The Kill - Emile Zola [2]
Long suites of vast rooms with high ceilings dwarfed the old furniture, which was built low of dark wood. The dusky gloom was peopled solely by the figures in the tapestries, whose large, colorless bodies could barely be made out. All the luxury of the old Paris bourgeoisie was represented here, a luxury as unusable as it was unyielding: chairs whose oak seats were barely covered by a cushion of hemp, beds with stiff sheets, linen chests whose rough boards were singularly hard on frail modern finery.
Although Zola makes a half-hearted attempt at the end of his book to depict this sepulchral solitude as a moral order that would have yielded Renée, his latter-day Phèdre, a happy life had she only bent herself to it, one feels through his pen the libidinal pull of the modern spectacle. He was the son, after all, of a civil engineer, a builder of bridges and canals, a proto-Haussmann possessed of heroic, visionary energy yet caught in the toils of stealthy financiers, who join with death to frustrate him of his prize.12Hence the heroic myth of modernity—Enlightenment made flesh—is one that the son can wholeheartedly embrace. Light indeed becomes a physical and palpable presence in the novel of modern life. Everywhere in Zola’s capital light is the ethereal creator of the new:
All the crystal on the table was as thin and light as muslin, devoid of engraving, and so transparent that it cast no shadow. The centerpiece and other large items looked like fountains of fire. Lightning flashed from the burnished flanks of the warming ovens. The forks, spoons, and knives with their handles of pearl could have been mistaken for flaming ingots. Rainbows illuminated the glassware. And amid this shower of sparks, this incandescent mass, the decanters of wine added a ruby tinge to table linen as radiant as white-hot metal.
Or, again:
It was not yet midnight. Down below, on the boulevard, Paris went rumbling on, prolonging the blaze of daylight before making up its mind to turn in for the night. Wavering lines of trees separated the whiteness of the sidewalks from the murky blackness of the roadway with its thunder of speeding carriages and flash of headlights. At intervals on either side of this dark strip newsdealers’ kiosks blazed forth like huge Venetian lanterns, tall and strangely gaudy, as if they had been set down in these precise places for some colossal illumination. At this time of night, however, their muffled glow was lost in the glare of nearby storefronts.
Similar passages could be multiplied at will. If this light—this very physical light, this blazing gaslight, so different from the notional, metaphorical light of “enlightened” eighteenth-century thought— was to dispel the funereal gloom of the old order, mountains had to be moved: again, mountains real and not metaphorical, mountains of fill and debris, and to mobilize the army of laborers needed to accomplish this, mounds of cash had to be accumulated.13Therein, for Zola, lay the rub. Heroism, noble when visionary and selfless, was obliged to consort with vulgar money men of contemptible ethics, or so Zola imagined them when he placed Saccard’s vulturine sister Mme Sidonie outside the Bourse every afternoon at three o’clock, holding “court for characters as suspect and dubious as herself.” Zola, himself a clerk at Hachette earning 600 francs a month at a time when his heroine was racking up a clothing bill of 257,000 francs, could have known this milieu only at second hand, and he gave in to stereotypes that left no room for the Saint-Simonian social vision that put the brothers Jacob and Isaac Pereire at odds with their coreligionist Baron Rothschild as to the best means of stoking the engines of progress.14Zola’s grasping capitalists are not Jews—Jewish blood does not figure among the hereditary determinants of the Rougon