the two names, Rougon and Macquart, which, linked together, have
supplied it with a general title. Some years ago those names were
noticed by the present writer in sundry old documents relating to
an abbey in Champagne, but Zola declared them to be common names in
Provence. As for Macquart--long familiar to Parisians in connection
with the knacker's trade--it is a suggestive circumstance that in
Zola's younger days there was a bookseller at Aix, named Makaire,
whom he may well have known. Makaire, of course is merely a variant
of Macaire; and it is not necessary to be familiar with the famous
"Auberge des Adrets," and the wonderful impersonation of Frédérick
Lemaître, to know that "Robert Macaire" is regarded by the French
as a type of braggart rascal, as cynical, as impudent as "Tartuffe"
is hypocritical and sneakish. Zola, then, in the writer's opinion,
adopted that vulgar name Macquart because it resembled Macaire, and put
Rougon before it in lieu of Robert. He pictured the Rougon-Macquarts
as the Robert-Macaires of the Second Empire, and the idea came to
him, perhaps, the more readily as Napoleon III. had been repeatedly
caricatured as Robert Macaire, a brazen knave repeating _abracadabrant_
axioms amid the applause of his followers. Thus the title of the
Rougon-Macquarts, if taken as synonymous with the Robert-Macaires, will
suffice to explain a good deal of Zola's series.
Let us now glance at the volumes. In "La Fortune des Rougon" (I)
the author describes the origin of the Rougons and the Macquarts.
One Adélaïde Fouque, a woman of hysterical nature who eventually
goes mad,--a variety of disorders being transmitted to most of her
descendants,--marries a man named Rougon, and on his death lives with
another named Macquart. By the former she has a son, Pierre Rougon;
by the latter a son, Antoine, and a daughter, Ursule Macquart. This
daughter marries a hatter named Mouret, and thus at the outset of the
series the second generation of the family is shown divided into three
branches. In the third generation it increases to eleven members;
in the fourth to thirteen. In the fifth it dwindles, its vitiated
energies now being largely spent; and though there are indications of
its continuance in sundry children who do not appear on the scene,
the hope of regeneration rests virtually in only one child, a boy
three months old when the curtain finally descends. In "La Fortune des
Rougon," then, we are shown old Adélaïde Fouque, her children and some
of theirs, all more or less poverty-stricken and striving for wealth,
which comes with the foundation of the Second Empire. The scene is laid
at Plassans--Aix, as was formerly explained--and one sees the Imperial
_régime_ established there by craft and bloodshed.
Next comes "Son Excellence Eugène Rougon" (II) which carries one to
Paris, where the fortunes of the eldest of the Rougon brothers, first
an advocate and at last an all-powerful minister of state, are followed
in official and political circles. The court of Napoleon III appears
at the Tuileries and at Compiègne, where one meets, among others,
a beautiful Italian adventuress, Clorinde Balbi--suggestive of the
notorious Countess de Castiglione--with a mother reminiscent of Madame
de Montijo. And in other chapters of the volume the scheming and
plotting of the reign, the official jobbery and corruption, are traced
for several years.
"La Curée" (III) follows, and one turns to Eugène Rougon's younger
brother, Aristide, who has assumed the pseudonym of Saccard. With him
the reader joins in the great rush for the spoils of the new _régime_.
A passion for money and enjoyment seizes on one and all, debauchery
reigns in society, and a fever of reckless speculation is kindled by
the transformation of Paris under Baron Haussmann and his acolytes.
Men and women sell themselves. Renée, Saccard's second wife, passes
from mere adultery to incest, becoming a modern Phædra, while Saccard
himself leads the life of an eager, gluttonous bird of prey, which he
continues in the ensuing volume, "L'Argent" (IV), where the Bourse--the
money-market--is shown with all its gambling, its thousand tricks and
frauds.
So far the series might seem a mere record of roguery, vice, and
corruption, but those who know the books are aware that such is not the
case. Silvère and Miette stand for love and all the better qualities
of humanity in the first volume; there are at least the Martinots
and the Berauds in the second and third; and the devoted Madame
Caroline, the honest Hamelin, the pious Princess d'Orviedo, the dreamy,
generous-hearted Sigismond, the loving Jordans, and the unfortunate
Mazaud, all figure in the fourth, amid the scramble for gold in which
the other characters participate.
