Thérèse Raquin

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  THERESE RAQUIN

  Preface to the Second Edition (1868)

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  Notes

  THÉRÈSE RAQUIN

  ÉMILE ZOLA, born in Paris in 1840, was brought up in Aix-en-Provence in an atmosphere of struggling poverty after the death of his father in 1847. He was educated at the College Bourbon at Aix and then at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris. After failing the baccalauréat twice and then taking menial clerical employment, he joined the newly founded publishing house Hachette in 1862. and quickly rose to become head of publicity. Having published his first novel in 1865 he left Hachette the following year to become a full-time journalist and writer. Thérèse Raquin appeared in 1867 and caused a scandal, to which he responded with his famous Preface to the novel’s second edition in 1868 in which he laid claim to being a ‘Naturalist’. That same year he began work on a series of novels intended to trace scientifically the effects of heredity and environment in one family: Les Rougon-Macquart. This great cycle eventually contained twenty novels, which appeared between 1871 and 1893. In 1877 the seventh of these, L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den), a study of alcoholism in working-class Paris, brought him abiding wealth and fame. On completion of the Rougon-Macquart series he began a new cycle of novels, Les Trois Villes: Lourdes, Rome, Paris (1894-8), a violent attack on the Church of Rome, which led to another cycle, Les Quatre Évangiles. While his later writing was less successful, he remained a celebrated figure on account of the Dreyfus case, in which his powerful interventions played an important part in redressing a heinous miscarriage of justice. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless, but his happy, public relationship in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, brought him a son and a daughter. He died in mysterious circumstances in 1902., the victim of an accident or murder.

  ROBIN BUSS is a writer and translator who works as a freelance journalist and as television critic for The Times Educational Supplement. He studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree and doctorate in French literature. He is part-author of the article ‘French Literature’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica and has published critical studies of works by Vigny and Cocteau, and three books on European cinema, The French through Their Films (1988), Italian Films (1989) and French Film Noir (1994). He has translated a number of other volumes for Penguin, including Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir and Au Bonheur des Dames.

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  First published 1867

  This translation first published 2004

  10

  Translation and editorial matter copyright © Robin Buss, 2004

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  Introduction

  (New readers are advised that this Introduction makes

  the details of the plot explicit.)

  Thérèse Raquin is the only one of Émile Zola’s works outside his novel-cycle Les Rougon-Macquart and his polemic J‘Accuse that is widely read. Indeed, with a few individual works from that twenty-volume cycle, it represents the height of his achievement as a novelist. Published in 1867, when Zola was only twenty-seven, it was not his first work of fiction, but it is the book that established his reputation as one of the outstanding novelists of the younger generation. Denounced by the critic of Le Figaro as ‘putrid’, ‘a pool of filth and blood’,1 it achieved a notoriety that would pursue Zola throughout his life and, at the same time, established the ‘experimental’ method that he would apply in the twenty volumes of Les Rougon-Macquart. We can say, with his biographer Henri Mitterand, that ‘Zola’s career as a novelist only really begins with Thérèse Raquin.’2

  The novel does, however, differ from the later works in some important respects. Les Rougon-Macquart was a hugely ambitious project, designed (according to its subtitle) to constitute ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’.3 The individual volumes in the cycle centre on a particular aspect of life in that period: provincial and national politics (La Fortune des Rougon, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon); the Parisian working class (Le Ventre de Paris, L’Assommoir); the industrial working class (Germinal); the peasantry (La Terre); and so on. Entering into these different milieux is part of the pleasure of reading Zola, and he supported the fictional narrative with extensive documentary research — into life in a large department store, for example, when writing Au Bonheur des Dames, or among workers on the railway, for La Bête humaine. Behind the chief protagonists in all these novels, one is aware of a host of minor figures and, beyond them, of the crowd: the crowd in the Parisian streets and markets, the shoppers in the department store, the miners, politicians, priests, soldiers, stockbrokers, workers and peasants who populate the background of the picture.

