In this respect, he is like all novelists, creating characters and then letting them loose. While novels such as The Conquest of Plassans and The Fortune of the Rougons have unambiguously ‘straight’ titles, novels like Germinal, La Bête humaine, Le Ventre de Paris are more evocative and lyrical, and hardly seem to fit with the ‘Naturalist’ label of plain or scientific factuality. Zola always allows room in his writing for a ‘poetic’ or mythical interpretation of his human characters and the events that befall them. We might consider, in this context, the great descriptive set-piece in Germinal, where Zola likens the mine swallowing up the miners to some great beast of the underworld gorging itself on the blood of the living; or the ‘bête humaine’ of the eponymous novel, the murderous inner beast which Zola links, symbolically, with the driverless train hurtling into the darkness. Closer to The Conquest of Plassans, there is the symbolic space of Plassans cemetery described in The Fortune of the Rougons, so full of bodies that the earth seems to push them back up to the surface. It is a powerful metaphor for the way in which the living are haunted by the dead, and for how the old ailments and defects resurface in the here and now. When the old cemetery is cleared and a new one designated, the bones are carted across town, scattering human remains along the streets.

Aunt Dide is given a mythical grandeur in chapter 7 of The Fortune of the Rougons, just before her children commit her to the lunatic asylum. She foretells the death of her nephew Silvère (François Mouret’s brother), the young Republican idealist who is betrayed by his own family and murdered with their connivance:

I brought nothing but wolves into the world . . . a whole family . . . a whole litter of wolves . . . There was just one poor lad, and they’ve eaten him up; they each had a bite at him, and their lips are covered with blood . . . Damn them! They are thieves and murderers. And they live like gentlemen. Damn them! Damn them!

Like some ancient prophetess, whose madness is also her lucidity and whose foresight goes unheeded, Dide curses the whole pack of Rougon-Macquart wolves. That curse too is a metaphor, just like the animal metaphors that run through Zola’s fiction and Naturalist writing generally, and a further endorsement of those who viewed his fiction as humanly diminishing. It is in keeping, of course, with the ‘natural history’ dimension of Zola’s plan to treat his characters with the detachment of the scientist observing animals in their habitats, but it also provides, paradoxically, an opportunity for him to use the imagery of a nature red in tooth and claw for poetic ends. The Rougon-Macquarts themselves are described as predators and opportunists, cunning and watchful as wolves. Antoine Macquart for instance is frequently called a wolf, while Félicité is described, in The Fortune of the Rougons, as having ‘the keenest scent in the whole family’. While their machinations might be subtle and complex, we are never far, with the Rougon-Macquarts, from animal instinct and the law of the jungle.

Marthe and François Mouret and their children are the only characters we feel sympathy for. Perhaps in the case of Mouret, who tries, albeit half-heartedly, to stand up for his principles and set himself against the town’s hypocritical bourgeois, we even feel something like affection, and are moved by his helpless descent into humiliation and insanity. Mouret has Republican sympathies, and Zola takes care to depict him as harmless but weak, well-meaning but changeable and compulsive. As with his wife and cousin, Marthe Rougon, we are given from the start small proleptic indications of the mental decline to come: Mouret is rash then apathetic, indecisive and then decisive in the wrong direction; he wavers, changes his mind, punishes his wife, and sends his children away but fails to notice the way in which he himself is being sidelined, manipulated, humiliated, and finally destroyed.