[Illustration: Photo by Émile Zola--Denise and Jacques]
In sharp contrast with that greed for gain is the picture offered by
the next volume, "Le Rêve" (V), where an immaculate lily arises from
the hot-bed of vice, whence later, and as a further contrast, a type
of foul shamelessness, Nana, the harlot, is also to spring. But
it is best not to anticipate. In the first four volumes the Rougons,
under the influence of heredity and surroundings, have shown themselves
scoundrels, whereas in Angélique, the heroine of "Le Rêve," a girl of
their blood appears who is all purity and candour. She comes upon the
scene, precisely at this moment, to emphasise the author's conviction
that, whatever he may have had to depict in his solicitude for truth,
all is not vice, degradation, and materialism, that there are other
aspirations in life besides the thirst for wealth, enjoyment and power.
And here, too, the priesthood is shown in its better aspect: the good
Abbé Cornille, the proud, heartbroken Bishop d'Hautecœur, in contrast
with whom the scheming, unscrupulous Abbé Faujas appears in the next
section of the series.
This is "La Conquête de Plassans" (VI) which retains one in the
provinces (whither one is carried from Paris in "Le Rêve"), and one is
confronted by a carefully painted picture of middle-class society in a
small town, this in its turn contrasting with the previous pictures of
life in Paris. And now the baleful results which may attend marriages
between cousins are exemplified. Marthe Rougon has married François
Mouret, and both have inherited lesions from their common ancestress,
Adélaïde Fouque. One of their children, Désirée, physically strong and
healthy, is mentally an "innocent"; and they themselves are unhinged,
the workings of their heredity being accentuated and hastened by the
wiles of Faujas, the priest, who gains access to their home. He is
a secret agent of the imperial government, and thus one again sees
the Empire at work in the provinces, utilising the clergy to enforce
its authority, and as often as not betrayed by it. In the end all
collapses. The maddened Mouret sets fire to his home and perishes in
the flames with Abbé Faujas, while Marthe dies of a disorder springing
from her inherited hysteria.
Then, the middle class of the provinces having been sketched, that of
the metropolis is depicted with an unsparing hand. The career of the
Mourets' eldest son, Octave, is followed, first through the pages of
"Pot-Bouille" (VII), in which he appears as a kind of modern Don Juan,
a Don Juan stripped of all poetry, all glamour, a sensualist of our
great cities, the man who prowls, not among the unhappy creatures of
the streets, but among the women of outward respectability who may
help him to acquire position and fortune. The scene is laid in a house
of the Rue de Choiseul, in the centre of Paris; and all around Octave
gravitate depraved, venal, egotistical, and sickly beings, adulterous
households, unscrupulous match-making mothers, _demi-vierges_ who will
only marry for money, dowry hunters, slatternly servant girls, and that
type of the middle-class debauchee who makes those girls his prey.
And the pleasing figures in the work are few--poor old Josserand, for
instance, and the charming Madame Hédouin, with the prosperous author
on the first floor, who drives in his carriage and has two handsome
children. At the same time the book pours a stream of light first on
all the ignoble shifts to which middle-class folk of small means are
put in their insane endeavours to ape their wealthier neighbours,
and secondly on the evils that arise from that dowry system which
superficial people regard as proving the foresight and wisdom of
the French when they embark on the sea of matrimony. As a matter of
fact, it frequently happens that this dowry system entirely blights
married life. As often as not the dowry itself is a mere snare and
delusion--the bride's parents retaining the principal, and merely
serving the interest until their death, when, as in the case of Zola's
old Vabre, the parental fortune may have entirely disappeared!
In "Au Bonheur des Dames" (VIII) Octave Mouret appears again, a
sensualist still but also a man of enterprise, at the head of a "Grand
Magasin de Nouveautés," a Temple of Temptation, which revolutionises
trade and panders to the feminine love of finery. Here the
_bourgeoisie_ is shown elbowing the class immediately below it, a world
of _employés_, clerks, shopmen and shop-girls, whose lives, likewise,
are full of evil. But again a girl of admirable rectitude, Denise
Baudu, comes forward to illumine the novelist's pages, and redeem and
ennoble the man who has hitherto regarded her sex as an instrument or a
toy.
