The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4)
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THE CONQUEST OF PLASSANS
ÉMILE ZOLA was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series with the subtitle Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, in which he sets out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range of characters and milieus. However, it was not until 1877 that his novel L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.
HELEN CONSTANTINE has published three volumes of translated stories, Paris Tales, French Tales, and Paris Metro Tales, with OUP. She has also translated Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin for Oxford World’s Classics, and Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons for Penguin.
PATRICK MCGUINNESS is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. He is a poet and novelist, whose first novel, The First Hundred Days, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. He has translated Mallarmé, edited the works of Marcel Schwob, and written about Huysmans and other French authors.
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Conquest of Plassans
Translated by
HELEN CONSTANTINE
With an Introduction and Notes by
PATRICK McGUINNESS
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Translation © Helen Constantine 2014
Editorial material © Patrick McGuinness 2014
First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2014
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ISBN 978–0–19–164189–3
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CONTENTS
Introduction
Translator’s Note
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Émile Zola
Family Tree of the Rougon-Macquart
THE CONQUEST OF PLASSANS
Explanatory Notes
Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to read the Introduction as an Afterword.
ÉMILE ZOLA aspired to being more than a novelist: he wanted to be a world-maker in fiction, and his twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle sought, in his words, to be ‘the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire’.1 That Zola believed in making his fiction reflect the real does not mean that he aimed only to copy the real, but rather that he understood how much artistry and imagination were needed to do justice to it. Like Balzac but not (or not often) Flaubert, Zola paid the world the compliment of being amazed by it. He knew, also like Balzac, that conveying reality was not a matter of mere transcription, however much research it required, but of translation: to translate the real into the language of fiction so that the real might find new ways of being itself. The novelist, even the ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ one, does not simply lift reality up and carry it wholesale across the border into fiction. There needs to be a change of currency first: art and reality may share the same truths, but they express these in different languages. As Balzac, Zola’s inspiration for the huge Rougon-Macquart tableau of novels, wrote in his preface to The Gallery of Antiquities (1839): ‘the real in literature cannot be the real in nature’. Zola himself, in his 1880 essay on the theory and practice of the novel, ‘The Experimental Novel’, wrote that the work of art was ‘a corner of nature seen through a temperament’. The key word there is temperament.
It is important to insist on this from the start, because of Zola’s reputation as a novelist of documentary fact, full of social and historical detail, and with characters driven (or dragged) by an inescapable mix of heredity, habitat, and historical-biological time—the famous ‘race, moment, milieu’ of Hippolyte Taine, the hugely influential nineteenth-century positivist thinker, literary critic, and cultural historian. It has been too easy to categorize Zola as a slave to documentary reality, and to focus on his belief in the scientific and positivist underpinning of his fiction to the detriment of his skill as a storyteller, an inventor of people, dramas, and situations, and the creator of some of the most powerfully poetic descriptions in nineteenth-century prose. All these qualities are to be found in The Conquest of Plassans, and whatever we may learn in terms of ‘social and natural history’, we must not forget that this, like all of Zola’s fiction, is also a novel of human truth told with drama, symbolism, lyricism, and imaginative power. Oriane de Guermantes, a perceptive and witty literary critic, when asked about Zola at a dinner party in Proust’s The Guermantes Way, pronounces: ‘But Zola is not a realist, Madame, he’s a poet! .
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