  This is not the case in Thérèse Raquin. Here is a tale of adultery, murder and madness, set mainly in a single location and with a cast of four leading characters and four minor ones (five, if we count the cat, François). Only during the scenes on the river (Chapters XI and XII) and in the Morgue (Chapter XIII) does one have any sense of other people moving around in the background; only very exceptionally does the writer introduce another character with a speaking part, like the painter who makes a fleeting appearance in Chapter XXV. For the rest of the time, he concentrates our attention on Thérèse, Camille, Laurent and Madame Raquin, with occasional appearances by the group of guests who visit them every Thursday: Grivet, the Michauds, father and son, the son’s wife, Suzanne; and, of course, by the cat. In the forefront of this picture is Thérèse, the half-Arab orphan who is abandoned by her father to be brought up by her aunt, the haberdasher, Madame Raquin. Thérèse has to compete for her aunt’s affections with her cousin, Madame Raquin’s sickly son, Camille. It is an uneven
struggle. Camille gets all the attention, while Thérèse learns to hold in her frustration and resentment, her natural energy and health smothered by the possessive mother and feeble son. When the time comes, she accepts marriage to Camille for want of anything better and prepares for a life of endless Thursday evenings playing dominoes in the company of Madame Raquin’s friends: the former policeman, Michaud, and his son, and the railway clerk, Grivet. The stage is set for a tragedy that will be set off by the arrival of Camille’s friend Laurent, a sturdy lad, self-indulgent and unscrupulous, who releases the full force of Thérèse’s passionate nature — under the watchful eye of François, the cat.

  The novel is intentionally claustrophobic. Thérèse Raquin is a chamber piece, a melodrama, a horror story about two murderers who descend into madness, haunted by the shade of their victim and observed eventually by a paralysed woman, who cannot move or speak, but has to listen and watch as they disintegrate in front of her. We are meant to share her feeling of powerlessness and revulsion. We are fascinated spectators of what happens to Thérèse and Laurent, alongside the stricken Madame Raquin — and the equally mute and eloquent cat.

  The significance of the cat can be overestimated. After all, the beast does little in the book except what cats do in real life. It hangs around and watches quietly, as its human owners get on with their lives. But Laurent, in his folly, attributes to the cat supernatural powers of understanding and judgement: when he and Thérèse start their affair, the cat seems to be watching them with disapproval; after the murder, it seems to know what has happened to Camille. Perhaps we make a mistake similar to Laurent’s when we think that the cat plays a significant role in the novel. Perhaps the animal is purely for decoration, but few critics would think so. They have often compared François to the cat in Manet’s painting Olympia (exhibited in 1865). From here, they have gone on to see him as a symbol of female sexuality, a ‘familiar’ or demon, and (like Laurent) as the reincarnation of the dead Camille.4 He could be any or all of these things. A modern psychoanalyst might even wish to read something into the fact that the cat has the same name as Zola’s father, François (Francesco), who died when Zola was barely seven years old. But the attention critics have paid to François the cat comes more from a desire to link Zola’s novel to Manet’s painting, because of what one knows to be Manet’s role in Zola’s intellectual life at the time: ‘We will see Olympia’s cat in Thérèse Raquin’s bedroom,’ says Henri Mitterand.5 The presence of this knowing cat in Manet’s painting and in Zola’s novel provides a peg on which to hang the assertion of the artist’s importance to the novelist’s work.

  However, this focus on the cat implies some immediate connection, as though one were suggesting that Zola might have seen Manet’s painting in the Salon of 1865 and thought: ‘Ah! I can use that cat!’ This may, indeed, have been the case, but in itself the transfer of the cat to the novel is purely trivial, whereas we know that, in fact, the study of Manet and other painters was of crucial importance to Zola’s thought and to his development as a writer. Rather than influences, in the narrow sense, it is better to think in terms of the aesthetic climate in which Zola was working, at a formative moment in his life and a time of great intellectual excitement. The constituents of that environment can be summed up under the heading of four names: Paris; Édouard Manet; Honoré de Balzac; and Claude Bernard.

  Paris is where Émile Zola was born, the son of a civil engineer; but when he was three years old the family moved south, to Aix-en-Provence, because his father was to work on building what is now called the Canal Zola. Then, in April 1847, the father, François Zola, died suddenly of pneumonia, caught apparently during a coach journey to Marseille. Émile and his mother stayed on in Aix, where from 1852 he boarded at the College Bourbon. One of his fellow pupils and close friends (among a collection of otherwise rather unsympathetic schoolmates) was the painter Paul Cézanne.

  François Zola had left a complicated financial legacy, and his wife, Emilie, was to spend many years in an unsuccessful battle to retrieve a share of the capital of the canal company from François’s main backer, the politician Jules Migeon. It was in order to further this suit that she eventually settled in Paris, leaving her son at school and, in the holidays, with his grand-parents in Aix. Then, in February 1858, after the death of her own mother, Emilie called on Émile to join her. At the age of seventeen he returned to the capital to finish his studies at the Lycée Saint-Louis.

  The young Zola must have felt a great sense of excitement and new horizons at this return to Paris from the provinces, though for many years his life in the capital was to be hard. Emilie failed to obtain any money from her lawsuit and her husband’s estate. Émile fell ill and left the lycée without passing his baccalauréat, and for two years he was obliged to earn a living by taking menial clerical jobs, until he joined the dispatch department of the publishing firm Hachette in March 1862. At the same time, he was reading and writing voraciously. He even considered becoming one of the many writers employed by the prolific Alexandre Dumas, but when he made inquiries, he found that Dumas was not recruiting ghosts for the moment.