When Zola has cast Octave Mouret at the feet of Denise, thereby
exemplifying a pure woman's influence over man, he again transfers his
scene from bustling Paris to a lonely region of the southern provinces,
there to follow the career of Octave's brother, Serge. In "La Faute
de l'Abbé Mouret" (IX) the battle is again one between woman, love,
and man; but a new factor appears--religion--for Serge is a priest,
bound by the unnatural vow of his calling, one of hysterical, mystical
temperament also, enslaved by the superstitions of his creed. In his
tumble-down parsonage and his little, decaying, forsaken church, amid
a semi-savage, brutish peasantry, he long strives to resist the cry of
nature. But she at last asserts her might, and the novelist carries the
reader into the enchanted garden of the Paradou, where love reigns
supreme. Yet the golden hours are brief: the priest is recalled to his
religion of death, and he cannot resist the call, for all the training
of years which has confirmed and increased his mystical tendency comes
back, and he is helpless. Thus the natural life is forsaken for the
illusions and dogmas of a creed; and Albine, whom Serge has loved, is
left forlorn with her unborn babe, to lie down and die amid the perfume
of the flowers with which she has strewn her bed. Serge it is who casts
the symbolical pinch of earth upon her coffin, for he has resumed his
ministry among the brutish peasants, dedicating all his efforts to slay
the sex given him by his God, for instead of living as a man he must
obey the command of his Church and live as an eunuch.
After that battle with nature and love, there comes a companion
picture: the fall of Hélène Mouret in "Une Page d'Amour" (X). She has
hitherto led an absolutely blameless life, but a sudden passion sweeps
her off her feet. A tragic sombreness attends the episode. No glamour
is cast over woman's frailty in Zola's pages. If Hélène tastes an hour
of intoxication she is punished for it as frightfully as any moralist
could desire. Jeanne, her fondly loved daughter, who is devoured by
jealous hysteria, dies as the result of her lapse, and it is only
afterwards, in pity as it were, that Hélène is granted the chance of
beginning her life afresh.
Then the series continues. All the Rougons--excepting one, Pascal, whom
the novelist keeps back till the end--have now been dealt with, the
Mourets also, and the chronicle of the bastard Macquart branch begins.
Antoine Macquart has three children, Lisa, Gervaise, and Jean, and it
is Lisa who supplies the next volume of the series, "Le Ventre de
Paris" (XI), which carries one through and around the great markets of
the French metropolis, as well as into the fine pork-butcher's shop,
which Lisa keeps with her husband, Quenu. This is a volume redolent of
victuals certainly, marked also by the egotism of the shopkeeping and
petty trading classes, with yet a glimpse of one of those conspiracies
which were frequent in the time of Napoleon III, and a backward glance
at the _coup d'état_ by which that sovereign had risen to power. The
chief figure in the story is Quenu's brother, the unhappy Florent, who
has escaped from Cayenne, and whom Lisa, that comfortable egotist,
ends by betraying to the authorities. For that ultra-righteous
deed,--counselled by Lisa's confessor,--and for the savagery of all
the fat fishwives, one is consoled by the presence of honest Madame
François and of Cadine, the little flower-girl, and Marjolin, her
youthful lover, whose smile brightens many a page.
Then, in "La Joie de Vivre" (XII), comes Pauline, whose nature is so
different from that of her mother, Lisa. She has no egotism in her
composition, she would never betray anybody; she is all human devotion
and self-sacrifice. With her we are carried to the seashore, to a
little fisher hamlet, where her guardian Chanteau dwells; and he, his
wife, and his son prey upon her, wrecking her life, though she remains
brave and smiling till the end. And how little joy there may be in life
is shown not only by her case, but by that of the crippled Chanteau,
his embittered, covetous, suspicious wife, his jealous servant, and his
weak-minded son, who tries to be this and that, but succeeds in nothing
and is consumed by a foolish, unreasoning dread of death. It is to
these that Pauline has to minister, for these that she has to sacrifice
herself, even as it often happens that the good have to lay down their
lives for the unworthy.
