The Beast Within - Emile Zola [21]
8 An account of the Poinsot murder and the judicial inquiry which followed it is given in Roger L. Williams, Manners and Murders in the World of Louis-Napoleon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), pp. 103-12.
9 Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, p. 1,716.
10 Zola visited Les Halles (the central Paris food market) when preparing Le Ventre de Paris; he visited three Paris department stores when preparing Au Bonheur des Dames; and he went down a mine when preparing Germinal.
11 . The illustration is reproduced in Zola, Œuvres Complètes, edited by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1967), vol. VI, p. 303.
12 Edmond de Goncourt, writing in his Journal on 17 April 1890, refers to the novel as ‘pure invention, imagination and fabrication’ (Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Journal: mémoires de la vie littéraire (Monaco: Les Editions de l‘Imprimerie Nationale de Monaco, 1956), vol. XVII, p. 34). The anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum on 22 March 1890 describes the novel as ‘not true to life’ (quoted in Geoff Woollen (ed.), La Bête humaine: texte et explications (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990), p. 70).
13 Zola’s father was for a while a railway engineer.
14 Even in 1890 there would have been many people alive who could remember the world as it was before the coming of the railway.
15 These procedures are described in Williams, Manners and Murders, pp. 4-15.
16 Zola’s article ‘J’accuse’, in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, the army captain falsely convicted of spying, was published in L’Aurore on 13January 1898.
17 Quoted in James F. McMillan, Napoleon III (New York: Longman, 1991), p. 37.
18 Ibid., p. 49.
19 Ibid., pp. 125-7.
Further Reading
The following suggestions for further reading are restricted to works in English. A fuller Zola bibliography will be found in Henri Mitterand’s two-volume Zola (Paris: Fayard, 2001).
Baguley, David (ed.), Critical Essays on Émile Zola (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).
Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Brown, Frederick, Zola: A Life (New York: Macmillan, 1995).
Burchell, S. C., Imperial Masquerades: The Paris of Napoleon III (New York: Atheneum, 1971).
Guillais, Joëlle, Crimes of Passion: Dramas of Private Life in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by Jane Dunnett (Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Hemmings, F. W. J., Émile Zola, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Hemmings, F. W. J., Culture and Society in France, 1849- 1898 (London: Batsford, 1971), especially chapter 4, ‘Fête Impériale’ .
Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Émile Zola (London: Paul Elek, 1977).
Horne, Alistair, Seven Ages of Paris (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), especially chapter 14, ‘The Second Empire’.
Jones, Colin, Paris: Biography of a City (London: Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2004), especially chapter 9, ‘Haussmannism and the City of Modernity’.
McLynn, Pauline, “‘Human Beasts?”: Criminal Perspectives in La Bête humaine’, in Geoff Woollen (ed.), La Bête humaine: texte et explications (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1990).
McMillan, James, F., Napoleon III (New York: Longman, 1991).
Nye, Robert, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Price, Roger, The French Second Republic: A Social History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972).
Semmens, P. W. B. and A. J. Goldfinch, How Steam Locomotives Really Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Simmons, Jack and Gordon Biddle, The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Walker, Philip, Zola (London: Routledge, 1985).
Williams, Roger L., Manners and Murders in the World of Louis-Napoleon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975).
Wilson, Nelly,