2. Henry James, “Letter from Paris: Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, ” in Henry James, Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 861.

3. Henry James, “Une Page d’Amour,” ibid.

4. Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 343– 4.

5. Ibid., p. 344.

6. All quotes not otherwise identified are from this translation of The Kill.

7. Zola was already an indefatigable researcher. His description in the novel’s opening scene of the procession of carriages in the Bois de Boulogne was lifted almost verbatim from a newspaper account; only the names were changed. And the contrast between ancient and modern in the realm of architecture was worked up from notes of the author’s explorations around the Parc Monceau and on the Ile Saint-Louis. See Emile Zola, Carnets d’enquêtes: une ethnographie inédite de la France, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris: Plon, 1986), and D. Baguley et al., La Curée de Zola: ou “La vie à outrance”: actes du colloque du 10 Janvier 1987 (Paris: SEDES, 1987).

8. Here Mallarmé was writing about Une page d’amour, but the comments apply equally well to The Kill. Quoted in Brown, Zola, p. 396.

9. Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 179.

10. Higonnet, Paris, p. 193.

11. “Sin” here is intended in a nostalgic sense, an “ancient” category with no counterpart in modern life. For Zola, there can be no sin in the modern capital because there is no Judge. It is this absence of judgment that deprives Renée of the singular damnation she expects as a reward for the audacity of her transgression. But no one will condemn her action as she desires: not her upright magistrate father, who in old age is so bewildered by the vertiginous changes in society that he has lost his bearings; not her husband, for whom profit trumps punishment; and not God, who has vacated the heavens above the Bois de Boulogne: “Above the still lake and squat trees and singularly unrelieved vista stretched the hollow of the sky, the infinite emptiness, wider and deeper than what lay below. There was something thrilling, something vaguely sad, about such a huge expanse of sky hanging over such a tiny patch of nature.” These lines were published a decade and a half before Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

12. See Brown, Zola, p. 40, on Zola’s mother’s efforts to reclaim part of that prize by way of litigation, reminiscent of Mme Sidonie’s litigiousness in The Kill.

13. See Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

14. See Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

15. Higonnet, Paris, p. 194.

16. Brown, Zola, p. 579: “All my works bear witness against the possibility of my having contributed to a book whose form and philosophy, whose means and end are equally obnoxious to me.”

17. Although the character of Eugène Rougon was widely believed to have been modeled after the imperial politician Eugène Rouher, Zola’s friend Paul Alexis said that it was in fact the character Zola would have been had he chosen to invest his intelligence in politics rather than literature.

18. Higonnet, Paris, p. 289.

19. Henry James, “Emile Zola,” in James, Literary Criticism, p. 894.

20. Ibid., p. 892.

21. Letter to W. D. Howells, quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 300.

22. Letter to T. B. Aldrich, quoted in Edel, Henry James, p. 300.

EMILE ZOLA

Emile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of François Zola, a civil engineer of Italian extraction, and his wife Emilie. In 1843 the family moved to Aix-en-Provence, where Emile lost his father at the age of six. In youth he became friendly with the future painter Paul Cézanne, after whom Zola would model a character in L’Oeuvre, a novel about bohemian Paris that put a severe strain on their friendship.

The widow Zola moved with her son to Paris in 1857 to pursue legal matters stemming from the tangled business affairs her husband had left behind after his death. An indifferent student, Emile twice failed the examination for the baccalauréat and eventually took employment as publicity director for the publisher Hachette. His first book, a collection of stories entitled Les Contes à Ninon, appeared in 1864. A novel, Thérèse Raquin, published in 1867, established his reputation. By 1869 he had conceived the ambitious plan of writing a series of twenty novels that would trace the fortunes of a family, the Rougon-Macquart. With these books Zola intended to give a vivid illustration of contemporary theories about the influence of heredity and milieu on human development while at the same time bestowing dramatic form on the history of the French nation. The Kill (La Curée in French) was the second title to appear in that series, in 1871. His reputation grew with the publication of L’Assommoir in 1877, and the sensation caused by Nana in 1880 made him wealthy as well as notorious and catapulted him to the head of the literary movement known as Naturalism.

By the 1890s he had become France’s most famous writer, extolled by some, reviled by others. At his country seat in Médan he received the nation’s literary elite and with assiduous effort rounded out the Rougon-Macquart saga he had first conceived a quarter of a century earlier. He might have ended his life as an eminent man of letters had it not been for the Dreyfus Affair. It took some time for Zola to be drawn into the movement that had grown up in protest against the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French artillery and a Jew, on charges that he had betrayed France. At last convinced that the evidence against Dreyfus had been fabricated, Zola mustered up the considerable courage needed to brave the howls of anti-Semites and nationalists that greeted the publication of his famous open letter, “J’accuse,” in L’Aurore in 1898. Charged with slander, he fled to England, where he remained until 1899. In 1902 he died of asphyxiation in his Paris apartment.

2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Translation and introduction copyright © 2004 by Arthur Goldhammer

Biographical note copyright © 2004 by Random House, Inc.

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Zola, Emile.

 [Curée. English]

The kill / Emile Zola; translated by Arthur Goldhammer.

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1. Goldhammer, Arthur. II. Title.

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