In one of these, La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, we watch a young priest being seduced by a sort of gypsy earth maiden in naked garden scenes worthy of D.H. Lawrence. In ‘Fasting’ the erotic undertones of the relationship between the pampered curate and his silly aristocratic female congregation are much more subdued.
‘While from up in his pulpit he was talking of bones cracking and limbs roasting, the little Baroness, half asleep as she was, saw him at her table, blissfully wiping his lips, telling her, “My dear madame, this is a bisque which would ensure you found grace in the sight of God the Father, if your beauty were not already sufficient for you to be certain of a place in paradise.”’
The unmistakable point of the story is that Catholicism, indeed all religion, can never give true sustenance to the human spirit. Anyone who looks to religion to be nourished, like the hungry sheep in Milton’s Lycidas, will be unfed.
In ‘Nantas’ we find ourselves in the world in which Zola’s imagination really felt most at home, the crowded Paris of the 1870s, its rain-soaked streets, its garrets where young people, lured to the big city from the provinces, lie hungry in the intervals of their tedious work and emotionally unfulfilled lives. Nantas believes himself to have one asset – his ‘strength’. He has paced the streets of Paris, and found nothing; he is down to his last hunk of bread when the offer comes. Thereafter, Nantas’ meteoric rise to a ministerial post is not really very plausible. Balzac could have made it so. The core of the story, though, is not so much the outward ‘success’ of Nantas’ life as his inner perceptions of himself and his sexual needs. Hence, the power of its closing scene with Nantas attempting to blow his brains out, and Flavie at the last minute bursting into the room to say she loves him. After humiliating him with a sexless marriage, she has at last sniffed strength. We are back in Zola country.
– A.N. Wilson, 2002
Two of these stories are about the way contracts between men and women unexpectedly break down. In ‘For a Night of Love’, Thérèse de Marsanne kills her lover Colombel in a sado-masochistic tussle. Knowing that Julien Michon is in love with her (he has shyly been serenading her from a neighbouring house with his flute), she beckons him over, and offers him a deal: if he will dispose of her lover’s body, she will give herself to him. In ‘Nantas’, the contract is between Nantas on the one side, and Flavie Danvilliers on the other. She has not murdered her lover, but, with almost equally grave potential repercussions for her family honour, has become pregnant by her momentary paramour, M. des Fondettes, who is already married. This time the deal involves him marrying Flavie in exchange for her rich dowry, which will act as seed capital for him to realise his intentions. Flavie herself insists, as part of the contract, that theirs is to be a mariage blanc, with separate lives. At first Nantas is only too happy to accept, so as to devote himself to his financial and political enterprises. But again the contract fails, and again it fails without either of the characters really defaulting on it. Or rather, Nantas does default – but by falling in love with his wife. This leads him to become jealous of her (something he attempts to rationalise by seeing her ‘infidelity’ as a potential slur on his honour), convincing himself, especially thanks to the machinations of the double-dealing maid, Mlle Chuin, that she has taken up again with M. des Fondettes (who does indeed long to ‘possess’ her once more). Nantas wants to revoke her autonomy, but in a battle of wills between them realises he cannot, and, broken, retreats, telling her ‘you are free’. His political moment of triumph (he has been appointed finance minister by Napoleon III) has been rendered worthless: he will put the finishing touches to his budget and then kill himself.
Contracts are particularly fragile when, as in these two cases, they involve sex: their vulnerability is increased by the fact that the signatories to the bargain are not social equals. In both these stories, an upper-class woman in a crisis offers a deal to a lower-class man who needs her (for her love or her money). In ‘For a Night of Love’, Thérèse requires Julien’s physical strength to dispose of Colombel’s body; Julien successfully performs his task, and thereby gains a right to the woman’s body, and thus to sexuality (he is a virgin): but he ends up refusing it, and life itself. In ‘Nantas’, Flavie needs Nantas’ ‘name’ to legitimise her child (who then conveniently disappears from the story), and allow her to remain part of the Danvilliers clan.
1 comment