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By Root 1297 0

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.

This “absolute and total satisfaction” is altogether kinetic. Zola’s enumeration of visual stimuli—balconies, signs, sidewalks, benches, storefronts—moves as rapidly as the lovers’ coupé, as if to signal slyly that the blur of motion is essential, that none of these delights can bear much scrutiny or be lived with for very long without turning into ennui, the affliction that drives Renée to sin.11The curious