In the first chapter, Sigismond explains to an uneasy Saccard his notion of a world with no money, no business deals, and no Stock Exchange, and Saccard, looking down from the high window, sees the Bourse not only shrunk by distance, but also threatened: what if this dreamer were right? … Sigismond sees money as a corrupting evil, standing in the way of progress, an evil to be banished. Saccard, on the other hand, sees it as the very tool of progress. In their later interview Sigismond is much changed by his illness, grown thin and pale, ‘with the eyes of a child, eyes drowning in dreams’ (p. 261). Saccard finds him reading his ‘Bible’, the work of Karl Marx, which, in Sigismond’s view, demonstrates the inevitable destruction of the capitalist system. In a world without money, ‘work vouchers’ would be the only currency, a notion that horrifies Saccard: ‘Destroy money? But money is life itself! There would be nothing left. Nothing!’ (p. 263). Saccard’s capitalist economy is, according to Sigismond, unconsciously but inevitably working towards the great ‘Collectivist’ takeover, and the idyllic future he has mapped out and planned in detail in his papers. But it is indeed a paper future, and even Sigismond’s papers will be destroyed.14
Before the novel quite ends Zola brings Sigismond back on stage once more, to explain, this time to Madame Caroline, the ideas that will carry mankind to universal peace and happiness. Zola positions this last appearance of the now-dying Sigismond alongside Madame Caroline’s encounter with La Méchain, accompanied as ever by her huge black bag, bulging now with dead Universal shares. Earlier described as a predatory bird, feeding on the corpses of the battlefield, La Méchain is like an attendant Fury who has waited and watched and finally gathered up her prey.
In Sigismond’s ideal city everything would be owned by the community. There would be no more prejudice against manual labour: everybody would work, ‘a work at once personal, obligatory, and free’ (p. 365). Sigismond’s idealistic socialism contrasts sharply with Saccard’s capitalist, even imperialist, notion of conquering the Middle East through finance and industrialization. Both men, in their different ways, are visionaries, and just as Saccard in his prison cell still radiates hope and vitality, so the dying Sigismond still sees in the distance the ‘happy city, triumphant city, toward which mankind has been marching for so many centuries’ (p. 367).
Modernity and Modernism
Money has an intrinsically cinematic quality, with its lively and varied visual scenes—excited clamouring in the Bourse, richly furnished interiors and salons, the streets of Paris with their bustling crowds and horse-drawn traffic, the horrific filth of the Cité de Naples—and Zola’s narrative operates in a quite cinematic manner, with multiple changes of angle and perspective, moving through panning panoramas, close-ups, ‘flashbacks’, and expansions, changing the lighting and making expressionist transformations. Zola even manages his huge cast of characters like a film-director, giving each new character some special feature or recognizable ‘tag’—Massias the jobber, always running; La Méchain with her sinister, bulging bag; Flory with his enveloping beard; Madame Conin with her pretty curls. This cinematic style, along with the topicality of the subject in the late 1920s, no doubt encouraged Marcel L’Herbier in 1928 to make his silent film of the novel, updating it from the 1860s to his own times; it is now regarded as a classic.
Zola shows the sort of writerly self-consciousness generally associated with the twentieth-century novel in its reflexivity, that is, the reflection of the work within the work. Repeatedly foregrounding the act of writing, Zola points obliquely to his own authorial activity, and in so doing subverts the Naturalist stance.
In the financial operations of Saccard the accountancy term ‘jeux d’écritures’ is used over and over. Translated as ‘juggling the books’ or ‘false accountancy’, it is literally ‘games (or play) of writing’, and there is a great deal of ‘writing play’ in this novel—everyone is writing and creating. The villainous Busch accumulates and classifies his papers with their histories of debt and deceit, then works to create something profitable out of them, while in the next room Sigismond is writing the work that outlines a new future for mankind. It is Hamelin’s letters to his anxious sister that keep her on track, with their accounts of the great changes taking place abroad. Jantrou too is a writer, creating the persuasive fictions, the ‘little novels’ of his brochures, the advertisements that sell the Universal Bank to a gullible public. Saccard, writing a speech for Hamelin, is well pleased with the turn of phrase by which ‘the ancient poetry of the Holy Land’ colours the presentation of the Carmel Silver Mines. Even in his prison cell Saccard, surrounded by files, is writing up his account of events.
It is from the drawings, plans, maps, and watercolours tacked on the wall of the Hamelins’ workroom that great new schemes arise, brought to life by Saccard’s imagination and eloquence, just as it is from Zola’s notes and tellingly named ébauches (‘sketches’) that the novel arises, brought to life by Zola’s imagination and eloquence. And it is those maps and sketches and watercolours that Madame Caroline takes down and rolls up in the final chapter, as if enacting the closure of the narrative. In a further instance of reflexivity, Jordan, the honest, hard-working writer, forced by poverty into journalism but whose novel at last succeeds, is a pale reflection of the young Zola himself. In his earlier work The Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre, 1886), Zola had introduced the writer Sandoz, who declares that he will create a series of novels based on one family. And in the last novel of the series, Dr Pascal, like Zola, gathers together the whole history of the Rougon-Macquart family; Pascal’s notes are destroyed, but Zola’s happily survive, embodied in the Rougon-Macquart novels.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Émile Zola
MONEY
Explanatory Notes
THIS translation is based on the text of the novel in volume 5 of Henri Mitterand’s excellent Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Fasquelle et Gallimard, 1967), which offers, as well as a scrupulously annotated text, a critical study, and detailed information on Zola’s sources and preparation for the novel and the reception of the novel by critics of the time.
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