early manifestation of Zola's creative inspiration; the confirmation, by reality, of a preconceived literary concept. Another excursion in the country, also related in the first person, provides the basis for one of the better conceived and constructed stories in the collection: "Les Voleurs et l'ane," which Zola could easily have entitled "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe." The story seems to be one of a number of early works in which the young author was attempting a modern version of a classical French work. Zola's early letters are full of admiring comments on La Fontaine and Moliere; he treats briefly La Fontaine's theme of the town rat and the country rat in "Le Paradis des chats," and in "Les Voleurs et l'ane" attempts to provide a contemporary illustration of La Fontaine's moral. But instead of stealing the donkey, Maitre Aliboron, the narrator's friend in Zola's conte, makes off with a charming grisette while her two companions argue over which of them she loves, quite in the manner of the two marquis in Le Misanthrope. This little story has a double interest for students of the early Zola. For one thing, it reveals an unusual concern for setting and for the arrangement of characters within it. When Leon and the narrator share a rowboat with the grisette and her two swains, we see a Manet-like sketch: "La jeune femme s'etait penchee, plongeant sa main clans l'eau. Elle l'en retirait

10

Zola before the Rougon-Macquart

toute pleine; puis reveuse semblait compter les perles qui s'echappaient de ses doigts." (135) When all five picnickers arrive at their island Zola arranges his own "Dejeuner sur l'herbe": Antoinette et Leon s'etaient places sous un grand eglantier, qui allongeait ses bras au-dessus de leurs tetes. Les branches vertes les cachaient a demi; comme ils me toumaient le dos, je ne pouvais voir s'ils riaient ou s'ils pleuraient. Ils parlaient bas, paraissaient se quereller. Moi, j'avais choisi un petit tertre, seme d'une herbe fine; paresseusement etendu, je voyais a la fois le ciel et la pelouse ou se posaient mes pieds. Les deux galants appreciant sans doute le charme de mon attitude, etaient venus se coucher l'un ama gauche, l'autre a ma droite. [140] This passage is marred by gratuitous assumptions about the characters: "je ne pouvais voir s'ils riaient ou pleuraient"; why would they be doing either? And why, when the suitors sit down beside the narrator before launching into a dialogue reminiscent of Moliere, does this gesture signify that they appreciate "le charme de mon attitude"? But when this is said the fact remains that the precision of Zola's scene-setting here reminds us of the careful placing of his characters on the stage: the banquet in Nana's apartment, for which a painstaking sketch exists in the working notes, is only one among many examples. The other interesting point about "Les Voleurs et l'ane" concerns the narrator's friend, Leon, who falls in love in spite of himself. This development seems intended to suggest that scientific realism may produce too narrow a view of life, a view Zola expressed when he told his friend Valabregue, "L'ceuvre d'art, ce me semble, doit embrasser !'horizon entier" (256). Leon is the unbending cynic; he adores Balzac and can't bear George Sand; he is disgusted by "Michelet's book" (probably L'Amour) and denounces woman as the eternal coquette; but he finally succumbs, illustrating, through characterization, that Zola was already beginning to give theoretical justification to his inherent idealism. The Contes aNinon of 1864 included among them Zola's lengthiest venture into fantasy, "Sidoine et Mederic," a conte philosophique imitated from Swift, Voltaire, Rabelais, and Ariosto. In the opening sentences, the author clearly places his story in the realm of the fairy tale, since he assigns to the strange process of growth that simultaneously produced tiny Mederic and gigantic Sidoine the same origin as the seven-league boots and the Sleeping Beauty (174). In this tale, however, in addition to deliberate fantasy, we find for the first time

