Nantas keeps his side of the bargain, and gains a fortune that opens up his path to political power (his success is partly due to the sublimation of energies that are not channelled into a full marital relationship). His ‘strength’ is a leitmotif of the story: it is not simple physical strength, like Julien’s, but the strength of will and intellect that enable him, even on the evening he is plotting to murder both his wife and her assumed lover, to show such eloquence at dinner on the subject of his projected budget that his daring new financial plans even convince his more conservative father-in-law. Nantas himself is by now convinced that his strength is worthless, since it has not gained him his wife’s love – but even as he privately decides that, although he has won everything, without her he has nothing, we see Flavie viewing him with an enigmatic new tenderness. And just as he is about to shoot himself (in the same Parisian garret where he had spent two penniless months trying to find a job – both ‘Nantas’ and ‘For a Night of Love’ are topographically circular), Flavie bursts in to declare that she does now love him because he is – in the story’s last word – ‘strong’. The aphrodisiac of power seems to have worked its charm. And yet the melodramatic coincidences that Zola foregrounds (it is just as Nantas is going to kill himself first time round that Mlle Chuin is shown in, like a fairy godmother, to wave her wand and offer him a rich marriage; it is just as he is going to blow his brains out that Flavie rushes in to pronounce the equally magical words ‘je t’aime’) suggest that Nantas’ ‘strength’ is only part of the story. On both occasions, it has not been enough by itself to save him: he needs help from outside, from a woman. Any strength he has must be recognised (by Mlle Chuin in the first instance, by Flavie in the second) for it to be effective. Without this recognition, he will die – yet another victim of a Paris depicted, in the early scenes, as tantalising in its Second-Empire bustle and glamour but also as inhuman and anonymous. Flavie’s final gift of herself is a sublation of the original contract, which as a mariage blanc was a paradox (or a compromise): now that their relation is to be a proper marriage, the separation accepted as part of the original terms is annulled.

Both Thérèse and Flavie are haughty and imperious femmes fatales, simultaneously subversive and conformist. They are subversive in challenging the traditional roles of women, but conformist in that they both ultimately uphold the established order: Thérèse allows Julien to be her scapegoat for Colombel’s death, and having thus eliminated two plebeian suitors marries a member of her own aristocratic caste; Flavie falls in love with Nantas because he has shown himself an adroit financial and political manipulator – her love is given only for a specific reason (‘because you are strong’) and thus tacitly imposes another condition: that his strength should continue. We may legitimately fear for the couple’s newly romantic relationship if a ministerial reshuffle precipitates Nantas from his eminence, just as Thérèse is unlikely to be satisfied by the young Comte de Véteuil unless, like Colombel, he is prepared to give her a bit of rough stuff.

These contractual aspects of the two stories act as a narrative scheme around which Zola weaves a web of impressionistic evocations. These are limited in ‘Nantas’ to the brief vignettes of the streets of Paris or the chime of the cash registers in Nantas’ firm: in ‘For a Night of Love’, they are more poetic. Thérèse is a white-faced, black-eyed, red-lipped frost-queen from an Edvard Munch canvas. Her haughty exterior conceals a baroque passion; she lives in a house that is compared to both a tomb and a church, and she bears the name of a saint (Teresa of Avila) closely associated with the intersection between fleshly and spiritual love (Thérèse herself is a mixture of intense piety and eroticism). The taciturn Julien finds absorption in a lyrical, ever-constant nature, and his only mode of self-expression is through that most natural instrument, a wooden flute. This is a story of chiaroscuro effects being disturbed by the harsher edges of black and white. Julien’s dark nocturne is slashed open by the dazzling light from Thérèse’s room, his grey placidity intruded on by the whiteness of her face and dress. His music should be heard, not seen – it initially attracts Thérèse, but then she sees the ugly young man playing it. His final refusal to take advantage of her offer marks a turn back from her ‘culture’ (the aristocratic residence, the elegant young men, the noisy waltzes, the underlying cruelty) to his ‘nature’, associated with music (the river Chanteclair with its clear song), the tranquillity of nature, and identification with his rival (almost his double) Colombel, calling him home to death.

‘Fasting’, in its depiction of a gourmet curate who preaches ascetic self-denial to a congregation of pampered upper-class women, is very different from the other two tales in this collection. Obviously anti-clerical in tone, on a deeper level it engages with the sheer sensuality of Catholicism that proved such an ambiguous source of attraction to the ‘decadent’ movement of the fin-de-siècle. The Baroness listening drowsily to the sermon is enveloped in a warm bath of mildly erotic fervour, and responds to the sound of the curate’s words, not to their sense – ‘as some to church repair, / Not for the doctrine, but the music there’ (Pope, An Essay on Criticism). This is a story of hot air: the Baroness swoons at the ‘music’ of the curate’s vacuous rhetoric, but even more at the warm gusts from the air vent playing up her skirt (the French ‘bouche de chaleur’, ‘mouth of warmth’, is nicely explicit). It is also a story which, like James Joyce in the ‘Lotus-Eaters’ episode of Ulysses (communion as the injunction to ‘shut your eyes and open your mouth’ for the ‘lollipop’ of the host), focuses on the intensely oral aspects of Catholicism: the curate’s words, preaching mortification, come from the same mouth whose ‘ready tongue’ wags in the salons of his ‘magdalens’, and absorbs the Baroness’ salmon pâté and Pommard with the fervour of someone taking the bread and the wine. The title, ‘Fasting’, is doubly ironic. This church is failing to provide its congregation with the real bread of angels: full bodily communion is replaced by mere fantasies – vaguely idealistic, languidly erotic products of sublimation. In this kind of society, even the well-fed little Baroness is left, in a real sense, fasting: hungry for something more real than the twilit boudoir of the church. And, though the text necessarily cannot say this, history is soon to impose its own fasting on a society indifferent to the unchosen ascesis, the hungers of every kind sapping the strength of the Second Empire. The story was published in early 1870: some of its first readers would before long be part of the starving population of a Paris besieged by the Prussian army and torn apart by civil war and revolution, lucky to dine, not off salmon pâté, but dogs and rats.

 

– Andrew Brown, 2002

 

 

Note on Publication Dates:
‘Fasting’ (‘Le Jeûne’), was published in March 1870. In June of that year, the first volume (La Fortune des Rougon) of Zola’s massive sequence of novels on life under the Second Empire, Les Rougon-Macquart, started serialisation.