Pauline, one has said, is very different from her mother, Lisa.
Equally different is Lisa's sister, Gervaise, the pathetic heroine of
"L'Assommoir" (XIII), with which the family chronicle is continued.
Lisa rises, Gervaise falls; so does it happen in many of the world's
families. Zola has now descended through several strata of society,
and has come to the working classes. A deep pathos lies beneath the
picture he traces of them under the bane of drink. At first Gervaise
appears so courageous amid her misfortunes that one can readily grant
her the compassionate sympathy accorded to every trusting woman
whom a coward abandons. There seems hope for her at the outset of
her marriage with Coupeau; a possibility, too, that she may prove
successful when, industrious and energetic, she starts her little
laundry business. But her husband's lazy, drunken ways recoil on her,
the return of the rascally Lantier completes her misfortune, and
then she rolls down hill, to die at last of starvation. The stage of
"L'Assommoir" is crowded with typical figures, some of them perchance
imperishable, for their names have passed into the French language to
serve as designations for one and another degraded character that one
encounters in every-day life. Yet all the personages of Zola's work are
not depraved. Even in this dark book there are a few who point to the
brighter side of human nature, honest Goujet, for instance, and Lalie,
the poor, pitiful "little mother." Gervaise and Coupeau themselves are
not wholly vile. In the midst of their degradation, when she prowls the
boulevard in the snow, when he is dancing madly in his padded cell,
one instinctively retraces their careers back to the early days when
both had looked so hopefully on life; and one recognises that a fatal
environment, more than natural worthlessness, has been the great cause
of their downfall.
Nana already appears--in her childhood and her youth--in the pages
of "L'Assommoir," but Zola does not pass direct from that work to
the later career of Gervaise's daughter. He first takes Gervaise's
elder children, her sons by Lantier; and "L'Œuvre" (XIV) unfolds the
painful story of Claude, the painter, a glimpse of whom has been given
previously in "Le Ventre de Paris." Again in "L'Œuvre," one finds
a record of downfall, but, whereas in "L'Assommoir" it has largely
resulted from environment and circumstances, it now proceeds more
directly from an evil heredity. Claude stands virtually on the border
line that parts insanity from genius, and thus in his career, the
old hypotheses of Moreau of Tours, and those subsequently enunciated
in England by Nesbit, might find play. In the end, after a life of
conflict and misery, insanity triumphs and Claude destroys himself. His
tale, as one has stated previously, is linked with a picture of the
French art-world. Fortunately a current of human interest flows through
the book, for beside Claude the unhappy Christine, his wife, appears:
she, like Gervaise, at first being a good, true, and courageous woman,
one who commits the irremediable mistake of linking her life with that
of a man fated to failure and insanity.
In these last sections of Zola's series the march of degenerescence is
hastened; downfall follows downfall; before long that of individuals
is to be succeeded by a supreme collapse, that of the _régime_ under
which they live. Thus, after "L'Œuvre," comes "La Bête Humaine" (XV),
Claude's brother Jacques, an engine-driver, in whom a murderer appears
among the Rougon-Macquarts. The hereditary virus, transmitted from
Adélaïde Fouque, has turned in him to an insensate craving for woman's
blood, and, frankly, his story is horrible. At the same time, while
one follows the growth of his abominable disease, many a vivid page
arrests attention: awful, yet a masterpiece of colloquial narrative and
full of a penetrating psychology, is Severine's account of the murder
of President Grandmorin; very human is Jacques' love for his engine,
La Lison; and striking are the pictures of the snowstorm, the railway
accident, and the death of Jacques and the stoker Pecqueux, at the end
of the volume, when their train, crowded with soldiers, is seen rushing
driverless, like some great, maddened, blind beast, towards catastrophe
and annihilation.
