Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [3]
At the same time, during these years of penury, he was discovering Paris. He was a keen flâneur (if one can be keen about strolling) and wandered around the city in the heyday of the Second Empire, at a time when it was being transformed by the efforts of Baron Haussmann. Haussmann, Prefect of Paris, was responsible for the major programme of rebuilding between 1853 and 1869, which destroyed many remnants of the medieval city, putting in their place the broad avenues of the grand boulevards and other characteristic features of modern Paris. Many other buildings, including most of those mentioned in Thérèse Raquin, were being pulled down and rebuilt at the time. This city in transition forms the background to many of Zola’s novels in Les Rougon-Macquart.
The city has a less obvious, but still important, role in this earlier novel. The Paris of Thérèse Raquin is not the Paris of high society, finance, politics or business. Nor is it precisely the working-class Paris of L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den). Its characters all come from the lower-middle classes: junior civil servants, officials, clerks and shopkeepers. The city in which they live is not the glamorous Paris of the boulevards, the Opera and the tourist sights (though they may walk along the Champs-Élysées on a Sunday); theirs is the Paris of dingy backstreets and dank, ill-lit premises; of railway offices; of the Morgue.
Above all, it is the Paris of the Seine. The river is constantly present. It passes only a few steps from the Passage du Pont-Neuf, where Thérèse and Mme Raquin live; they have moved here from the little Norman town of Vernon, which also lies on the Seine, about fifty-five kilometres downriver from Paris. Laurent comes from the village of Jeufosse, built around an island in the river, between Vernon and Mantes-la-Jolie. Camille and Laurent work for the Orléans Railway Company, which had its headquarters in the Gare d‘Orléans, right beside the Quai d’Austerlitz (it is now known as the Gare d‘Austerlitz). Camille is drowned at Saint-Ouen, on that wide meander of the Seine to the north-west of Paris, and his body ends up in the Morgue, on the Quai de l’Archevêché, on the tip of the Île de la Cite. Of this novel, if of any, it could be said that a river runs through it.
The Seine, however, is not just any watercourse; it is the main artery of Paris. The city, like all large cities during the nineteenth century, had come to be seen not only as a place of culture and civilized society, or even as a place of opportunity (the role that Balzac eventually gives it in Le Père Goriot), but also increasingly as a site of poverty, misery, loneliness, alienation, crime, vice and degradation. The young Zola had experienced the excitement of arriving in Paris as an ambitious young poet with the future ahead of him, but he had also experienced disappointment and poverty. He had known the bohemian Paris where he had his first sexual experience and lived with his first mistress. He had seen the filth and cold of the city, witnessed what it could do to those who failed, and sensed the terrible realities hidden in its meaner streets. This, too, was exciting, the stuff of literature, whether in the poems of Baudelaire or the popular novels of Eugène Sue.
The river in Thérèse Raquin has several faces, but they are mainly sinister or, at least, negative ones. At Vernon, Mme Raquin has a garden that goes right down to the