For a Night of Love
For a Night of Love
Emile Zola
Translated by Andrew Brown
CONTENTS
Title Page
Foreword by A.N. Wilson
Introduction
For a Night of Love
Nantas
Fasting
Biographical note
Copyright
Writing to his friend Thomas Sergeant Perry, of Rhode Island, Henry James said, ‘I heard Zola characterises his manner sometime since as merde à la vanille. I send you by post Zola’s last – merde au naturel. Simply hideous.’ It is, for the master of circumlocution, a somewhat startling joke, but it conveys Zola’s shock value. James’ letter was written in 1876; the Zola novel in question was Son Excellence Eugéne Rougon. We only have to recall the climate of opinion over the Channel in London to imagine how startlingly frank Zola must have seemed to his contemporaries. In 1819, the publisher Macmillan asked Thomas Hardy to tone down a scene in Tess of the D’Urbevilles in which Angel Clare picks up the heroine in his arms and carries her over a ford. In the published version, to spare the blushes of readers, Tess is trundled over the stream in a wheelbarrow.
Zola, meanwhile, had written a whole series of novels in which the sexual needs of his female characters were fully explored. One thinks of the striptease artiste Nana and her string of hireling lovers; or the womenfolk of the miners in Germinal, all freely indulging in sexual activity and displayed to the reader in the full realism of their energy and appetite. Or think of the girls who sell charcuterie in Le Ventre de Paris. The men they fancy, mock, and enjoy are seen as no more or less than the bits of meat they handle all day long in their market stalls in Les Halles.
We can’t doubt that Zola depicted the world with punctilious accuracy. He is the master of detail piled upon detail. His novels and tales achieve their effect by thoroughly researched reportage. Whether he is describing the working routines of a coal-miner, or a laundress, or a clerk, or a priest, he takes you through every detail of what they do, from their waking moment to sleep again.
To enjoy Zola at his best, therefore, you have to read one of the great novels, in which a whole panorama emerges, as in the work of one of those highly realistic nineteenth-century painters, such as William Powell Frith (1818–1909), who attended to every last bootstrap or railway ticket clutched in the hands of characters who swarm across his canvases. Even in these shorter works, however, you can catch the flavour of Zola’s brilliance.
Henry James would no doubt have applied the scatological metaphor to the longest of the stories in this collection, ‘For a Night of Love’. It is a neat plot, ideally suited to its length, and with three main protagonists. Thérèse is a beautiful young woman in a small provincial town. Through the eyes of a gangling, awkward clerk, Julien, we enjoy ogling at her, glimpsing her from afar, deriving excessive sexual excitement from the glimpse of her letting her hair down as her maid undresses her for the night. He tries to woo her by playing the flute, a rather obviously phallic instrument, and seethes with fury when he realises that he has a rival.
Thérèse is a sadist, which adds to the kinky charm of the story. She has always enjoyed tormenting Colombel, a young man with whom, as a baby, she had shared a wet-nurse. Their love affair, when it develops, has almost something of incest about it. And their lovemaking is violent, including much wrestling and the exchange of insults. Again, think of the characters in English novels of this period, or even the characters in the urbane and sophisticated novels of James! We might enjoy guessing what Dorothea and Mr Casaubon got up to in the bedroom in Middlemarch, but we are certainly never told by George Eliot.
Thérèse kills Colombel during one of their violent romps. She offers Julien a night of love if he will dispose of the corpse. The actual business of his taking the body to the bridge and dumping it in the water is as exciting and full of suspense as a Patricia Highsmith story. (One wonders whether Highsmith knew this tale, in fact.) Julien’s reveries, however, are distinctively late nineteenth-century ones. His carnal imaginings about Thérèse in a state of undress turn into a sick yearning for death. Liebestod in the French provincial manner follows. The morning light shows not Julien and Thérèse twisted in the bedroom sheets, but Julien and Colombel at the bottom of the river.
The high camp of ‘Fasting’ is very different in atmosphere. Zola had a line in highly anti-clerical tales that bordered on the pornographic.
1 comment