Ask Emile Zola!

Got a problem? Renowned 19th-century French novelist, critic, political activist, and advice columnist Emile Zola answers all questions!

Dear Emile Zola,

I work in the accounting department of a small firm in the Midwest. My immediate supervisor is a very nice guy, but he wears an overwhelming amount of cheap aftershave every day. My colleagues and I get dizzy and nauseous every time he stops by our cubicle. How can we gently (he is our boss, after all!) suggest to him that, in this case, less would definitely be more?

Signed,
Arrivederci Aroma?

Dear Aroma,

Your problem is surprisingly common — I hear from people in this situation quite often. Yet all you need do is to follow these few easy steps.

First, murder your supervisor. Either a stabbing in a deserted alley or an “accident” in a rowboat will do. After a decent interval (three or four days should suffice), you can take over his job, seduce and marry his widow, and move into his apartment. All your problems will be solved, unless of course you and your new wife eventually become so consumed with remorse and suspicion that you kill each other. Good luck!

*

Dear Emile Zola,

I’m in my early 20s and quite shy. I’ve met a much older man whom I find attractive, and I believe he may find me attractive, too. I can’t work up the nerve to ask him out, much less find a way to let him know that I’d really like for him to ask me. He’s extremely well-off, financially and socially, and I don’t want him to think I’m a gold-digger. What can I do?

Signed,
Demure, Chaste and Pure

Dear Demure,

Try removing all your clothing, then his, and then ride him around the bedroom like a horsie. The rest will take care of itself!

*

Dear Emile Zola,

I just started my freshman year at a liberal arts college in the Northeast. Before I left for school, my stepmom gave me an old lamp for my dorm room. Naturally, during a party, one of my friends knocked over the lamp and broke it. Now it turns out the lamp was an antique with a lot of sentimental value: it’s been in my stepmom’s family for generations. I know I need to tell her the truth — but how to do it so she doesn’t freak out?

Signed,
Stepson Steps Up

Dear Step,

Just sleep with her! Chances are, your dad won’t mind. (Hint: if she starts to lose interest, try dressing up as a girl, then sleeping with her some more.)

*

Dear Emile Zola,

Now that my business is taking off, my wife would like to see us take a more prominent role in our community. Trouble is, I’m not much of a joiner, and after a hard day at the office, I’d really prefer just to stay home. But she’s putting more and more pressure on me. What can I do?

Signed,
Pillar of the Community

Dear Pill,

Your wife is right: why not take advantage of your position? And moving up the ladder is easy! At the next political demonstration in your town, try shooting and killing a nephew or young cousin. If your pastor is also a social-climber, your wife or daughter (or both!) should seduce him, effectively linking your fortunes to his. Finally, if you have any relatives who are eccentric or outspoken, make sure they’re institutionalized as soon as possible.

These may seem like small, almost effortless measures, yet they’re guaranteed to improve your status.

*

Dear Emile Zola,

My wife’s younger sister has come to live with us. She’s quite attractive, and I’ve begun to have sexual feelings for her. What should I do?

Signed,
Brother-in-Lust

Dear Brother,

Rape her! If she resists, stab her in the thigh, then ask your wife to help you hold her down. Happy rutting! (Provided, of course, that rutting is in your nature.)

*

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Zolapalooza

Paul Alexis Reads to Emile Zola:
As seen by Zola’s schoolmate, Paul Cézanne

It’s easy to call Emile Zola’s Rougon–Macquart Cycle “monumental”: stack its 20 volumes, and you’ve got a monument, right there. Examine it more closely, and it remains impressive, “A Natural History of One Family under the Second Empire” told in a series of (mostly) absorbing novels. Among these are a handful of the keystones of 19th-century French literature, and as good as anything anyone has ever written, in any language: L'Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, La Terre, and La Bête Humaine. This week, I concluded my reading — with Le Rêve — bringing to an end an adventure that has lasted six or seven years (no one is really sure) and spanned two continents. The process has surely been transformative, though it may be some little while yet before I fully understand the transformation. Nevertheless, now is the time to begin to record my experience, and the realization that, for the first time in years, I don’t quite know what to read next.


As the subtitle of his cycle suggests, Zola made proud claims for the scientific validity of his fiction, constructing elaborate hereditary medical backgrounds for his characters. Alas for him, science has since disproved many of his theories. We’re able to appreciate the books’ value nevertheless, because two strains that dominate modern reading — psychology and politics — are given their full due by Zola, whether or not he realized or intended it. (Usually, he did.) In the debate over “nature versus nurture,” Zola tends to side with “nature,” where we now believe “nurture” responsible, yet his powers of observation are so keen that his stories are no less true. Can any novelist strive to achieve anything better?

Several of Zola’s characters will walk beside me forevermore:

• Gervaise Macquart, whose aspirations to the middle-class are drowned by liquor;


• her daughter, Nana Coupeau, hoisted by her beauty to become the toast of Paris;


• Gervaise’s son, Claude Lantier, a painter driven mad by his inability to realize his grandiose vision;


• their cousin, Eugène Rougon, the government minister, who lusts after power instead of women;


• his brother, Aristide Saccard, whose pursuit of wealth is a sport;


• their mother, Félicité, who blithely sacrifices the lives of several members of her family in the interest of her own (and, okay, her husband and children’s) social advancement;


• Félicité’s direct opposite, Pauline Quenu, who willingly surrenders all she has, for those she loves;


• Octave Mouret, who sleeps his way through the apartment building where he lives, a scale model of French society, as he invents the department store;


• and Buteau, no kin to the principal families in the story, who cheats, rapes, and murders his relatives without qualm in order to assert his dominance.

That’s just for starters. And while the events in which these characters figure may not always be memorable, Zola takes meticulous pains to research and describe occupations and backgrounds: he takes us to coal mines and the stock exchange; ministerial and doctor’s offices; salons and studios; churches and markets. We learn how to organize a labor union, how to embroider a chasuble, and how to survive the Franco-Prussian War.

Family Tree: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly,
the Rougons, and the Macquarts

For the most part, Zola resists easy judgments on any of his many subjects. His sympathies are with artists and social visionaries, yet he depicts their ideals as impractical and their efforts as mostly futile; meanwhile, he finds amused sympathy for the worst sinners (even Napoléon III, who shows up in La Débâcle). Already I have begun to see that France, a century later, demands such flexible perspectives — and detailed study. And for all that they span 20 volumes, Zola’s books are only the beginning of the necessary research.

The Life of Emile Zola:
I may need to see the Paul Muni movie now.

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What Am I? Madoff Money?

Reenactment of a scene from French literature

Spending the past days in the U.S. has enlightened me on several fine points of the Bernard Madoff Scandal, beginning with the correct pronunciation of his name, which no Frenchman seems to know. (We’ve been saying, “mah-DOFF.”) Yet the more I learn, the more French the scandal seems to be, and I realize now that this is because I just finished reading the novelization of the Madoff story — namely, Emile Zola’s L’Argent (Money), first published in 1891.

In Zola’s novel, the protagonist, a cheerful scoundrel named Aristide Saccard, sets up what he calls the “Universal Bank.” This, he hopes, will become a bank for all Christians, and he succeeds in attracting the investments of lots of Catholic charities, while donating generously to others, and pleading with the Pope for an official sanction. (Saccard’s desire to do good is sincere, albeit shallow; it’s tempered by his sense of Catholic charities as a great place to pick up wealthy women.) Saccard’s ambitions are too great, and he launches several other businesses with funds from his bank: a railroad, engineering projects, a kind of commercial Crusade in the Middle East. In order to keep his board and investors happy, he winds up launching a sort of Ponzi scheme, and it works — until a Jewish banker swiftly ruins him. Zola based many of his characters on real-life and immediately recognizable figures: Saccard finds his roots in a banker named Eugène Bontoux, and his Jewish nemesis, Gundermann, is clearly based on a Rothschild.*

It’s Zola’s genius that, even as we gawp and giggle at Saccard’s audacity, we witness and pity the destruction he leaves in his wake. Well-meaning people are taken in not necessarily from greed but from need, and through faith; they are ruined as a result.

Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme differs in certain particulars from that of Aristide Saccard, notably in the reversal of religious affiliations, yet the basics are all right there in the pages of Zola. American commentators have been tut-tutting lately that courses in elementary economics and finance ought to be required of high-school and college students, to prevent us from getting fooled again. Why aren’t we insisting, too, that economics students read more novels? They’d learn a great deal.

*Please note that Saccard’s anti-Semitism is one of his signal character flaws; Zola’s own views on the subject have evolved already, and at the time of writing L’Argent, he is only a few years away from his famous defense of Alfred Dreyfus.

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Zola Update

I have come to a kind of crisis in my traversal of Emile Zola’s 20-volume series of novels, the Rougon-Macquart cycle, “the natural history of a family under the Second Empire.” Most of the books concern truly awful people, and Zola excels at depicting sordid behavior and outrageous events: I have reveled in the pages of L’Assommoir, Nana, Pot-Bouille, Germinal, La Terre, and La Bête Humaine. In the penultimate volume of the series, La Débâcle, the niceness of the characters is secondary to the Franco-Prussian War; the author’s fury at incompetent generals and at the ineffectual Emperor, Napoléon III, enlivens many passages, and the numerous scenes of combat are as grisly and wince-inducing as battlefield photographs might be.

Now I’ve gotten to the cycle’s final volume, Le Docteur Pascal, and my distress mounts by the paragraph. I’m 100 pages in already, and not once has a single character cheated his aunties, passed out drunk, committed theft, arson, or adultery, staged a train wreck, or raped an old lady. What the hell?

A very few of the Rougon-Macquart books are concerned with basically nice, fundamentally sane characters, but they’re tough slogging for this reader. La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret is about an earnest young priest who falls in love with a free-spirited girl, presumably shocking stuff in 19th-century France. But no fear — Abbet Mouret wouldn’t really break his priestly vows — his maxima culpa is only the result of a head injury! I’ve seen soap opera plots more daring. (I preferred a preceding volume, La Conquête de Plassans, in which another priest schemes his way to political prominence, while one local matron —Abbé Mouret’s mother, as it happens — develops a violently erotic crush on him.)

I’ve written in this space about my dissatisfaction with the opening pages of Le Rêve, in which an angelic blonde orphan, stranded in the snow, is taken in by a kindly couple — I had to set that one aside for some other time. I managed to stay the course with Une Page d’amour, mainly because the heroine’s daughter turns out to be a deliciously manipulative hysteric. Threatened by the attraction between her mother and a handsome, wealthy neighbor, little Jeanne throws fits and succumbs to sudden fevers. She’ll stop at nothing to thwart her mother’s happiness. A truly dedicated little hypochondriac, she takes to her bed for months at a stretch — then dies.

Portrait (by Manet) of the Author as a Young Man

The Rougons (mostly ruthless predators, but prone to mental instability) and the Macquarts (mostly drunks and dreamers) behave as they do, Zola insists, because of particular genetic traits. In Le Docteur Pascal, the author attempts to assemble and to validate his theories of heredity; we see at last just how serious he was when he called this “A Natural History.” Helpfully, Zola lays out a family tree, in which characters are identified by moral and physical “élections”; that is, they take after the mother or the father, or a mixture of both, or some other ancestor. (A very few characters, including Dr. Pascal Rougon himself, take after neither side of the family, a natural phenomenon Zola acknowledges but can’t explain.)

Anybody with a seventh-grade education in biology (which is about all I’ve got) knows that Zola’s theories don’t hold up, despite the way the author keeps stacking the deck in his own favor. All the while he wrote, the new field of psychology already was blowing gaping holes in his science, even as it corroborated his characterizations and plots. The books all remain perfectly plausible — Zola was too keen an observer, too relentless a researcher to write piffle — but sex, and not genetics, emerges as the great motivator in these tales.

Everybody’s a critic: Zola’s support for Dreyfus made him unpopular with many.

We come to Zola, as I say, for his unblinking eye, for his abilities to capture every detail in any segment of French society, to root out the very worst of human nature and still to entertain us. We don’t come to him for moral lessons, and we don’t come to him for uplift. Everyone in Le Docteur Pascal has behaved himself impeccably thus far — but I’m not yet ready to set the book aside. There’s much to be said for coming to the end of this saga, which has occupied me, on and off, for some six years.

And besides, if you look closely at the Rougon-Macquart family tree, you’ll see that Dr. Pascal has a child, late in life — by his own niece. She’s his ward, by the way, and she’s also the daughter of the lovably odious Aristide Saccard (of La Curée and L’Argent). Somewhere in this book, there’s a story. I’m determined to find it.

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Zola® Brand Fiction: Freshness Guaranteed!

What a great idea for a book!

My continuing traversal of Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, the 20-volume “natural history of a family under the Second Empire,” was briefly derailed, not long ago, by the 15th novel in the series, Le Rêve. For weeks, I dawdled over the book’s opening scene, in which an angelic, blonde orphan girl seeks shelter in the doorway of a church, in the middle of a fierce snowstorm; a kindly, childless couple take her in.

To put it bluntly, this is not what we come to Zola for. If we want sentimental crap like that, we will turn to the Victorian English novelists (and not a few Americans). We come to Zola for un- blinking depictions of the human condition. His coolly detached analyses are not lurid but scientific; it’s not for nothing that he calls the series a “natural history,” and Zola is especially drawn to sex as a motivation for his characters, much as Balzac blamed money as the root of all evil. Although in their own time they were considered scandalous, nowadays, with armies of Marxists and Freudians to back them up, Zola and Balzac seem like our contemporaries.

I couldn’t get into Le Rêve. Not quite three weeks ago, I resolved to skip it, for now, and to dive into the 16th Rougon-Macquart novel, La Bête Humaine. Fie on pitiful orphans! True to his old form, Zola begins La Bête Humaine with a confession of sexual abuse greeted by one of the most harrowing scenes of wife-beating ever written, culminating in a murder plot. “Ah,” I said, “it feels good to be home.”

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve finished the book, breaking my speed record for a French novel this length, and wholly appropriate for a novel that’s set in railyards and locomotives. By weird coincidence, I was riding from Beynes to Paris when I read the terrifying train-wreck scene; I can tell you that it requires a good deal of fortitude not to jump off the train after a scene like that.

Yet as I read, I was troubled by questions. How could Zola understand his own work so poorly, that he’d throw in a cheesy heart-warmer in the middle of the rutting passions of the Rougons and the Macquarts? How could he be persuaded that angelic orphans are what we want from him? How could he fail to recognize that he had become a brand name?

Lurking in the heart of each of these men is a cold-blooded killer.

The answer turns out to be that the critical reaction to his previous novel wounded Zola. La Terre (The Earth) is, even by his standards, extreme, perhaps best summed up in the scene in which an 80-year-old woman kills her mentally deficient grandson with an axe when he rapes her in a barn. As I noted in an earlier posting, the common complaint is that Zola’s characters behave like animals, but in La Terre, the animals are better-behaved than the people. With Le Rêve, Zola set out to prove that he was capable of writing a story in which people are motivated by altruistic love.

Well, good for him. That even he wasn’t entirely persuaded by the demonstration may be seen in the title: The Dream. As in, “You think people aren’t motivated by lust and greed? Dream on.” I’m sure I’ll get to it, one of these days.

La Bête Humaine, on the other hand, is a passionate defense of the things Zola really believed in, as well as a monument to modernity. Choo-choo trains may be old-fashioned to us, but to Zola, they were the latest word in technology. When I visited his country house, in Médan, I was surprised to see a train track running along the bottom of his garden. “That must have cut into property values,” I said, but the guide told me that Zola loved to watch the trains passing.

Jean Renoir, son of the Impressionist painter,
adapted La Bête Humaine for the cinema.

The Impressionist painters, working at the same time, were controversial because they elevated trains (and other mundane and working-class subjects) by making art of them; Zola was doing the same thing. As a sometime art critic, he was a champion of the Impressionists (and a schoolmate of Cézanne), and in his fiction he strove to promote the same ideals and to achieve many of the same goals.

In each Rougon-Macquart novel, he is liable to describe sunlight precisely the same way, at least a few times: as “une poussière d’or,” a dusting of gold. The description makes little sense until one recalls the lighting effects in the paintings of his contemporaries. La Bête Humaine is crammed with painterly wordplay, describing the play of light, breaking down colors, detailing the shifting skies.

And there’s plenty of base behavior, too, rough sex and rougher politics: one has no difficulty identifying this novel as Zola Brand Fiction.

As a writer, I may find this more intriguing than you do. But as I chug away at my career, questions of through-line emerge already in conversations with my agent: will a projected book make sense in the context of other things I’ve written? So far, the answer apparently is yes. Whether this is the result of an accident or of an obsessive temperament, I can’t say, but I can assure you it wasn’t intentional.

In general, I don’t turn to classic literature for career advice, though I do seek other kinds of wisdom among the pages. In La Bête Humaine, I got all that, plus a thrilling story — that reads like a runaway train.

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Émile Zola and ‘La Terre’

Zola, the Natural

For the past few years, I have been immersed in the work of Émile Zola, the French novelist who promoted a movement in fiction called naturalism, influence of which can be seen clearly in the works of writers as diverse as Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser, and, more recently, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. The idea was to treat stories as “natural histories” or scientific case studies, minutely researched, in order to expose the impulses that govern human behavior. In Zola’s own time, this idea was reduced to “He writes about the groin.”

Which isn’t entirely incorrect. Every volume of Zola contains at least one scene of rape, incest, adultery, prostitution, masturbation, or some kind of kink. Renée, the heroine of La Curée, carries on a torrid affair with her stepson, in a “warm, moist, pink-and-grey” boudoir the mere mention of which is lurid. La Joie de vivre features a scandal-provoking depiction of a young woman’s first menstrual period. In Pot-Bouille, a young man cheerfully sleeps with at least one married woman on every floor of the bourgeois apartment building where he lives; while in the servants’ quarters, a housemaid singlehandedly delivers her illegitimate stillborn child, then disposes of the remains and goes back to work. (Nobody notices.) The bisexual heroine of Nana salvages a hilariously inauspicious theatrical debut by shaking her breasts at the audience; the result is a brilliant career as a courtesan, the toast of Paris, leading her to ride one titled sugar daddy like a pony around her bedroom and ending in a fatal case of venereal disease. None of this is presented purely for shock value, but a lot of it is pretty shocking.

And to think that Zola was writing at the same time as the prudish Victorians! An American or British reader must spend a great deal of time gawping, as I do, wondering how the hell the man got away with this stuff.

He didn’t, always, but he paved the way for the next generation, who would be heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud (who wrote about sex, too, as you doubtless know). Zola himself was influenced by Honoré de Balzac, whose work depicts money as the root of all evil, an idea he picked up working in a law office. For Zola, money was evil, sure, but it wasn’t the root. Humans were having sex long before they invented money.

Deeply disillusioned by the politics of the Second Empire, Zola writes with scorn and fury about the rich. About the poor, he writes with somewhat greater sympathy as he exposes their living conditions. But they’re not very nice, either, as seen in the novel I most recently read, La Terre, about farmers in the region of Beauce, around Chartres. In this “natural history,” the characters don’t behave like animals — they behave much worse, something Zola underscores by setting his scene with plenty of cows, horses, dogs, chickens, a flock of geese, and one memorably dissipated donkey. Rutting, selfish, entirely lacking in morals, the inhabitants of the village of Rognes are fascinating, monstrous, and entirely human.

The most noteworthy of them is Buteau, a farmer who (spoiler alert*) swindles, steals, and lies; cheats his brother and sister; abuses, beats, and kills both his parents to get their land and their money; sleeps with his cousin and fathers her child but marries her only when she inherits property; sexually harasses her sister, who lives with them; prevents her marriage to a man who actually loves her by claiming that she’s his mistress, too; then rapes her while his wife holds her down, and looks on as his wife murders her (and her unborn child), so that they can inherit her property. Oh, and he drinks, too. I’m not sure a more outrageous character exists in fiction; I hope none exists in life.

Buteau’s exploits make other scenes in the book — such as that in which a man (nicknamed “Jésus-Christ”) farts for an entire chapter; or that in which an old lady uses her own excrement to fertilize her vegetable garden; or that in which the donkey drinks a vat of wine and vomits all over the barnyard; or that in which a halfwit boy rapes his octogenarian grandmother, who promptly brains him with an axe; or that in which the village curate, unable to cope with these people, has a nervous breakdown and is carted away — seem almost mild. Zola suggests that none of this matters, really, because the earth (la terre) that Buteau so covets takes little notice of him, or of anyone. It will go on with or without us, whether we behave ourselves or not.

The book provoked a scandal, as so many of Zola’s books did, and it was banned in the United States for a long time. (Probably there are libraries still that refuse to carry it.) Not long ago, I found a book review by Mark Twain himself, in which he defended La Terre by answering the question “Are there really people like this?” with feigned resignation and a clear-cut “Yes.” I must say, I haven’t looked at my neighbors in the farming village of Beynes the same way since.

La Terre is the fifteenth in the twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle, “The Natural History of a Family in the Second Empire.” By examining both branches of the family, one prosperous, the other poor, he hoped to arrive at conclusions about heredity and environment, and other scientific factors, but that’s the least convincing aspect of the series now, not least because he keeps tipping the scales. What’s more compelling is the focus each book places on a slice of society: government, military, clergy, high finance, medicine, the arts, urban and rural working classes, even the rise of the department store, all painstakingly researched. To read Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris) today is to recover the city’s central market, destroyed years ago; Zola convincingly describes it as a monument to rival the great cathedrals.

A left-winger, Zola skewers the fat cats who profited under Napoléon III at the expense of suffering working men and women. But he was ambivalent about possible remedies. The revolutionaries and rabble-rousers in his novels come to bad ends, starting with the first volume, La Fortune des Rougon, in which the teenaged boy Silvère is killed while protesting the coup d’état that finished the Second Republic and transformed the “Prince-Président” into an Emperor. Both La Terre and its predecessor, Germinal, a study of labor unrest among coal miners, feature lengthy political debates in which Zola shoots down arguments on all sides. Meanwhile, the fat cats are shown doing very well for themselves.

So did Zola, as it happens. His books earned him a great deal of money. But just by calling attention to the manifold plights of the poor, and by so carefully documenting every detail, Zola made an important political statement — many of them. His late novels attack the Catholic Church head-on, and he made a ringing defense of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer falsely accused by his superiors of espionage. By taking on the army, Zola took on the government; he had to flee the country, and when he returned, he was assassinated. (Carbon monoxide poisoning, courtesy of a zealous right-wing heating repairman.) He was buried in the Montmartre Cemetery, just under my window, but his remains were moved almost immediately to the Panthéon.

Zola’s death jolted Twain, among many others. Twain’s writings already were growing more political and more bitter (we’re a long way from “The Celebrated Jumping Frog” when he starts railing against American imperialism in the Philippines), yet they gain intensity in his last years, as he resolves to fill the gap that Zola left. I wonder if I have the guts (to say nothing of the talent) to do the same.

I began to read Zola’s work not long after one of my many Twain kicks, when I was preparing an article for Opera News on Tobias Picker’s opera Thérèse Raquin, based on one of Zola’s early books. Picker would have been better off calling his opera “Mary Smith,” for all the fidelity it shows to the novel. Where Zola depicts savage brutes, Picker writes of nice people who make bad decisions. At the time, I suspected a cynical, though perhaps unconscious, attempt to draw in the Masterpiece Theatre crowd, and thus to profit by high-mindedness and cultural cachet. (Masterpiece Theatre, which presented a dramatization of the novel in 1980, is the only way most Americans would have heard of it.) In an interview with me, Picker said he wasn’t drawn to Thérèse Raquin because of Zola, he was attracted by the story — though, to these ears, he wound up telling a completely different one. He and his collaborators claimed that modern audiences wouldn’t stand for the wife-beating and amorality of Zola’s plot, and maybe they were right.

It’s no skin off my nose, because through a mediocre opera I wound up discovering a very great writer. I am a true disciple now, as you see. I made a pilgrimage to Zola’s home, in Médan, not long ago, finding inspiration in the inscription over the fireplace in his massive, neo-Gothic study: “Never a day without a line.” (And now I have a blog!) Even his photography, amateurish but passionate, inspires me.

I have five volumes to go in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. And then — who knows? I think it’s Victor Hugo’s turn.

____________________________

* I may as well offer a few plot spoilers, because the damage is done already. It is now a kind of fetish among French editors to share with readers all of an author’s preliminary materials and rough sketches, to the point of restoring phrases emended and chapters cut by the authors themselves, with good reason. I’m not sure what the point of this is. Something about illuminating the creative process, I suppose, yet the editors ignore that this is often a wholesale betrayal of the author’s intentions. Proust died trying to get his work into a particular shape, but the French seem to shrug and sigh a collective “Tant pis.” Modern editions of his books are almost unreadable for their annotations. You are better off getting an old edition, from the 1930s or so, when the French held him in such contempt that they would not stoop to ruin his work.

Because Zola left so much documentation, he’s catnip for French editors. And they’re uncommonly clumsy about presenting the material: instead of putting it all in a foreword or in appendices, and letting us look it up if we choose, they litter the pages with footnotes, many of which give away key plot points and spoil the story for those of us who never read it before and don’t know how it turns out. Thus it wasn’t Zola who told me of the death of Françoise in La Terre (not just that she would die, but how and when), it was some damnable idiot of an editor.

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