Paris, for Henry James, was “the biggest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes . . . such a beauty of light.”18Yet lust, whether of the eyes or the flesh, leads to lassitude: “I would say you’ve tasted every conceivable apple,” Maxime tells his stepmother, but when he asks her what she dreams of, she has no answer other than to say, “I want something different.” Don Juan himself could not have expressed more succinctly the insatiability of mere appetite, as distinct from the more profound desire whose aim is not to fill a recurring void in the desiring subject but to effect an inner metamorphosis. Metamorphosis, however, calls for roundness of character, and Zola’s individuals are, as James accurately lamented, “simple and shallow,” so that “our author’s dealings with [them] . . . maintain their resemblance to those of the lusty bee who succeeds in plumping for an instant . . . into every flower-cup of the garden.” James concedes, however, that “we see enough of the superficial among novelists at large . . . without deriving from it, as we derive from Zola at his best, the concomitant impression of the solid.”19

Zola in The Kill does indeed flit among flowers. Renée in her flouncy finery resembles the flowers of the conservatory in which she makes love to her stepson. Her lips are said to beckon like the petals of the Chinese hibiscus covering the wall of the Saccard mansion. Maxime appears as a flower in the tableau vivant that casts him as Narcissus and Renée as Echo:

He was changing into a flower. His limbs seemed to turn green and grow longer inside his green satin tights. His supple trunk and slightly curved legs seemed to sink into the ground and take root, while the upper part of his body, festooned with wide strips of white satin, opened out into a marvelous corolla. Maxime’s blond hair completed the illusion, as his long curls could be taken for yellow pistils with white petals all around.

Yet if Zola permits himself to mock the bathos of the feckless prefect’s attempt to modernize the myth of Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he is quite content on his own account to derive whatever ironic profit he can from the conceit that what is tragic about Renée’s love for Maxime—if love is not too grand a word—is precisely that it lacks the tragic dimension of Phèdre’s for Hippolyte. Zola cannot sustain the note of ambivalence between ancient and modern that he strikes repeatedly throughout the novel: he must, time and again, resolve the issue in favor of a tradition, a status quo ante, in which he no longer believes, and in so doing he falls short of tragedy as surely as the prefect whose pretentiousness he ridicules falls short of sublimity. Instead of tragedy, Zola settles for moral satire.

Nevertheless, Renée is not an insignificant creation. Unconvincingly and rather matter-of-factly Zola does provide her with justification for her defiance of convention by portraying her as the victim of a rape. But this violation merely incites and exacerbates a preexisting will to acquire forbidden knowledge—a will whose origin the author, half a generation older than Freud, locates squarely in the prelapsarian paradise of the “children’s room,” from which lofty height Renée is free to indulge her curiosity about the male bodies on display at the swimming school below. Even her vanity is a response to the cruelty of other children, who mock her untutored adherence to outmoded preferences in schoolgirl attire. It is curiosity about the meretricious glamour of the demimonde that lures her out of the cosseted cocoon of her fabulous dressing room, at once womb and lair. If Renée’s author succumbs at times to the conventions of la belle dame sans merci, painting her as huntress, nymph, or sphinx, he inflects mercilessness by inflicting it primarily upon the merciless beauty herself. So great is her narcissism that she cannot imagine another victim worthy of her cruelty. If she is vapid, it is because she willfully starves her imagination.

For this starvation Henry James sees no excuse. Renée possesses by default the wherewithal that James’s huntresses spend so much of themselves in acquiring.