Table of Contents

Title Page

INTRODUCTION - Arthur Goldhammer

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

NOTES

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

About the Author

Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION

Arthur Goldhammer

Several years after Emile Zola’s novel The Kill ¹ had run afoul of the Republic’s censor for its outrage to public morals and “gross materialism,” a poet for whom the words of literary language were but the pulsating ghosts of a material world annihilated in the service of the sublime offered him consolation in the form of a letter. Stéphane Mallarmé, whom posterity would assign to an altogether different slope of the literary Olympus from Zola, had just finished reading the sixth novel in the twenty-volume series of which The Kill is the second: the “Rougon-Macquart” saga, in which Zola had set himself the goal of working out the combinatorics of heredity and history that in his mind made orderly taxonomic sense of the profusion of the human jungle. His Excellency Eugène Rougon was in fact devoted to the brother of the hero of The Kill, and while the temporal and geographical locus remained the Paris of the Second Empire (1852–70), the focus of the action had shifted from the world of finance and speculation to that of politics. Yet Mallarmé’s appreciative eye, penetrating beyond the superficialities of plots that can fairly be described in both cases as creaky, remarked the quality that would make the novelist’s work impossible to ignore, even for readers like Henry James, who thought, at this early stage of Zola’s career, prior to the master stroke of L’Assommoir, that it stood out chiefly for its “brutal indecency”²and who found themselves put off by its minute attention to “misery, vice, and uncleanness.”³( James would later revise his judgment substantially, as we shall see.) The quality that appealed to Mallarmé was a certain novelty in the experience of reading: “I read it straight through,” he wrote to Zola of His Excellency, “then read it again piece by piece over several days. [The novel] lends itself to both ways of savoring a work—the old way, which is how it was when novels unfolded like plays, and the new way, which reflects the intermittence of modern life.”⁴

“The intermittence of modern life”: the phrase is especially apposite of The Kill, whose style, in its best passages, is “swift and transparent, like the glance of a contemporary, of your reader,”⁵and whose subject, more than the incestuous relationship between Renée Saccard and her stepson Maxime or the frenetic speculations of Aristide Saccard—husband of the one and father of the other—is in fact “the capital of modern life,” the city of Paris itself. For neither the speculation nor the incest would be conceivable without the modernity that is Paris, and that, far more than the “brutal indecency” of illicit sex, is the true object of Zola’s meditation. And at the heart of that Parisian modernity is ambivalence, for the modern has no fixed identity. It is never anything but the antagonist in a perpetual “quarrel of ancient and modern,” a quarrel in which the ancient, the world we are perpetually losing, provides the only beacons in relation to which the identity of its ineluctably if ephemerally triumphant opponent can be located.

THE CAPITAL OF MODERN LIFE

In The Kill we gaze upon Paris as if attempting to get a fix on our precise location from a variety of angles: from the window of a restaurant high above the city on the Buttes Montmartre; from the children’s aerie atop the Hôtel Béraud on the Ile Saint-Louis; from a carriage ambling through the scenic trumpery and social snobbery of the Bois de Boulogne or racing along new boulevards that paved the gas-lit way to perdition; from a mansion built in obedience to the dictates of “the style Napoléon III, that opulent hybrid of every style that ever existed”;⁶from across the dinner table at a banquet of the rich and powerful; from the muddy ruts of a vast construction site; from inside the studio of an illustrious couturier; from a private room in the Café Riche offering a panorama of gaudily lit kiosks and gaudily dressed streetwalkers. Each of these set-piece descriptions—cinematically precise, with lighting and angles carefully calculated by the auteur⁷— not only establishes a physical ambience but advances a moral argument. Description in Zola is never neutral, innocent, or passive, as the label Naturalist might suggest; it is a rhetorical weapon, a bludgeon with which to induce in the reader Zola’s religious terror of modernity as an implacable, engulfing flood: images of torrents, inundations, swollen seas, and raging rivers abound, but their purpose is to effect a transfer from the register of natural disaster to that of capitalist calamity. Thus urban development is represented by mountainous seas of rooftops; financial legerdemain eventuates in torrential rivers of gold. Mallarmé correctly grasped the intent of Zola’s prose paintings when he remarked, “I admire very much your backgrounds, Paris and its sky. . . . Everything comes from you, horizons included, and when I the reader leave the page to muse, you, bold tyrant that you are, hang a drop curtain behind my reverie.”⁸Naturalism was not so much an unvarnished description of what is as a willful imposition of images of a violence akin to nature’s own on the unnatural order of the new.

A violence akin to nature’s own: it was a problem for a novelist of Zola’s epic ambition that the order of the new, being unnatural, lacked the palpable conflict inherent in the natural order in which the strong devour the weak. The transformation wreaked upon Paris in the years preceding the writing of The Kill—the years of the Second Empire— did not “unfold like a play.” It respected no unities of time or place; its action took place behind closed doors. Its battlefields were contracts and counting houses; its victories, expropriations, and quarter-point discounts on promissory notes. Though an epochal feat, which shaped history as surely as a decisive battle, it was not a feat of arms. It did, however, have a general: Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, “the visionary prefect [of the Seine], who saw himself as an ‘artist of demolition,’ pragmatic, Protestant, modern, efficient.”⁹In the wake of the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, which ultimately elevated Louis Napoleon Bonaparte to the rank of Emperor Napoleon III, Haussmann was tapped to turn Paris into an “urban machine.”¹⁰The function of this machine was to accelerate the flow of goods and consumers and thus to quicken the lifeblood of the French capital. Broad boulevards were its arteries. Zola evokes the rapturous response to the enhanced perfusion of the urban tissue:

The lovers were in love with the new Paris. They often dashed about the city by carriage, detouring down certain boulevards for which they felt a special affection. They took delight in the imposing houses with big carved doors and innumerable balconies emblazoned with names, signs, and company insignia in big gold letters. As their coupé sped along, they fondly gazed out upon the gray strips of sidewalk, broad and interminable, with their benches, colorful columns, and skinny trees. The bright gap stretching all the way to the horizon, narrowing as it went and opening out onto a patch of empty blue sky; the uninterrupted double row of big stores with clerks smiling at their customers; the bustling streams of pedestrians—all this filled them little by little with a sense of absolute and total satisfaction, a feeling of perfection as they viewed the life of the street. . . . They were constantly on the move. . . . Each boulevard became but another corridor of their house.