  At the same time, during these years of penury, he was discovering Paris. He was a keen flâneur (if one can be keen about strolling) and wandered around the city in the heyday of the Second Empire, at a time when it was being transformed by the efforts of Baron Haussmann. Haussmann, Prefect of Paris, was responsible for the major programme of rebuilding between 1853 and 1869, which destroyed many remnants of the medieval city, putting in their place the broad avenues of the grand boulevards and other characteristic features of modern Paris. Many other buildings, including most of those mentioned in Thérèse Raquin, were being pulled down and rebuilt at the time. This city in transition forms the background to many of Zola’s novels in Les Rougon-Macquart.

  The city has a less obvious, but still important, role in this earlier novel. The Paris of Thérèse Raquin is not the Paris of high society, finance, politics or business. Nor is it precisely the working-class Paris of L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den). Its characters all come from the lower-middle classes: junior civil servants, officials, clerks and shopkeepers. The city in which they live is not the glamorous Paris of the boulevards, the Opera and the tourist sights (though they may walk along the Champs-Élysées on a Sunday); theirs is the Paris of dingy backstreets and dank, ill-lit premises; of railway offices; of the Morgue.

  Above all, it is the Paris of the Seine. The river is constantly present. It passes only a few steps from the Passage du Pont-Neuf, where Thérèse and Mme Raquin live; they have moved here from the little Norman town of Vernon, which also lies on the Seine, about fifty-five kilometres downriver from Paris. Laurent comes from the village of Jeufosse, built around an island in the river, between Vernon and Mantes-la-Jolie. Camille and Laurent work for the Orléans Railway Company, which had its headquarters in the Gare d‘Orléans, right beside the Quai d’Austerlitz (it is now known as the Gare d‘Austerlitz). Camille is drowned at Saint-Ouen, on that wide meander of the Seine to the north-west of Paris, and his body ends up in the Morgue, on the Quai de l’Archevêché, on the tip of the Île de la Cite. Of this novel, if of any, it could be said that a river runs through it.

  The Seine, however, is not just any watercourse; it is the main artery of Paris. The city, like all large cities during the nineteenth century, had come to be seen not only as a place of culture and civilized society, or even as a place of opportunity (the role that Balzac eventually gives it in Le Père Goriot), but also increasingly as a site of poverty, misery, loneliness, alienation, crime, vice and degradation. The young Zola had experienced the excitement of arriving in Paris as an ambitious young poet with the future ahead of him, but he had also experienced disappointment and poverty. He had known the bohemian Paris where he had his first sexual experience and lived with his first mistress. He had seen the filth and cold of the city, witnessed what it could do to those who failed, and sensed the terrible realities hidden in its meaner stree
ts. This, too, was exciting, the stuff of literature, whether in the poems of Baudelaire or the popular novels of Eugène Sue.

  The river in Thérèse Raquin has several faces, but they are mainly sinister or, at least, negative ones. At Vernon, Mme Raquin has a garden that goes right down to the Seine where Thérèse likes to lie in the grass, thinking of nothing; but even here she fantasizes that the river is about to rise up and engulf her. Camille enjoys strolling beside the river on his way to and from work, watching it flow and, like Thérèse, has no thoughts in his head; but the river is not to be lucky for him. After the murder, Laurent sees dreadful visions in the Seine at night, though he later finds a moment of peace strolling along the quais, momentarily forgetting his crime ...

  The river, linking the places and people in the book, has a symbolic function, as do so many inanimate objects in Zola’s work. One can also read it as a mythical place, the river Lethe, river of oblivion and death; or see it as a figure for the unconscious, for dark desires and for the terrors of the mind. Zola himself, like Laurent, lived for a while in the Rue Saint-Victor, a few minutes’ walk from the quais, he worked briefly for the Compagnie des Docks, he spent summer afternoons lazing on the water at Vitry. He must often have walked along the banks of the Seine, especially at times when he was unemployed, staring into the river, as his characters do in Thérèse Raquin.

  The Seine, as it flowed through the peaceful landscape of northern France, had an increasing appeal for writers and artists. Among the latter, the trend was towards subjects taken from everyday life, landscapes painted (or at least sketched) in the open and scenes of simple people engaged in ordinary activities: the peasants of Jean-François Millet’s L’Angélus (1859), for example. Millet spent much of his life in the Norman riverside village of Barbizon, which gave its name to a school of painting dedicated to the countryside and the open air.