Therese Raquin - Emile Zola [9]
One day, all three of them set out for a day on the river at Corbeil. After ordering dinner, they hire a boat and, when it is hidden behind the tall trees on an island, Jacques starts a fight with Michel, who bites him on the cheek. After a short struggle, he pushes Michel overboard, then capsizes the boat. Michel is drowned, the two lovers are rescued and no one suspects murder.
Every day, Jacques goes to the Morgue. When at last he recognizes Michel’s body, he feels a shudder of horror, though up to then the thought of the crime has left him unmoved. Hoping to drive away his fears, he marries Suzanne, but the couple find that their passion for one another has cooled and they are haunted by the spectre of Michel. In fact, they come to hate one another, each accusing the other of being responsible for the crime. The scar on Jacques’s face is a permanent reminder of the killing and horrifies Suzanne whenever she sees it.
Finally, their suffering becomes intolerable and each of them decides to get rid of the sole witness to their crime. Finding each other preparing poison, they realize what is happening, burst into tears and take the poison themselves, dying in each other’s arms. ‘Their confession was found on a table, and it was after reading that grim document that I was able to write the story of this love match.’
It is clear that the outlines of Zola’s future novel are in this story, which occupies four pages in the Petits Classiques Larousse edition of Thérèse Raquin, where it is reproduced in full.
Though the final sentence of ‘Un mariage d’amour’ makes it sound like a news story, the inspiration for the plot came from a novel by Adolphe Belot and Ernest Daudet, La Venus de Gordes, which Zola had received from the publisher in his capacity as a book reviewer. This was the melodramatic story of a love affair in the Lubéron, in which a woman and her lover try to poison, then shoot her husband, a crime for which they are imprisoned, the woman eventually dying of yellow fever in the penal colony of Cayenne. There is a long way from this to ‘Un mariage d’amour’, and further still to Thérèse Raquin.
Zola started working on his first major novel early in 1867. In fact, he was engaged on two books: Thérèse Raquin, which he wrote in the mornings; and Les Mystères de Marseille, which occupied his afternoons. He was quite clear in his mind that Thérèse Raquin was the more important of the two. He had proposed it in February to Arsène Houssaye for the periodical La Revue du XIXe siècle, as a development in six parts of ‘Un mariage d’amour’; but by the time the novel was written, in June 1867, La Revue du XIXe siècle had folded, so it was transferred to L’Artiste (another publication of Arsène Houssaye and his son, Henri), where it appeared, under the same title as the short story, Un mariage d’amour, in three parts from August to October, with a few cuts, which the Houssayes had asked for to spare their readers’ sensibilities. In November 1867, the novel appeared in book form under its final title.
‘The work is very dramatic, very poignant, and I am counting on a horror success,’ Zola wrote in a letter of 13 September 1867.20 Those who reviewed the novel on its first appearance (like Louis Ulbach, quoted earlier) saw Zola’s intention, though they did not always share his estimate of the novel’s qualities: ‘a tormented work’, ‘medical dissections’, ‘crude colours’, ‘brutality’, ‘mire, blood and bestial love’, were some of the terms used to describe Zola’s work,21 which was generally ascribed to the genre of the horror novel. The horror element, in this psychological study, is indicated by Zola’s vocabulary. One drawback is the relative poverty of the vocabulary which Zola has at his disposal to describe the psychological