Next the story of Gervaise's third son, Étienne, is unfolded in
"Germinal" (XVI), this again a tale of the workers, the hardships, the
misery, the degradation of the sweated toilers of the coal-pits, who
are maddened by want to revolt. And then, of course, they are shot down
by the soldiers at the disposal of the capitalists who batten on the
sufferings of labour. A tribute of compassion, a call for justice, a
cry of warning to the rich and powerful--such, as Zola himself said,
is "Germinal." Those who wonder at the hatred of the workers for those
above them, at the spread of socialism throughout France, need merely
read his pages to understand why and how such things have come to pass.
But "Nana" (XVII) now confronts the reader. He has just passed
through the world of labour: drunkenness, degradation, insanity,
crime, revolution have been indicated successively as resultants
of the condition of the masses; and here comes another product of
an evil social system, the low-born harlot who, like an unconscious
instrument of retribution, ascends from her native dung-heap to poison
the _bourgeoisie_ and aristocracy--the rulers, the law-givers, to
whom the existence of that dung-heap and its evil ferments is due. In
"Nana" depravity coruscates. Here is the so-called "life of pleasure"
of the world's great cities, the life of indulgence which recruits
its votaries among all the aristocracies, all the plutocracies, all
the _bourgeoisies_, all the bohemias. To some, Nana may seem to be "a
scourge of God"--assuredly the world's Nanas have wrought more evil
than its Attilas--"a punishment on men for their lewd and lawless
sensuality." In Zola's pages one does not witness merely the ruin and
disgrace of the professedly profligate; one sees also how natural,
youthful desire when exposed to temptation may ripen into depravity
and end in misery. One sees, again, the reflex action of libertinism
on married life--how wives end at times by following the example of
their husbands, and even "bettering the instruction."[1] From first to
last this much-maligned book is a stupendous warning for both sexes, as
great a denunciation of the social evil as ever was penned.
But the scene changes, and in "La Terre" (XVIII) appears Jean Macquart,
soldier and artisan, who becomes a peasant. He, though a brother of
Gervaise, has escaped the hereditary taint, is strong, sensible,
hard-working, a man destined, one might think, to a life of useful
and happy obscurity. But fate casts him among the Fouans, a family of
untutored peasants, barely raised above animality; and a drama of
savage greed and egotism is unfolded around him. Old Fouan, being no
longer able to till his fields himself, divides his property among
his children, who agree to make him an allowance. But he is cheated,
ill-treated, robbed of his savings by them, and finally murdered by
one of his sons. That same son, Buteau, is consumed by a ravenous
earth-hunger, but animal desire is also strong within him. He is both
enamoured and jealous of his wife's sister, Françoise, who is Jean
Macquart's wife, his passion for her being blended with a craving to
appropriate her land. At last she, by violence, becomes his victim, and
in a struggle with her sister, who is present, is thrown upon a scythe
and mortally injured. That crime is witnessed by old Fouan, and it is
for fear lest he should reveal it that he is stifled--then burnt.
From "La Terre" Jean Macquart passes to "La Débâcle" (XIX), for the
time has now come for the great smash-up of that Empire all tinsel
without and all rottenness within. War and invasion descend upon
France. You follow the retreating soldiers from the Rhine to the Meuse,
on that terrible, woeful march to Sedan, where all becomes disaster.
You see the wretched Emperor borne along in the baggage train of his
army, carried, it was thought, to certain death in the hope that France
might then forgive, and allow his son to reign. And you see him under
fire, vainly courting death, which will not take him. Then the horrors
of Bazeilles, the struggle for the Calvary, the great charge, the
hoisting of the white flag, the truce, and the abject surrender follow
in swift succession. Next comes the battlefield after the slaughter,
with the dreadful Camp of Misery, and later, the efforts of the
National Defence, the peace imposed on the vanquished, and then the
Commune's horrors crowning all. But from first to last human interest
is never absent: one finds it in the friendship of Jean for the unlucky
and degenerate Maurice, in the story of Silvine and Prosper, in the
bravery of Weiss, the heroism of Henriette, Jean's love for her, and
the hope that both, hereafter, may be able to begin life afresh and
together, a hope which is blasted by the fatality of civil war, when
brother rushes on brother and blindly slays him.