The Kill - Emile Zola [169]
Régence: the period 1715–1723, during which France was ruled by Philippe d’Orléans, while Louis XV was still a minor.
Mont-Valérien: fort built on a hill west of Paris, near the suburb of Suresnes.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER, an affilitate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, has translated some ninety works from French. His translations have earned him numerous awards, including two French-American Foundation Translation Prizes and the Médaille de Vermeil of the Académie Francaise. He is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
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Maya Angelou
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Edmund Morris
Azar Nafisi
Joyce Carol Oates
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John Richardson
Salman Rushdie
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Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Carolyn See
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Gore Vidal
1. The present work is a translation of La Curée, which Zola wrote in 1870–71 and which first appeared serially in the newspaper La Cloche in September 1871. Publication was halted in November when the publisher received a warning from the censor, but the entire text appeared in book form a few months later. A word about the title: la curée refers to the portion of the kill fed to the hounds after a hunt. The English word quarry has this French word as its root and according to the Oxford English Dictionary possesses this archaic meaning: “Certain parts of a deer placed on the hide and given to the hounds as a reward; also, the reward given to a hawk which has killed a bird.” The novel has been translated twice before: once under the title The Rush for the Spoils: A Realistic Novel, with an introduction by George Moore (the translator is not named), in an undated edition published by C. Marpon and E. Flammarion in Paris (and identified in the Widener Library catalog as “the suppressed English edition”); and once under the title The Kill, in a translation done in 1895 by A. Teixeira de Mattos and published by the Lutetian Society in 1895 but reprinted by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1954 with an introduction by Angus Wilson.
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