Pascal is the novelist’s envoy into his own fictional world, and he is there both to represent a hopeful escape from the generations-long curse of heredity and to underline the novelist’s own belief that the truth, however bad, is also a kind of freedom.
Heredity, and the vast family tree Zola creates, is necessary for the kind of cycle he has in mind: it offers both a series of stories—a roadmap of narrative, we might say—and an opportunity to think on a wider canvas than the single novel. It ensures continuity, but also contiguity, letting the novelist choose which path he will follow, which characters he will focus on, and enabling him to write not just in a linear way, with one novel following from the other, but also in a parallel way, with novels unfolding side by side in time. Every novel in the cycle connects up to the others, but each is also independent, and can be read alone. Characters or branches of the family can be promoted from walk-on parts in one book to full-blown centrality in another; they can fade into the background, be mentioned only in passing, or not appear at all, and then they and their offspring can suddenly emerge as the focal point of a novel of their own. Rather in the manner of soap operas, which must both depict an ongoing series of intertwined stories and be accessible for viewers to join with each and every episode, so Zola’s novels are designed as part of a tableau of interconnected narratives, projecting ahead to new storylines or back-projecting to past dramas, and made to be read on their own terms.
The Conquest of Plassans works on all these fronts: it is a novel about a particular place and time, which encompasses characters and dramas that can be found in any place and time; it is part of a whole but it is also a whole in and of itself. Like all of Zola’s novels in the Rougon-Macquart series, it gives the reader a starting point from which to go backwards or forwards in time, and the scale and spread of Zola’s total twenty-novel conception adds to, rather than detracts from, the novel’s ability to stand alone. However much the project as a totality is underpinned by research, by observation, by notes and references and data, what drives it, book by book and page by page, is the human drama, the tightness of the plotting, and the dynamic variety of the writing.
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1 For the full text of Zola’s preface, see The Fortune of the Rougons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
2 Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of an Italian civil engineer and his French wife. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence when Zola was 3, and he lived there until he moved back to Paris in 1858. Among his school friends was the painter Paul Cézanne, whose work he would later passionately advocate in his art criticism.
3 Taine, A History of English Literature (1863), vol. i, p. xv.
4 Zola often addresses the theme of religious hypocrisy in Second Empire France, and had written three short stories on the subject for the Republican newspaper La Cloche in the early 1870s, at roughly the same time as he was writing The Conquest of Plassans.
5 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) had appeared in French in 1865.
La Conquête de Plassans, from the Rougon-Macquart family saga, is not one of Zola’s best-known novels. This is because, although its narrative force is almost unsurpassed, it has only twice been translated into English. The first translation, The Conquest of Plassans or The Priest in the House, was by the remarkable Ernest Vizetelly, who, with others, translated Zola’s novels during the 1880s. In his preface (1887) he refers mysteriously to ‘late disclosures’ in London about ‘the priest in the house’, implying that the novel and his translation are very topical. The second translation was by Brian Rhys (Elek Books, 1957) who called it simply A Priest in the House. The novel is in many ways a sequel to the first of the Rougon-Macquart series, La Fortune des Rougon, translated by Brian Nelson for Oxford World’s Classics, which has filled a large gap in the Englishing of Zola. I hope this book will do the same for Zola’s many fans among English readers.
I started my translation at the Centre for Literary Translation in Arles, where the staff were, as usual, unfailingly kind and helpful. I am grateful to them, as well as to the Institut Français in London and the director of the Centre National du Livre who gave me a generous grant to finish translating the book in Paris. I should also like to thank my friend Béatrice Roudet-Marçu, who clarified some of the trickier idiomatic expressions for me and encouraged me along the way. And I am most of all grateful to my husband, David Constantine, who has read it all with immense patience and, as ever, offered his invaluable suggestions and comments.
The text I have used is the Classiques de Poche edition of 1999 with an introduction and notes by Colette Becker. Included in that edition are four stories and three critical articles by Zola which have some bearing on the novel.
H. C.
The Conquest of Plassans was first published in 1874 and, like The Fortune of the Rougons, serialized in the Republican newspaper Le Siècle between February and April 1874 before being published by Charpentier the same year. It is the fourth volume of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and is included in the first volume of A. Lanoux and H. Mitterand’s Pléiade edition of Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–7). There exist also the following notable paperback editions: La Conquête de Plassans, ed. E. Carassus (Garnier-Flammarion); La Conquête de Plassans, ed. M. B.
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