Faujas is the cuckoo in the nest, and the Mourets’ house and garden are chosen because they lie between two opposing political camps that Faujas must reconcile in order to put forward his masters’ candidate for election. This candidate, revealed towards the end of the book, is to be a yes-man who, when elected, votes with the majority and thus helps maintain the status quo. But there is no status quo for the novel itself, which powers towards its terrible ending. The Mourets lose their reputation, their children, their sanity, and finally their property, which has become the symbolic battleground on which the human and political drama is played out. To understand how Zola merges the symbolic and mythic dimension with the naturalistic and documentary, we need only think of the Mourets’ garden, the place Mouret calls, again with dramatic irony, his ‘little corner of paradise’ (p. 36). On the one hand, Zola is so precise in his preparation for the scenes he paints that he drew detailed diagrams of the house and garden, right down to the vegetable patches and paths; and on the other, he makes the fate of the house and garden into the symbolic marker of Faujas’s rise and the Mourets’ fall. Partway through the book, Faujas’s greedy and deceitful sister and brother-in-law, the Trouches, arrive and join him in the Mourets’ house. Gradually, they take it over, stealing food, money, and objects, using the kitchen, and even, at the end, sleeping in the Mourets’ bed. They are truly repellent characters, and the reader follows helplessly as they thieve and lie their way to dominance of Mouret’s realm. They are also, with the help of the doctor and the connivance of Faujas, instrumental in having Mouret declared insane, using a law—that Zola researched fully—which allowed people to be committed to asylums with frighteningly little evidence of madness. By the end of the book, Mouret really is mad, something else that Zola researched: the way in which people who suffered from depression or melancholy, or who simply became inconvenient to their families, finally succumbed to clinical madness in the very institutions which were supposed to care for them. In his short story, ‘Histoire d’un fou’ (‘Story of a Madman’—first published in 1868), Zola told the tale of a husband, Maurin, who is committed to an insane asylum by his wife and her lover, a doctor, in order to get him out of the way. The wife pretends her husband has been attacking her while the townspeople tell increasingly incriminating stories about the poor man, until, like Mouret, he is taken away in the dead of night and thrown into the asylum. Zola had originally intended to make Marthe fake her attacks the way Maurin’s wife does, but he changed his mind because he felt that such planning and deceit were inconsistent with her character as he had created it. There was even a very early plan to make her Faujas’s lover, but this too, and for the same reasons, was abandoned. Zola instead prefers to trace, as a sort of parallel narrative to her husband’s, Marthe’s own descent into insanity in ways that chimed with his own interest in female hysteria.

Meanwhile, Faujas colonizes the garden, and even the Mourets’ housekeeper, Rose, is suborned by the Faujas clan. As the Mourets’ home is invaded and its inhabitants manipulated and turned against each other, so Plassans too is ‘conquered’. The two spaces reflect each other: public life and domestic life are infiltrated and undermined by the same forces and in a sort of symmetrical movement. This symmetry is designed not just to show the close collaboration, a collaboration seen by Zola as born of self-serving and based on hypocrisy, between the Imperial regime and the religious establishment, but also to emphasize the link between the characters’ inner life and the world which they both shape and are shaped by. It also, on the more practical level, helps to hold together the various plots and subplots of the story. Zola was often called, by admirers and critics alike, a ‘constructeur de romans’, a ‘builder of novels’, and in a book with so much intrigue, so many characters, and so many different parts, Zola’s deep understanding of how to structure complex narratives is impressive. This sturdiness of plotting complements something else too: a profound understanding of how to deploy a symbolic structure and a poetic, not to say lyrical, style. Zola choreographs symbolically charged scenes in which, for instance, a game of shuttlecock between children becomes an opportunity for Faujas to bring the (self-)interests of the two opposing factions into line with his own plan. Later in the novel, Mouret’s insanity and fall is symbolized by the way he returns to find his beloved vegetable garden has been pulled up and turned by Trouche, Faujas’s brother-in-law, into a vulgar and showy flower garden. Though Zola relied on documentation and textbooks to plot the different madnesses of Marthe and François Mouret, and even uses examples from contemporary medicine when he has Doctor Porquier cite case files of insane people, there is a powerful symbolic meaning to the couple’s fates. Mouret dies in the fire he starts which destroys his house, the place he loves, and has, in his insane way, reclaimed by killing the Faujas clan, while Marthe dies in her mother’s house, catching sight of her son Serge’s soutane in the red light of the flames as they flicker across the room. These are tragic homecomings, but they are homecomings nonetheless: they fit together, and we might even say they ‘rhymed’. Even the novel’s ending casts ahead: Serge himself, drawn to religion by Faujas and his mother’s favourite child, will return with his own tragedy in the novel that immediately follows this one: The Sin of Abbé Mouret (1875). Like many of Zola’s books, this one thus ends on the cusp of the next instalment: people beget people, novels beget novels.

The Scientific Novel

‘Heredity, like gravity, has its laws,’ wrote Zola in the preface to The Fortune of the Rougons, for which he proposed, revealingly, an alternative ‘scientific title’ with a deliberately Darwinian flavour: ‘Origins’.5 Zola believed that art had a responsibility to understand its period and to show solidarity with its times.