Zola's Paris

At the center of Zola's book La Curée (The Kill) is a not-very-devoted couple living in a very elegant private mansion adjacent to the Parc Monceau in what is now the 8th arrondissement. The time frame is the early 1860s, shortly before Zola composed the book. The post card view above dates from somewhat later than Zola's composition of the novel, but it captures the look of the park as it probably appeared when Zola was writing. 

The two characters in the quoted paragraphs are obviously lovers. Moreover, Renée, the woman, is her lover Maxime's stepmother. Their story is full of irony, as well as quite a lot of downright debauchery. The most amazing scene is when these illicit lovers attend a performance of a currently popular translation of the ancient Greek play Phaedra -- a play which, in his introduction, Zola says is his model: "to show the terrible social breakdown that occurs when all moral standards are lost and family ties no longer exist." (p. xi). 

"One night they went together to the Théâtre-Italien. They had not even looked at the programme. They wanted to see a great Italian actress, La Ristori, who was at that time the toast of Paris, and who was so much in fashion that they were forced to take an interest in her. The play was Phèdre. ... Phèdre was of Pasiphaé’s blood,* and Renée asked herself of whose blood she could be, she, the incestuous one of modern times. She saw in the play nothing but this tall woman dragging across the stage her antique crime. In the first act, when Phèdre confides her criminal affection to Œnone; in the second, when, burning with passion, she declares herself to Hippolyte; and later, in the fourth act, when the return of Thésée overwhelms her, and she curses herself in a crisis of dark fury, she filled the theatre with a cry of such wild passion, with so great a yearning for superhuman voluptuousness, that Renée felt every shudder of her desire and remorse pass through her own body. ... She was in agony, she was losing consciousness, when the last death-rattle of Phèdre, repenting and dying a convulsive death by poison, made her open her eyes. The curtain fell. Would she have the strength to poison herself one day? How mean and shameful her tragedy was compared with the grand epic of antiquity!" (pp. 179-180). 

 

"She told him how frightened she had felt in the Parc Monceau. Then she confessed another of her longings: she would like one night to go for a row on the little lake in the gardens in the little boat she could see from her windows, moored at the edge of a pathway." Émile Zola, The Kill (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 2) (p. 120). 

"Then, when springtime came, Renée’s feelings of melancholy returned. She made Maxime stroll with her at night in the Parc Monceau in the moonlight. They went into the grotto, and sat on the grass in front of the colonnade. But when she expressed a desire for a row on the little lake, they found that the boat they could see from the house, moored at the edge of a pathway, had no oars. These were evidently removed at night. This was a disappointment."  (p. 168).

Monet: A view of Parc Monceau.
Monet and the Impressionists were friends
of Zola, though later they had a falling out.

Zola, as he paints the portrait of the characters in the novel, constantly walks his readers through the streets of Second-Empire Paris. The very expensive neighborhood where Renée and her husband, Aristide Saccard, live -- and where she trysts with her lover Maxime -- is next to the Parc Monceau, which was often painted by Zola's contemporary Monet. The combination of the lovers’ awareness of the streets and the husband’s activity building them is played off one against the other:

“The lovers adored the new Paris. They often drove through the city, going out of their way in order to pass along certain boulevards, which they loved with a personal affection. The tall houses, with their great carved doors and heavy balconies, with inscriptions, signs, and company names in great gold letters, delighted them. As the brougham rolled on, they gazed fondly at the wide pavements, with their benches, their variegated columns, and their slim trees. This bright gap, which stretched as far as the horizon, grew narrower and opened upon a pale blue square of space; this uninterrupted double row of big shops.” (p. 168)

Zola's primary interests in the book are moral and social observations about a class of upwardly mobile and very cynical people like Renée and her husband, who uses the name Saccard, though his original name was Rougon. Saccard rises from poverty by marrying Renée, and becomes active, with two partners, in land speculation along with the development of the boulevards and new buildings of a Paris that was emerging from its past. 

Saccard, his partners, and most of the other characters belong this class of ambitious social climbers and fortune seekers of that era. Their attitudes towards the explosive development of a new city of Paris during the reign of Napoleon II, the Emperor, is central to the novel. Saccard imagines the development of a Paris very much like the one that actually emerged and still exists today:

"If Saccard was the animating spirit of the business, infusing it with his vigour and greed, Mignon and Charrier, by their matter-of-fact ways, their methodical, narrow management, saved it a score of times from being capsized by the extraordinary imagination of their partner. They would not agree to have superb offices, in a house he wanted to build in order to amaze the whole of Paris. They refused, moreover, to entertain the subsidiary speculative schemes that sprouted in his head each morning: the building of concert halls and immense baths on the building-ground bordering their boulevards; of railways along the line of the new boulevards; of glass-roofed arcades which would increase the rent of the shops tenfold and allow people to walk about Paris without getting wet." (pp. 97-98).

 

Another view of the Park Monceau by Monet, who painted it a number of times.
The Impressionists painted many views of the new Paris that Zola described.

The beauty and distinctiveness of central Paris today owes everything to the public works projects done in the Second Empire, the exact projects being described in Zola's novel. If you walk in Paris you see the broad avenues and boulevards, the spectacular architecture of buildings like the Opera and the big department stores, the clearing of space around the medieval buildings like Notre Dame, and the unified character of many apartment buildings and workplaces. A generation ago, you could also have seen Les Halles, the famous market, which was one of the first projects of this great renewal (but was torn down in the 1960s). Few older buildings still stand in the large residential neighborhoods along the Grand Boulevards, because they were torn down by speculators like the ambitious characters in The Kill.

The title of the book made me curious: the introduction explains: "The novel’s title gives the work its dominant image. A hunting term, la curée denotes, literally, the part of an animal fed to the hounds that have run it to ground." (p. x). 

I began this summer's Paris reading with the first book
 in Zola's 20-book series, which explains the humble origins
of Aristide Saccard and his family, the Rougons.

Blog post © 2021, mae sander, images from Wikipedia.

Shared with "Paris in July"