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By Root 840 0

link is the character of Laurent, a young peasant who has come up to Paris and wants to be an artist, not because he is driven by any particular urge to paint, but because he thinks that a painter’s life will be ‘a jolly business, not too tiring’, and allow him to ‘smoke and lark around all day long’ (Chapter V). Zola’s description of Laurent’s paintings, in particular the portrait of Camille, shows how futile this approach is, and this gives the writer an opportunity to describe what painting should not be: Laurent’s technique is ‘stiff, dry, like a parody of the primitive masters’, he is hesitant and he paints ‘with the tips of the brushes ... making short, tight hatching strokes, as he might when using a pencil’ (Chapter VI). Ironically, it is only in a state of nervous collapse following Camille’s murder that Laurent discovers a real talent for painting — evidence of Zola’s belief in the relation between neurosis and artistic creation.

Particular paintings may have directly inspired some of the scenes in the novel: Le Déjeuner sur l‘herbe could well have been in Zola’s mind as he described Thérèse, Laurent and Camille in Saint-Ouen finding a shady spot with a carpet of green where the ‘fallen leaves lay on the ground in a reddish layer’, while the ‘tree trunks were standing upright, numberless, like clusters of Gothic columns, and the branches dipped right down to their foreheads, so that their only horizon was the bronze vault of dying leaves and the black-and-white shafts of the aspens and oaks‘, making ‘a melancholy pit in the silence and cool of a narrow clearing’ (Chapter XI). And the image of the dead girl whom Laurent sees in the Morgue, her ‘fresh, plump body ... paling with very delicate variations of tint ... half smiling, her head slightly to one side, offering her bosom in a provocative manner’ with ‘a black stripe on her neck, like a necklace of shadow’ (Chapter XIII), was probably suggested by Manet’s Olympia, who has a black velvet choker round her neck. In each case, though, if Zola has borrowed from Manet, he has transposed the meaning of the work, giving it a more sinister significance that fits his purpose in the novel.

In any case, it is not necessary to find such direct correspondences between particular paintings and passages in the novel to be aware of the influence of painting on the author. Contemporary critics talked about the ‘painterly’ qualities of his writing. His descriptions are carefully composed, with a strong sense of colour. In Thérèse Raquin, in fact, he uses a palette of dark colours and half-tones to convey a strong sense of chiaroscuro. The adjectives ‘yellow’ and ‘yellowish’ occur with particular frequency, as do ‘greenish’, ‘bluish’, etc., in settings that are dark, dingy and gloomy. Apart from which, Zola’s mind was so imbued with ideas about painting that they influence his whole aesthetic: he wanted to do in literature what painters do on canvas: to represent the reality of nature without mere imitation of nature, discovering its poetic truth and the individual essence of the person creating the work.

Thérèse Raquin was not Zola’s first published work; it came after a rather long literary apprenticeship and an extended reflection on the nature of literature and the tasks of the writer. His first book, which appeared in 1864, was a collection of Provençal stories, the Contes à Ninon. In the following year, he published the semi-autobiographical La Confession de Claude, and this was followed in 1866 by the short novel Le Vœu d‘une morte, a story of love and devotion. He even wrote a serial novel in the manner of Eugène Sue, Les Mysteres de Marseille, which he later dismissed as merely a pot-boiler (though Henri Mitterand and others have found it interesting and pointed out how much time and effort Zola devoted to the work). He was a prolific journalist, a literary and art critic, and the author of an important manifesto, ‘Two Definitions of the Modern Novel’, a paper which he sent to the Congrès scientifique de France, held in Aix-en-Provence in December 1866.

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