People have been angered by the words. My crime is to have had the literary curiosity to collect the language of the people and to pour it into a highly crafted mould – but the form is the great crime! Yet there are dictionaries of this language and scholars pore over them and enjoy its freshness, its vigour, its startling quality and its forceful images. It is a delight for scholarly linguists. Despite that, no one suspected that my aim was to engage in a purely philological exercise, which I believe to be of considerable historical and social interest.

In any event, I am not defending myself. My work will defend me. It is a truthful work, the first novel about the people that does not lie and which carries the scent of the people. From that, one should not conclude that the people as a whole are bad – because my characters are not bad; they are only ignorant, vitiated by the environment of harsh labour and poverty in which they live. And one should read my novels, understand them and see them clearly as a whole, before making the kind of trite criticisms, the grotesque and repulsive assessments that one hears about myself and my works. Oh, if people only knew how much my friends laugh at the incredible myth about me that is foisted on the masses! If they could only know that the savage, bloodthirsty novelist is in reality a respectable bourgeois, devoted to scholarship and art, who lives quietly in his corner with no ambition except to leave behind him as great and as vital a body of work as he can! I am not refuting any of the fabrications, I am getting on with my work and leaving it to time and to the good faith of the public to reveal me as I truly am beneath the stupidities that have been heaped upon me.

Emile Zola

Paris, 1 January 1877.

NOTES

1. For the title of the novel, see A Note on the Translation, p. xxxiii.

2. In a letter to Le Bien public, 13 February 1877.

3. Napoleon Ill’s rule was problematical for Karl Marx, since it appeared to have no basis in any particular class in French society; he analysed the class character of the regime in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

4. Joy Newton has followed this theme of the countryside as an ideal through the whole novel in ‘Conscious Artistry and the Presentation of the Persistent Ideal’, in Zola and the Craft of Fiction, ed. Robert Lethbridge and Terry Keefe (see Further Reading), pp. 67-79.

5. See A Note on the Translation.

6. Zola was an admirer of Richard Wagner, whose Ring cycle had been prepared at Bayreuth in 1876.

7. And human beings are associated with animals, most noticeably by their names: Madame Lerat (‘the rat’) and the constable, Poisson (‘fish’), for example. It has been said that this indicates Zola’s belief that working-class people, corrupted by drink and poverty, underwent a sort of Darwinian evolution in reverse, bringing them close to animals; but the humanity that he attributes to the characters in this novel (not only Gervaise, but Lalie, for example) would seem to suggest otherwise.

8. Henry James, The Art of Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Morris Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 174.

9. Martin Turnell, The Novel in France (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), p. 370

10. ‘I think that the claims that have been made for him as one of the greatest European novelists, or even a great novelist, are exaggerated. It is evident, however, that he cannot any longer be dismissed as a boring out-dated Naturalist.’ – Martin Turnell, The Art of French Fiction (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), p. viii.

11. See Further Reading.

CHAPTER 1

Gervaise had waited for Lantier until two o’clock in the morning; then, shivering all over, because she had been standing in her shift in the cold air from the window, she slumped down across the bed, in a fever, her cheeks wet with tears. For the past week, when they came out of the Veau à Deux Têtes where they used to eat, he had sent her off to bed with the children and did not come back until late at night, claiming that he had been looking for work.