Complete Works of Emile Zola (161 page)

He kept silent. — .

“Don’t you remember then,” she continued more violently, “the room in the inn where I slept with my lover?
and don’t you remember that table where I had written, ‘I love James,’ and those blue bed-curtains that I drew aside during the stifling summer nights?”

At the mention of James’s name, a shudder passed over him; but he strove with more fury to get hold of the bottle. Then his wife lost all control over herself.

“So much the worse for you!” she exclaimed.
“
I wanted to spare you one last pang.: but you are compelling me to be brutal. This morning I told a lie — I had not forgotten anything at all, I only stayed in Paris to go and see James. I wanted to keep him away from us, and I fell into his arms like a prostitute. Do you understand, William, I come straight here from his embraces.”

Under the sudden blow of this confession, William at last let go Madeleine’s hands. His arms fell down lifeless and his eyes were fixed in a stupor on his wife. He fell slowly back. “Oh! you see very well,” she said, with a strange smile of triumph, “that you consent to my death.”

He was still stepping back. When he came to the wall, he leaned his back against it, without taking his eyes from Madeleine. He stared at her aghast, and bent forwards so as the better to follow each of her movements. She raised the bottle and showed it to him.

“I am going to drink, William,” she said.
“
You give me your permission, don’t you?”

He stood mute, his eyes starting from their sockets and his teeth chattering noisily. He huddled himself together, and shrunk into little room at the frightful sight before him from which he could not take his eyes.

Then Madeleine slowly raised the phial and drank it at one draught, never losing, sight of her husband, even when drinking. The effect of the poison, taken in this powerful dose, was terrible. She reeled, with open arms, and fell on her face. One convulsion shook her frame as she lay on the ground, and her huge chignon of red hair came undone and spread out on the floor like a pool of blood.

William had followed every detail of this rapid scene; as his wife was drinking he had doubled himself still more, and he was now crouching on the floor against the wall. When she fell with a dull thud, like a lump of lead, he felt the floor tremble beneath him, and it seemed to him that as Madeleine’s fall resounded in his brain, his skull suddenly cracked. For a few seconds he looked at the corpse under the table. Then he raised a burst of terrible laughter; he jumped up with one bound and began to dance about the laboratory, beating time by clapping together his bloodstained hands, and gazing at the red marks with hysterical glee. He went several times round the room like this, trampling on the broken crockery that lay scattered about, and kicking the rubbish into the middle of the floor. Then he stopped at last and jumped over his wife’s body with his feet together, like a child at play. And he laughed more loudly, finding this amusement, no doubt, very funny.

Just at this moment Geneviève appeared at the door. Motionless and rigid, like fate itself, she cast a searching glance over this huge, gloomy room with its fetid exhalations, its corners filled with filth, and one solitary caudle casting a faint gleam on its shadows. When she had distinguished the corpse lying flat on the floor, as if it had been stamped on by this madman who was dancing and laughing diabolically in the shadowy vagueness, she drew up her tall figure and exclaimed in her severe voice:

“God the Father has not pardoned.”

THE END

The Rougon-Macquart Cycle

Zola’s childhood home in Aix

Les Rougon-Macquart

Natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire

The crowning achievement of French naturalism,
Les Rougon-Macquart
is the collective title given to Zola’s cycle of twenty novels, following the lives of a fictional family during the Second French Empire (1852–1870). Inspired in his youth by Honoré de Balzac’s famous cycle
La Comédie humaine
, Zola set about crafting his own unique cycle, after the modest success of his first novels. However, whereas Balzac’s novels served a broad scope, with the objective of being “the mirror of the contemporary society”, Zola’s novel cycle concentrates instead on the fortunes of a single family, exploring how characters are modified by their environment. As Zola later explained, “My major task is to be strictly naturalist, strictly physiologist.”

As a ‘naturalist’ writer, Zola was interested in science and the problem of heredity and evolution. In his writings he referenced the works of the doctor Prosper Lucas, Claude Bernard and Charles Darwin, who all influenced the style and events of Zola’s works. Believing that people are heavily influenced by heredity and their environment, the author used his novel cycle to prove how these factors could influence the members of the fictive Rougon-Macquart family. In 1871, in the preface of
La Fortune des Rougon
, the first novel in the cycle, Zola explained his intent:

“The great characteristic of the Rougon-Macquarts, the group or family which I propose to study, is their ravenous appetite, the great outburst of our age which rushes upon enjoyment. Physiologically the Rougon-Macquarts represent the slow succession of accidents pertaining to the nerves or the blood, which befall a race after the first organic lesion, and, according to environment, determine in each individual member of the race those feelings, desires and passions — briefly, all the natural and instinctive manifestations peculiar to humanity — whose outcome assumes the conventional name of virtue or vice.”

In a letter to his publisher, Zola stated his goals for the cycle as being:

1° To study in a family the questions of blood and environments.
2° To study the whole Second Empire, from the coup d’état to nowadays.

Since his first goal was to portray how heredity affects the lives of descendants, the author began his grand task by drawing the family tree of the Rougon-Macquart. The tree provides the name and date of birth of each member, along with certain properties of their heredity and life. Though modified many times over the years, with some members appearing or disappearing, the tree conveys the degree of preparation and planning that Zola devoted himself to, before writing the first book.

To study the Second Empire, Zola depicted in each novel a specific aspect of the life in his time. For example, a political novel (
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon
), a “novel about the defeat” (
La Débâcle
) and “a scientific novel” (
Le Docteur Pascal
).

At first, Zola was unsure exactly how many novels he would include in the cycle. In the first letter to his publisher, he mentioned “ten episodes”, but by 1872, his list included seventeen novels and by the time of the cycle’s completion in 1893, there were twenty novels.  After twenty-two years of diligent workmanship, Zola had created one of the great achievements in world literature.

Almost all of the main protagonists of the cycle are introduced in the first novel,
La Fortune des Rougon
and the final work,
Le Docteur Pascal
, contains a lengthy chapter summarising the loose ends from the other novels. As the novels of
Les Rougon-Macquart
are not in chronological order, there is
no ideal order in which to read them. Some novels in the cycle are direct sequels to one another, while many others follow on directly from the conclusion of
La Fortune des Rougon,
often with overlapping events from other works.  However, each novel is an individual work, providing its own distinct narrative, which does not require an extensive understanding of any other works to be read with enjoyment.

A manuscript page in Zola’s hand, describing the plan of the cycle, addressed to his publisher

Caricature of Zola paying tribute to Balzac, published circa 1880

The Rougon-Macquart family tree, published in 1893 in ‘Le Docteur Pascal’

Genealogy of the Rougon-Macquart family

THE FORTUNE OF THE ROUGONS

Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly