Therese raquin emile zola pdf

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Table of Contents

Title Page Copyright Page Introduction THERESE RAQUIN

Preface to the Second Edition (1868) I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI XXII XXIII XXIV XXV XXVI XXVII XXVIII XXIX XXX

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XXXI XXXII Notes

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THÉRÈSE RAQUIN

ÉMILE ZOLA, born in Paris in 1840, was brought up in Aix-en-Provence in an atmosphere of struggling poverty after the death of his father in 1847. He was educated at the College Bourbon at Aix and then at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris. After failing the baccalauréat twice and then taking menial clerical employment, he joined the newly founded publishing house Hachette in 1862. and quickly rose to become head of publicity. Having published his first novel in 1865 he left Hachette the following year to become a full-time journalist and writer. Thérèse Raquin appeared in 1867 and caused a scandal, to which he responded with his famous Preface to the novel’s second edition in 1868 in which he laid claim to being a ‘Naturalist’. That same year he began work on a series of novels intended to trace scientifically the effects of heredity and environment in one family: Les Rougon-Macquart. This great cycle eventually contained twenty novels, which appeared between 1871 and 1893. In 1877 the seventh of these, L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den), a study of alcoholism in working-class Paris, brought him abiding wealth and fame. On completion of the Rougon-Macquart series he began a new cycle of novels, Les Trois Villes: Lourdes, Rome, Paris (1894-8), a violent attack on the Church of Rome, which led to another cycle, Les Quatre Évangiles. While his later writing was less successful, he remained a celebrated figure on account of the Dreyfus case, in which his powerful interventions played an important part in redressing a heinous miscarriage of justice. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless, but his happy, public relationship in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, brought him a son and a daughter. He died in mysterious circumstances in 1902., the victim of an accident or murder.

ROBIN BUSS is a writer and translator who works as a freelance journalist and as television critic for The Times Educational Supplement. He studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree and doctorate in French literature. He is part-author of the article ‘French Literature’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica and has published critical studies of works by Vigny and Cocteau, and three books on European cinema, The French through Their Films (1988), Italian Films (1989) and French Film Noir (1994). He has translated a number of other volumes for Penguin, including Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir and Au Bonheur des Dames.

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First published 1867

This translation first published 2004 10

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Introduction

(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the details of the plot explicit.)

Thérèse Raquin is the only one of Émile Zola’s works outside his novel-cycle Les Rougon- Macquart and his polemic J‘Accuse that is widely read. Indeed, with a few individual works from that twenty-volume cycle, it represents the height of his achievement as a novelist. Published in 1867, when Zola was only twenty-seven, it was not his first work of fiction, but it is the book that established his reputation as one of the outstanding novelists of the younger generation. Denounced by the critic of Le Figaro as ‘putrid’, ‘a pool of filth and blood’,1 it achieved a notoriety that would pursue Zola throughout his life and, at the same time, established the ‘experimental’ method that he would apply in the twenty volumes of Les Rougon-Macquart. We can say, with his biographer Henri Mitterand, that ‘Zola’s career as a novelist only really begins with Thérèse Raquin.’2

The novel does, however, differ from the later works in some important respects. Les Rougon- Macquart was a hugely ambitious project, designed (according to its subtitle) to constitute ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’.3 The individual volumes in the cycle centre on a particular aspect of life in that period: provincial and national politics (La Fortune des Rougon, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon); the Parisian working class (Le Ventre de Paris, L’Assommoir); the industrial working class (Germinal); the peasantry (La Terre); and so on. Entering into these different milieux is part of the pleasure of reading Zola, and he supported the fictional narrative with extensive documentary research — into life in a large department store, for example, when writing Au Bonheur des Dames, or among workers on the railway, for L a Bête humaine. Behind the chief protagonists in all these novels, one is aware of a host of minor figures and, beyond them, of the crowd: the crowd in the Parisian streets and markets, the shoppers in the department store, the miners, politicians, priests, soldiers, stockbrokers, workers and peasants who populate the background of the picture.

This is not the case in Thérèse Raquin. Here is a tale of adultery, murder and madness, set mainly in a single location and with a cast of four leading characters and four minor ones (five, if we count the cat, François). Only during the scenes on the river (Chapters XI and XII) and in the Morgue (Chapter XIII) does one have any sense of other people moving around in the background; only very exceptionally does the writer introduce another character with a speaking part, like the painter who makes a fleeting appearance in Chapter XXV. For the rest of the time, he concentrates our attention on Thérèse, Camille, Laurent and Madame Raquin, with occasional appearances by the group of guests who visit them every Thursday: Grivet, the Michauds, father and son, the son’s wife, Suzanne; and, of course, by the cat. In the forefront of this picture is Thérèse, the half-Arab orphan who is abandoned by her father to be brought up by her aunt, the haberdasher, Madame Raquin. Thérèse has to compete for her aunt’s affections with her cousin, Madame Raquin’s sickly son, Camille. It is an uneven

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struggle. Camille gets all the attention, while Thérèse learns to hold in her frustration and resentment, her natural energy and health smothered by the possessive mother and feeble son. When the time comes, she accepts marriage to Camille for want of anything better and prepares for a life of endless Thursday evenings playing dominoes in the company of Madame Raquin’s friends: the former policeman, Michaud, and his son, and the railway clerk, Grivet. The stage is set for a tragedy that will be set off by the arrival of Camille’s friend Laurent, a sturdy lad, self-indulgent and unscrupulous, who releases the full force of Thérèse’s passionate nature — under the watchful eye of François, the cat.

The novel is intentionally claustrophobic. Thérèse Raquin is a chamber piece, a melodrama, a horror story about two murderers who descend into madness, haunted by the shade of their victim and observed eventually by a paralysed woman, who cannot move or speak, but has to listen and watch as they disintegrate in front of her. We are meant to share her feeling of powerlessness and revulsion. We are fascinated spectators of what happens to Thérèse and Laurent, alongside the stricken Madame Raquin — and the equally mute and eloquent cat.

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.

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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 at this return to Paris from the provinces, though for many years his life in the capital was to be hard. Emilie failed to obtain any money from her lawsuit and her husband’s estate. Émile fell ill and left the lycée without passing his baccalauréat, and for two years he was obliged to earn a living by taking menial clerical jobs, until he joined the dispatch department of the publishing firm Hachette in March 1862. At the same time, he was reading and writing voraciously. He even considered becoming one of the many writers employed by the prolific Alexandre Dumas, but when he made inquiries, he found that Dumas was not recruiting ghosts for the moment.

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

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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 Seine where Thérèse likes to lie in the grass, thinking of nothing; but even here she fantasizes that the river is about to rise up and engulf her. Camille enjoys strolling beside the river on his way to and from work, watching it flow and, like Thérèse, has no thoughts in his head; but the river is not to be lucky for him. After the murder, Laurent sees dreadful visions in the Seine at night, though he later finds a moment of peace strolling along the quais, momentarily forgetting his crime ...

The river, linking the places and people in the book, has a symbolic function, as do so many inanimate objects in Zola’s work. One can also read it as a mythical place, the river Lethe, river of oblivion and death; or see it as a figure for the unconscious, for dark desires and for the terrors of the mind. Zola himself, like Laurent, lived for a while in the Rue Saint-Victor, a few minutes’ walk from the quais, he worked briefly for the Compagnie des Docks, he spent summer afternoons lazing on the water at Vitry. He must often have walked along the banks of the Seine, especially at times when he was unemployed, staring into the river, as his characters do in Thérèse Raquin.

The Seine, as it flowed through the peaceful landscape of northern France, had an increasing appeal for writers and artists. Among the latter, the trend was towards subjects taken from everyday life, landscapes painted (or at least sketched) in the open and scenes of simple people engaged in ordinary activities: the peasants of Jean-François Millet’s L’Angélus (1859), for example. Millet spent much of his life in the Norman riverside village of Barbizon, which gave its name to a school of painting dedicated to the countryside and the open air.

Zola had come to Paris from Aix with instructions from his school friend Paul Cézanne to report back on the art scene in the capital, and this he did, giving an account of the Salon of 1859, the biennial exhibition sponsored by the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the official showcase for new work in the visual arts. Already, the Salon was starting to reflect conflicts between different trends, and it was turned into a battleground with the arrival of the Impressionists in the 1860s, though the seeds of these upheavals were sown in 1859, when works submitted by Manet and Whistler were

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rejected by the Académie.

In 1861, a painting by Pissarro was also rejected by the Salon committee, and protests from the younger painters grew. The emperor, Napoleon III, demanded that for the following exhibition, in 1863, the painters who had been rejected by the Académie should be allowed to exhibit their works in another part of the Palais de l‘Industrie, in what became known as the Salon des Refuses. It was at the first of these that Édouard Manet exhibited his pastoral scene Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which showed two young students, fully clothed in modern dress, apparently enjoying a picnic beside a naked woman, with another bathing in the river behind them. The Empress Eugénie was shocked by this canvas and it caused a scandal.

Zola wrote a passionate defence of Le Déjeuner sur l‘herbe and Manet’s other outrageous painting, Olympia (the one with the cat). As Robert Lethbridge argues, Zola may have seen Manet’s notoriety as a means to establish his own name, even though Manet himself may have had doubts about ‘such blatant exercises in publicity’.6 He would become an acquaintance of Manet, of Pissarro and of other writers and painters. In late 1867, Zola sat for a portrait by Manet, which was exhibited in the Salon in 1868. He would later record the artistic life of the 1860s and the struggle of the Impressionists in one of the novels of Les Rougon-Macquart, L’Œuvre (1886). Outside literature, painting was the art that interested him most. He often referred to Manet as a ‘Naturalist’ painter, using the word to associate the new, anti-Romantic movement in art with his own practice in literature.

This connection with the world of the plastic arts is reflected in various ways and at different levels in Thérèse Raquin. The most overt 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

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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.

He was also reading a good deal, going to the theatre, visiting exhibitions, talking to a widening circle of friends — all of which helped to define what he saw as the current situation of literature and the writer’s task. Zola had read with interest the exiled Victor Hugo’s essay on literary genius, William Shakespeare (1864). The 1860s saw a continuing reaction against Romanticism in literature, with the publication in 1866 of the first volume of Le Parnasse contemporain, an anthology of poetry including work by Paul Verlaine, Leconte de Lisle and Stéphane Mallarmé: Zola was to make fun of these Parnassians a couple of years later in an article for L’Événement illustré; he was no longer greatly interested in poetry, despite his schoolboy efforts at writing verse.

His chief concern was the novel, a form that carried less prestige than poetry, but had a much wider appeal to an increasingly literate public. If it was to establish and retain its status as a major literary form, it would have to demonstrate that it was not merely frivolous entertainment, but a literary art, offering at the same time a means to analyse human psychology and human society. The historical novel, popular in the earlier years of the century, had revealed new possibilities for the genre as an analytical tool, and Balzac had shown how fiction could use an imaginative construct to explore the workings of society in the novels of La Comédie humaine.

Zola greatly admired Balzac, whom he discovered only in the mid 1860s: he praised in particular

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Balzac’s ability ‘to see both the inside and the outside of contemporary society’.7 Eventually, Les Rougon-Macquart would be an enterprise comparable to Balzac’s, doing for the Second Empire what La Comédie humaine had done for the Restoration: the opening of Thérèse Raquin, carefully situating the coming action with its description of the Passage du Pont-Neuf, has a decidedly ‘Balzacian’ feel, recalling the scene-setting first pages of novels such as Le Père Goriot and César Birotteau. The aim is to establish a realistic environment in which the characters can develop, both as individuals and as representatives of their class and time.

The break with the fantastic story-telling of the Romantics and, at the same time, with the popular novel of adventure and melodrama, was most decisively made by the novelist whom Zola would come to admire most among his contemporaries: Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary had been published in book form in 1857, but was already the subject of a prosecution for obscenity and blasphemy when it appeared as a serial in the previous year (charges on which Flaubert was acquitted). Zola would soon be able to sympathize with Flaubert’s predicament — and also to appreciate how useful a sensational controversy could be for the sales of a novel and the fame of its author. Throughout his life, he was happy to attract controversy and to exploit his reputation for scandal.

Zola came late to Flaubert’s masterpiece, as he had done to Balzac, not reading Madame Bovary until the mid 1860s; but it made an enormous impression. The story of the adulterous doctor’s wife, who dreams of romance and commits suicide after an unhappy love affair, was important to him on many counts, including as an analysis of the tedium of contemporary provincial society and as an exercise in style. Flaubert’s method was as far removed as one could imagine from that of prolific popular novelists such as Alexandre Dumas or Eugène Sue: he honed every word, he wrote and rewrote tirelessly, he had an almost religious veneration for his art and he aimed as far as possible to remove the artist from his work. The writer was to be a recorder of reality who shrank from nothing: the description of Emma Bovary’s death from poisoning makes no concessions to the sensibilities of the susceptible reader; nor does it, on the other hand, indulge in the horror for its own sake. The writer merely observes and refuses to turn away. Flaubert, for Zola, was ‘the pioneer of the century, the painter and philosopher of our modern world’.8

Flaubert’s immediate imitators included the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, now remembered chiefly as the authors of a literary journal. In 1864, they published their fifth novel, Germinie Lacerteux, the story of a servant girl’s descent into alcoholism, degradation and hysteria. The writers’ brief Preface — ‘the public likes false novels, this is a true one’ — became a manifesto of Naturalism. They began by proclaiming that, in a democratic age, the ‘lower orders’ deserved to be the subject of a novel, and that the novel, as a genre, was now ‘the great, serious, passionate and vital form of literary study and social inquiry’, having taken upon itself ‘the studies and duties of science’. The Goncourts were aware of the influence of their method and subject matter on Zola, their younger contemporary, whom they referred to in a rather proprietorial manner as ‘our admirer and our pupil’.9

Even when literary and artistic Romanticism was at its height in France, in the 1820s and 1830s, there had been critics who saw it as a futile reaction against an age that was becoming increasingly scientific and utilitarian. ‘The idea of beauty presided over the civilization of Antiquity; modern

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society is increasingly dominated by those of truth, justice and utility,’ one wrote in the Revue encyclopédique in 1828,10 and this argument helped to explain the social alienation of the Byronic outsider. Zola was to use a similar contrast between the novel in Antiquity (‘a pleasant lie, a tissue of wonderful adventures’) and the modern novel, adapted to the ‘scientific and methodical tendencies of the modern world’.11 Balzac, in his Preface to the Comédie humaine, had put forward the idea of the novelist as a kind of natural scientist, classifying society in much the same way as Buffon12 had classified the natural world: ‘there will always be social species as there are zoological species’.

The image that Zola uses most frequently is not the Balzacian one of the Naturalist, but that of the surgeon. In the Preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin,13 in which he defends the novel against its critics, he writes of having performed ‘on two living bodies the analytical work that surgeons carry out on dead ones’; and he sees himself as ‘a mere analyst, who may have turned his attention to human corruption, but in the same way as a doctor becomes absorbed in an operating theatre’. The writer, he insists, is describing, analysing, representing with the detachment of an artist looking at his nude model or a doctor examining a patient.

It is not surprising, therefore, that he finds the ultimate philosophical underpinning of what he is doing not in art or literature, but in science. The title of his theoretical work Le Roman experimental (1880) should not be read in what would almost certainly be its modern meaning, referring to fiction that experiments with literary form. What Zola means is the novel as experiment, in the scientific sense, adopting a title that deliberately echoes the doctor and scientist Claude Bernard’s Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (1865) and La Science expérimentale (1878). The first of these was among the works that most influenced Zola’s intellectual development in the years leading up to the writing of Thérèse Raquin, with its description of the application of scientific method to medicine and the need for systematic observation and verification.

The underpinning of Bernard’s ideas came from the Positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, whose Cours de philosophie positive had been published between 1830 and 1842. With the anti-Romantic critics of the 1830s, Comte believed that humankind had entered a stage of development dominated by positive, scientific understanding, which could be applied not only to the natural world, but also to society; it was to be based on observation of material phenomena and on experience, rejecting theoretical or metaphysical propositions that could not be verified by experiment or observation.

Comte’s philosophy was to influence Zola particularly through the writings of the critic and historian Hippolyte Taine, whom he may first have encountered thanks to one of his teachers at the lycée, Pierre-Émile Levasseur,14 and he would certainly have encountered Taine later, after he started to work for the publisher Hachette, Taine being one of their authors. It was through Taine that he came to appreciate Balzac, and he would pay tribute to the critic in a long article in La Revue contemporaine (15 February 1866), later saying of Taine that ‘he is, in our age, the highest manifestation of our curiosities, or of our need to analyse, of our desire to reduce everything to the pure mechanism of the mathematical sciences’.15

Taine’s literary and historical criticism was based on a Positivist approach that saw writers, like other historical figures, as the product of ‘race, milieu, moment’. But if the task of the critic is to study

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the work of writers who are shaped by their heredity and their environment, why should the writer not treat the characters in fiction in the same way? They, too, can be treated as the product of a particular race, milieu and historical moment. The novel, instead of being a mere fantasy, will become a laboratory in which the novelist carries out his experiment, a scientific instrument for the analysis of individuals and society.

Of course, Zola was writing in the days before Freud and psychoanalysis; theories of human psychology contained elements that we would nowadays find odd. In particular, doctors still believed in the idea of ‘temperament’, which derived from the medieval concept of ‘humours’. According to the Larousse dictionary of 1875, human temperaments could be divided up into bilious, sanguine, nervous and lymphatic, with an additional category, phlegmatic (a combination of lymphatic and bilious). The nervous and sanguine temperaments were to be considered more or less normal, while the bilious and lymphatic were weaker and pathological.16

The Larousse dictionary shows that there had been some development in the concept since the Middle Ages. For a start, the melancholic temperament had been discarded, and the temperaments were no longer considered to be so closely related to particular organs of the body or to the four elements, earth, air, fire and water. Nor were they thought of as innate: a person’s temperament could alter according to circumstances, so there were cases of ‘mixed’ temperaments and many individuals were unclassifiable. But the basic theory — that humans could be divided into psychological types according to certain physiological criteria — was still accepted, not least by Zola. ‘In Thérèse Raquin I set out to study temperament, not character,’ he wrote in the Preface to the second edition, meaning by this that he wanted to show how human beings of a particular disposition react when placed in a given set of circumstances. And throughout the novel he refers to the sanguine temperament of Laurent and the nervous temperament of Thérèse, these two temperaments being opposite and complementary. Laurent is earthy, driven by his animal needs, while Thérèse is nervous, changeable, hysterical; and each of the main protagonists in the novel has physical characteristics that correspond to the traditional descriptions of his or her particular temperament: Laurent’s ruddy cheeks, Thérèse’s pale face and the lymphatic Camille’s blond hair. 17 What Zola aims to do here is exactly what he attributed to the Goncourts in his review of Germinie Lacerteux: putting ‘a certain temperament in contact with certain facts and certain beings’.18 And the Goncourts themselves had written in their diary: ‘Since Balzac, the novel has had nothing in common with what our fathers understood by “novel”. The present-day novel is made with documents described or noted down from nature, just as history is made out of written documents.‘19 The ‘milieu’ and the ‘moment’ were ready for Zola’s first serious attempt to apply his theories in Thérèse Raquin.

In December 1866, Zola published a short story in Le Figaro under the ironic title ‘Un mariage d’amour’ (‘A Love Match’). This tells how a young man, Michel, marries a ‘thin, nervous’ girl, Suzanne, who is ‘neither ugly, nor beautiful’. For three years they live together in harmony, until Suzanne starts to fall passionately in love with one of her husband’s friends, Jacques. Tacitly, the two lovers get the idea of killing Michel.

One day, all three of them set out for a day on the river at Corbeil. After ordering dinner, they hire

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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.