Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [2]
The significance of the cat can be overestimated. After all, the beast does little in the book except what cats do in real life. It hangs around and watches quietly, as its human owners get on with their lives. But Laurent, in his folly, attributes to the cat supernatural powers of understanding and judgement: when he and Thérèse start their affair, the cat seems to be watching them with disapproval; after the murder, it seems to know what has happened to Camille. Perhaps we make a mistake similar to Laurent’s when we think that the cat plays a significant role in the novel. Perhaps the animal is purely for decoration, but few critics would think so. They have often compared François to the cat in Manet’s painting Olympia (exhibited in 1865). From here, they have gone on to see him as a symbol of female sexuality, a ‘familiar’ or demon, and (like Laurent) as the reincarnation of the dead Camille.4 He could be any or all of these things. A modern psychoanalyst might even wish to read something into the fact that the cat has the same name as Zola’s father, François (Francesco), who died when Zola was barely seven years old. But the attention critics have paid to François the cat comes more from a desire to link Zola’s novel to Manet’s painting, because of what one knows to be Manet’s role in Zola’s intellectual life at the time: ‘We will see Olympia’s cat in Thérèse Raquin’s bedroom,’ says Henri Mitterand.5 The presence of this knowing cat in Manet’s painting and in Zola’s novel provides a peg on which to hang the assertion of the artist’s importance to the novelist’s work.
However, this focus on the cat implies some immediate connection, as though one were suggesting that Zola might have seen Manet’s painting in the Salon of 1865 and thought: ‘Ah! I can use that cat!’ This may, indeed, have been the case, but in itself the transfer of the cat to the novel is purely trivial, whereas we know that, in fact, the study of Manet and other painters was of crucial importance to Zola’s thought and to his development as a writer. Rather than influences, in the narrow sense, it is better to think in terms of the aesthetic climate in which Zola was working, at a formative moment in his life and a time of great intellectual excitement. The constituents of that environment can be summed up under the heading of four names: Paris; Édouard Manet; Honoré de Balzac; and Claude Bernard.
Paris is where Émile Zola was born, the son of a civil engineer; but when he was three years old the family moved south, to Aix-en-Provence, because his father was to work on building what is now called the Canal Zola. Then, in April 1847, the father, François Zola, died suddenly of pneumonia, caught apparently during a coach journey to Marseille. Émile and his mother stayed on in Aix, where from 1852 he boarded at the College Bourbon. One of his fellow pupils and close friends (among a collection of otherwise rather unsympathetic schoolmates) was the painter Paul Cézanne.
François Zola had left a complicated financial legacy, and his wife, Emilie, was to spend many years in an unsuccessful battle to retrieve a share of the capital of the canal company from François’s main backer, the politician Jules Migeon. It was in order to further this suit that she eventually settled in Paris, leaving her son at school and, in the holidays, with his grand-parents in Aix. Then, in February 1858, after the death of her own mother, Emilie called on Émile to join her. At the age of seventeen he returned to the capital to finish his studies at the Lycée Saint-Louis.
The young Zola must have felt a great sense of excitement and new horizons