The Beauvilliers have lost everything, with Alice raped, the son of the family dead, and what little money they had left lost in the collapse of Saccard’s bank. Madame Caroline witnesses the atrocious scene in which Busch manages to deprive the Countess of the last bits of her family jewellery, and yet when Sigismond dies she is able, with characteristic tolerance and kindness, to feel sympathy and pity even for Busch in his agony at his brother’s death.

Looking for help from Saccard’s other son, Maxime, Madame Caroline finds him just about to set off to Naples for the winter. Reflecting once more on the huge difference between Saccard’s two sons, Madame Caroline wonders if it is poverty that has made Victor a voracious wolf, and wealth that has made Maxime an elegant, idle dandy? When she finds the little girls in the Work Foundation saying prayers for Saccard, she is at first outraged, but then reminds herself that he had indeed been kind to them, and to many others at the Work Foundation, as well as to people like the Jordans, whom he befriended and helped. Perhaps she could forgive herself for having loved him. Looking back once more on her ‘fall’, and her guilty love for a man she could not esteem, she feels able to ease her shame, recognizing that a man may do much harm, yet also have much good in him. Madame Caroline now learns that Saccard has gone to the Netherlands, where he is already working on drainage schemes, reclaiming land from the sea. Hamelin is revisiting the places that feature in the maps and pictures that Madame Caroline now takes down from the walls, before going to join him. Saccard had promised so much, failed so badly, done so much damage, and yet some of those promised miracles have indeed happened. Hamelin, writing from the Carmel Gorge, tells her:

a whole population had grown up there… The village, at first of five hundred inhabitants, clustering round the workings of the mine, was at present a city of several thousand souls, a whole civilization, with roads, factories, and schools, creating life in this dead and savage place… And wasn’t this the awakening of a world, with an expanded and happier humanity? (p. 371)

It is the realization of at least part of what Saccard had so enthusiastically prophesied, and money, filthy as it might be, had accomplished it. Money might be a dung-heap, but it was also the compost in which the future would grow. Saccard had argued that love itself can sometimes be sordid, and money, similarly, may be filthy but fruitful.

The novel is a mighty allegory, but not in terms of simple one-to-one correspondences: each figure is multiple, a nexus of meanings and contradictions. Madame Caroline herself, with all her good sense, does not entirely preserve her integrity; she is, after all, imperfect, but, as she herself suggests early on in the novel, her case is, ‘in microcosm, the case of all humanity’ (p. 62).

In the telegraphic style of his preparatory notes, Zola wrote: ‘I should like, in this novel, not to conclude on disgust with life (pessimism). Life, just as it is, but accepted, in spite of everything, for love of itself, in its strength.’ This was what he wanted to emerge from the whole Rougon-Macquart series. He had put much of himself into Madame Caroline, with her indestructible love of life and stubborn joy in being alive, and it is left to her at the end to bring all the paradoxes together, underlining the coexistence of good and evil in an imperfect but always interesting world.

Economics and Politics

Money reflects a sophisticated view of the economy, and it also shows economic concerns as deeply embedded in the social milieu, affecting both public and private life at every level. The people involved in speculation with the Universal Bank cover a huge social range—from pensioners with small savings to country priests, relatively well-off bourgeois, and aristocrats, both penurious and wealthy. Politics too plays an integral part. It is not by accident that the first chapter of the novel introduces references to political events that will affect the lives of the characters, and indeed the life of France and its people. Three of the political issues raised in the conversation in Champeaux’s restaurant recur throughout the book: Mexico, Rome, and the foreign policy of Prussia. All three exemplify the weaknesses—some might say follies—of the foreign policy pursued under Napoleon III. In Mexico, the attempt to gain a foothold in the country through French military intervention, while the United States was preoccupied with the Civil War, failed dismally after only three years, ending with the execution of Maximilian, the emperor Napoleon III had chosen for Mexico. In the matter of Rome and the Italian Wars of Independence, Napoleon III’s intervention to defend the Pope was driven as much by domestic politics and the need to keep the Catholics on side as by foreign-policy considerations. Italy was being created, with French support, out of a patchwork of small states, some controlled by Austria and some by the Pope. The decision to prevent the Papal States, including Rome, from being absorbed into Italy, with the use of 2,000 troops in 1867, as well as being expensive and ultimately ineffective, alienated those who supported the liberal cause of Italian nationalism while leaving the Catholics thoroughly dissatisfied.

Moser’s references to the matter of the Duchies, wrested from Denmark by Prussia and Austria, not only serve to tie the novel into actual events of the period but also draw attention again to the inadequacies of the regime’s foreign policy. When Moser remarks that ‘when big fish start eating the little fish you can’t tell where it will all end…’ (p. 6), the reader is reminded of the end that lies in store. Bismarck was already steadily creating the German Confederation while France did nothing: ‘In a few short years Bismarck had overturned the European balance of power and France, under the incompetent and vainglorious guidance of Napoleon III, found herself facing a politically unified and increasingly aggressive Germany.’11

Politics and the financial world are closely interlinked. Saccard views with envy the enormous power of the banker Gundermann, ‘for whom ministers were no more than clerks, and who held whole states in his sovereign fiefdom’ (p. 181).