The Debacle - Emile Zola [4]
Hence not only the apparent speciousness but also the choice of characters and points of view. In a historical novel it is unwise to challenge real history by placing well-known figures in the principal roles, but it is equally unwise to omit all known historical figures and try to give a slice of life in another period or setting, for that will produce a boring archaeological reconstruction. Zola avoids these traps by introducing Napoleon III, MacMahon, Bazaine, Thiers, Gambetta and many others episodically or indirectly, as seen through the eyes of lesser mortals. But the front-rank characters in the novel are typical soldiers or civilians representing various kinds of victims or beneficiaries of war.
In a sense the principal part is a dual one, a pair incarnating the two eternal and irreconcilable facets of the French national character: Jean Macquart and Maurice Levasseur. Jean is balanced, reasonable, hard-working, law-abiding and conservative; Maurice is highly intelligent (although his behaviour makes one wonder), but mercurial, brilliant at chicanery and destructive criticism but less so at construction, nervy, dashing, effervescent, but fatally inclined to collapse hysterically under stress. France has ever been thus, one half practising moderation and common sense, the other flying to the most violent extremes. Jean is not young, he is thirty-nine and has been through personal tragedy. He is, though there is little resemblance, brother of the smug, self-centred Lisa Quenu (Le Ventre de Paris) and of the pathetic Gervaise (L’ Assommoir). But the two girls left home early and went to Paris while he stayed in Provence as a carpenter and then served for seven years in the army, after which he became a farm-hand in a horrible village in the Beauce (La Terre). So he has lost touch with them and presumably has never seen his nephews the Lantier boys, Claude (L’ Oeuvre), Jacques (La Bête humaine) and Etienne (Germinal), nor Gervaise’s daughter by Coupeau, the notorious prostitute Nana. On the farm he was bitterly resented as a stranger by the family of the girl he married, and when his wife was brutally murdered by her own sister lest her bit of land should pass to Jean or his children, he left the land, horrified and broken-hearted, and re-enlisted shortly before the outbreak of war. He is perhaps the most healthy and sane member of the whole Rougon-Macquart tribe and certainly by far the best of the Macquarts. Maurice is hardly young either, being twenty-nine, but he was helped and protected by his twin sister, who sacrificed to send him to Paris and train him as a lawyer, and he still behaves as impetuously as a spoilt child. The friendship of these two men is one of the most beautiful human relationships in all Zola’s work. Maurice finds himself in a squad of men under Corporal Macquart. At first there is instinctive aversion and mistrust between the simple peasant and the highbrow intellectual. But Maurice is forced to admire the solid qualities of Jean who in his turn helps Maurice when he is in pain and distress and learns to love him like a brother. Later each saves the life of the other. From then onwards their relationship becomes highly symbolical, as Zola himself is at pains to point out. The two apparently contradictory aspects