The Kill - Emile Zola [3]
Still, if Saccard is the hidden face of empire, its cash nexus, he also stands for a boldness of vision, a will to conquer, that Zola, student of heredity that he was, would have seen as his own father’s legacy.17 Standing above the capital on the Buttes Montmartre like a general on the eve of battle, Saccard explains the broad outlines of his superior’s strategy to a woman who, to his subsequent relief, will carry the secret with her to an early grave, for this is a war that can be won at far less cost if its victims are unaware that it is being waged: “[E]xtending his open hand and wielding it like the sharp edge of a cutlass, he made as if to slice the city into four parts.” Then he speaks to his doomed first wife:
Look, follow my hand. From the boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, one cut; then, over this way, from the Madeleine to the Monceau plain, another cut; and a third cut in this direction, a fourth in that direction, a cut here, another farther out. Cuts everywhere. Paris slashed to pieces with a saber, its veins laid open to provide nourishment for a hundred thousand excavators and masons . . .
Saccard’s “cutlass” lifts the action from the Bourse, which for Zola belongs to the register of the base, the ignoble, to the battlefield, the arena of nobility par excellence. The character of Saccard thus succinctly embodies the ambivalence that always attends what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” We warm ourselves at Prometheus’ fire and complain of liver troubles attendant on the sedentary ways we adopt in order to remain close to the hearth.
AMBIVALENCE AND ANDROGYNY
“Ennui is the enemy,” a guide to the French capital observed in 1867, “and I confess that I cannot understand how anyone can feel bored in Paris.” Yet Renée Saccard, riding in her carriage in the Bois de Boulogne circa 1861, is heard to exclaim, “Oh, I’m bored! I’m bored to death.” The contradiction is more apparent than real, however: variety of sensation not only cannot ward off ennui but is likely to induce it— such is the perversity of the laws of pleasure. Paris, for Henry James, was “the biggest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes . . . such a beauty of light.”18Yet lust, whether of the eyes or the flesh, leads to lassitude: “I would say you’ve tasted every conceivable apple,” Maxime tells his stepmother, but when he asks her what she dreams of, she has no answer other than to say, “I want something different.” Don Juan himself could not have expressed more succinctly the insatiability of mere appetite, as distinct from the more profound desire whose aim is not to fill a recurring void in the desiring subject but to effect an inner metamorphosis. Metamorphosis, however, calls for roundness of character, and Zola’s individuals are, as James accurately lamented, “simple and shallow,” so that “our author’s dealings with [them] . . . maintain their resemblance to those of the lusty bee who succeeds in plumping for an instant . . . into every flower-cup of the garden.” James concedes, however, that “we see enough of the superficial among novelists at large . . . without