The Kill - Emile Zola [170]
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,