The Teller of Tales

11

what J. A. Bede• has called the "merveilleux des dimensions," that is, spatial or temporal fantasy which appears largely unplanned. So it is that unlike Rabelais' giants, who are of normal size or gigantic according to the author's designs in particular situations, Zola's Sidoine begins with the relatively modest height of an oak tree, but very soon performs actions on a more and more gigantic scale; he at first bends slightly to take a birds' nest from the tree top, but shortly afterward picks up mountains, wears clothes the size of Notre Dame, and strides easily across oceans. One may see in this early instance of a character's "running away," as it were, from his creator, a first indication of Zola's inability to confine himself within the natural limits, objectively measured, of space and, for that matter, of time as well. Sidoine may well be the ancestor of what Jared Wenger has called Zola's "unchastened characters," perhaps the best example of which is Nana, who has gigantic traits, and who belongs, in F. W . J. Hemmings' words, "half on the plane of particular, historical, and half on that of universal, timeless truth." 5 The same phenomenon applies to area: the famous garden of Le Paradou, in La Faute de l'ahbe Mouret, which in actuality measures a scant square kilometer, takes on the proportions of a vast forest. And as we shall see later, Zola seemed unable to measure time objectively. II. REALISM AND SOCIAL CRITICISM

Despite the reservations he expressed to Valabregue, Zola declared as early as 1860 that realism was the best method of encompassing the wide horizon that art must embrace. In his curious theory of "screens," elaborated in 1864 in another letter to his friend, he states that, while the artist can never exactly reproduce reality, he himself accepts the method of realism, "qui est celle de se placer en toute franchise devant la nature, de la rendre dans son ensemble, sans exclusion aucune" (Corr. I, 257). Among Zola's later works, those that were the most resolutely realistic were to be precisely those that dealt with social injustice. L'Assommoir, Germinal, and La Terre lead inevitably to a consideration of socialism as a remedy. In his contes, Zola seems already to be fully aware of social injustice and to consider it a fitting subject for literature. But when he treats poverty or social misfortune in these early works he seems unable or unwilling to take the usual realistic •In a letter to the present writer. G"The Present Position in Zola Studies," 112.

12

Zola before the Rougon-Macquart

path of depicting people in a contemporaneous setting. Far from remaining dispassionate and objective he frequently uses a rather heavy-handed irony, and the only remedy he seems to consider is charity. The story that, according to Alexis' account, made Zola's employer Hachette exclaim, "Vous etes un revolte!" presents the first in a rather considerable line of charitable heroines. Like "La Fee Amoureuse," "Sreur-des-Pauvres" is a fairy story, evidently suggested by Charles Perrault's "Les Fees."6 As in most of Perrault's tales, Zola's story has a vaguely mediaeval setting, his characters bear nicknames, or merely given names, and they address one another in a pseudo-archaic speech. The heroine, Sreur-des-Pauvres, although a ragged orphan, has no thought for her own poverty, but only for the misfortunes of those around her. One day, she gives her last farthing to a beggar woman (Perrault's heroine had given an old beggar woman a drink of water) and the recipient of this charity, like Perrault's character, gives the young girl the power to produce riches at will. In Zola's story the gift is a magic coin, which reproduces itself. The unselfish girl immediately sets about enriching the poor, and in the end, showers gifts of money even upon her aunt and uncle, who have cruelly mistreated her. The heroine's parents had been rich; with orphanhood came poverty. The uncle and aunt who became her guardians have also lost their money. But their situation appears as nothing more than a falling upon evil days, and not at all the product of social injustice. They badly mistreat their ward, but their actions spring from sadism rather than from misfortune, and in this regard they far outdistance their counterparts in Balzac's Pierrette: Aussi se plaisaient-ils aux haillons de Sreur-des-Pauvres, a ses petites joues amincies, toutes blanches de larmes. Ils ne s'avouaient pas la joie mauvaise qu'ils prenaient a la faiblesse de cette enfant, lorsque, au retour de la fontaine, elle chancelait, tenant a deux mains la lourde cruche. Ils la battaient pour une goutte d'eau versee, disant qu'il fallait corriger Jes mauvais caracteres; et ils frappaient avec tant de haine et de rancune qu'on voyait aisement que ce n'etait pas la une juste correction. [149] 6Theophile Gautier made a curious reference to Perrault's story, which may well have chalfenged Zola, in Caprices et zigzags ( quoted by Baudelaire in L'Art romantique, 456): "Quoique nous n'ayons donne a boire a aucune vieille, nous sommes dans la position de la jeune fille de Perrault; nous ne pouvons ouvrir la bouche sans qu'il en tombe des pieces d'or, des diamants, des rubis et des perles; nous voudnons bien de temps en temps vomir un crapaud, une couleuvre, et une souris rouge, ne fut-