Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [108]
The bodies stayed throughout the night on the dining-room floor, twisted, arched and lit by the streaks of yellowish light cast by the shade of the lamp. And for nearly twelve hours, until the following day around noon, Mme Raquin, silent and unmoving, stared at them where they lay at her feet, unable to have enough of the spectacle, crushing them with her merciless gaze.
Notes
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1868)
1 temperament, not character: See Introduction, pp. xxvi-xxvii.
2 compelled to call their ‘remorse’: See Introduction, p. xxix.
3 the back stage: The accusation of hypocrisy had been made in similar terms by the Goncourts in the Preface to Germinie Lacerteux: the public, they said, ‘likes saucy little books, the memoirs of whores, bedroom confessions, erotic filth ...’
4 two or three men who can read, understand and judge a book: Zola is thinking in particular of the critics Hippolyte Taine and Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve.
5 to the background of a novel: Taine, in a letter early in 1868, makes comparisons with Shakespeare, Dickens and Balzac, as well as criticisms which are very similar to the ones that Zola mentions: ‘a book should always be, more or less, a portrait of the whole, a mirror to an entire society ... You need to enlarge your framework and balance your effects.’ (Quoted in the Petits Classiques Larousse edition of Thérèse Raquin (see Further Reading), p. 441 .)
6 ‘putrid literature’: A reference to the review of Thérèse Raquin in Le Figaro, 23 January 1868, by Louis Ulbach (see Introduction, p. xiii).
CHAPTER I
1 Passage du Pont-Neuf... Rue Mazarine ... Rue de Seine: ‘You describe the Passage du Pont-Neuf,’ Sainte-Beuve said in his letter to Zola (10 June 1868). ‘I know this arcade as well as anyone ... [it is] flat, banal, ugly and, above all, narrow, but it does not possess the deeply melancholy colour and the Rembrandtesque shades that you ascribe to it ...’ The arcade in question is on the Left Bank of the Seine, but in 1912 it was rebuilt and renamed Rue Jacques-Callot. The Rue Mazarine, a street leading towards the river, forms a junction with the eastern end of the Rue Saint-André-des-Arts. The Rue de Seine runs from the Quai Malaquais to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, at right angles to the Passage du Pont-Neuf.
2 fifteen sous: The unit of currency was the franc, divided into a hundred centimes. A sou was worth five centimes, but in the plural the word was (and still is) commonly used to mean a small amount of money. Five francs was worth about one American dollar or four English shillings (one-fifth of a pound sterling).
CHAPTER II
1 . Vernon: A small town in Normandy on the Seine.
2 Algeria: The French conquest of Algeria began in 1830 and was more or less complete by the time this novel was written, though, as one can see from the fate of Captain Degans, it was not an entirely safe posting for the army. The country became an important colony with a large population of settlers from around the Mediterranean, and was to remain French until the war of independence (1954-62). It forms the background to travel writings and novels, and is frequently mentioned in nineteenth-century literature.
CHAPTER III
1 . the Orléans Railway Company: One of five railway companies in France, set up in 1838, it had its headquarters in the Gare d‘Orléans, now the Gare d’Austerlitz, which was rebuilt in 1867-8.
2 from the Institut to the Jardin des Plantes: The Institut is the building housing the five former royal academies, including the Académie Française. It moved to this building on the Left Bank of the Seine