ZOLA: FAMILY

Emile Zola: Blood, Sex, Money 2.3

This episode is based on La Curée by Emile Zola and it concerns Aristide, the middle child of Pierre and Felicité Rougon, and therefore Aunt Didi's grandson.

SHORT VERSION OF THE PLOT: Aristide Saccard is making himself very rich by insider property deals and  insecure mortgage deals. But his new wife has embarked on an affair with his son. The corruptions of money are paralleled with the corruptions of sex. Long version here.

La Curée is the second book in Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series and it's here that the whole saga really gets going. We are in Paris at the height of the Second Empire, in the middle of the Haussmannisation of the city. Houses, streets, whole districts are being demolished to make way for Baron von Haussmann's new boulevards. On the back of all this building work, many people are getting very rich. Bankers offering loans, property developers building homes, building contractors laying roads, landlords selling their demolished houses to the state and renting out the new properties; this is an age where money flowed like water and, according to Zola, that same unconstrained acquisitiveness affected the moral realm:

C’était l’heure où la curée ardente emplit un coin de forêt de l’aboiement des chiens, du claquement des fouets, du flamboient des torches. Les appétits lâchés se contentaient enfin, dans l’impudence du triomphe, au bruit des quartiers écroulées et des fortunes bâties en six mois. La ville n’était plus qu’une grands débauche de millions et de femmes. Le vice, venu de haut, coulait dans les ruisseaux, s’étalait dans les bassins, remontait dans les jets d’eau des jardins, pour retomber sur les toits, en pluie fine et pénétrante. Et il semblait, la nuit, lorsqu’on passait les ponts, que la Seine charriât au milieu de la ville endormie, les ordures de la cité, miettes tombées de la table, nœuds de dentelle laissés sur les divans, chevelures oubliées dans les fiacres, billets de banque glissés des corsages, tout ce que la brutalité du désir et le contentement immédiate de l’instinct jettent à la rue, après avoir brisé et souillé. Alors, dans le sommeil fiévreux de Paris, et mieux encore que dans sa quête haletante du grand jour, on sentait le détraquement cerebral, le chauchemar doré et voluptueux d’une ville folle de son or et de sa chair. (Zola 2015, pp. 199-200.)

This was the hour when the eager hunt lit up the forest with dogs barking, whips slashing, torches blazing. The appetites unleashed feasted on the sound of collapsing building and fortunes built up in mere months. The city was nothing less than a non-stop orgy of women and gold. Vice, pouring from above, flowed through the gutters, filled the reservoirs, sprayed from the public fountains, falling again on the roofs in a fine penetrating rain. And at night it seemed, when you crossed the rivers, that the Seine was dragging through the centre of the sleeping town all the filth of the city: the crumbs fallen from the table, scraps of lace left on divans, locks of hair forgotten in the backs of cabs, bank notes slipped from bodices, everything that brutality and instant gratification propelled into the street, broken and soiled. And in Paris’s fevered sleep, even more than in daylight's ravenous pursuit, you sensed minds out of joint, the gilt-edged sensual nightmare of a town sent mad by dreams of gold and flesh.

'Curée' is a difficult word to translate (and I haven't really tried above). It means the part of the hunted animal that you feed to the dogs that tracked it. The French captures that sense of the headlong bloody rush for the juiciest rewards. It's usually translated as 'the kill', though that misleads slightly. The first English translation of the novel (by John Stirling) gives the title as The Rush for the Spoil, which captures the meaning a little more clearly, but in a rather unlovely way. 

As this famous passage suggests, in the book, the financial immorality of the Second Empire is mirrored by its sexual immorality. The quasi-incestuous relationship between Renée and Maxime is a sign of the era's wholesale abandonment of all restraint and parallels Aristide's multiple corruptions. Indeed, Zola is also skewering the hypocrisy of the age: Aristide remains throughout a wholly respectable figure despite his insider trading, his Ponzi schemes, his many financial frauds, and he takes the moral high ground at the end, abandoning Renée and stealing all her money - which, really, was the idea all along. It was a shocking book when it first appeared - its first appearance, serialised in a newspaper - was stopped by the government (though Brian Nelson [2004, p. xi] argues that was probably more for political than moral reasons).

The novel is sensational. It was written only a year after the collapse of the Second Empire and it is seething with Zola's disgust and hatred for the regime. (In many ways, Zola's novel is the first draft of history; it set a certain tone for the collective understanding of what the Second Empire was. The three appearances of the Emperor in the book - at the beginning and end in his carriage, and then, corpulent and leering, being helped across the floor of a Tuileries ballroom to ogle Renée (not that she minds) - are part of a pattern of images of Napoleon III in the Rougon Macquart which would take a century for historians to dislodge (see Plessis 1985 for more on this) There are several masterly and powerful sequences in the book through which Zola conveys a vivid sense of the time; in chapter 2, Aristide takes Renée to a restaurant in Montmartre from which he can look down at Paris and he imagines a series of violent slashes across Paris that will become the boulevards. There is an extraordinary series of tableaux vivants in Chapter 6 in which all Renée's society friends appear, mocking the narcissism and artificiality of the era. (In fact theatricality is a motif that runs through the whole book, suggesting both superficial attractions and a kind of performative perversity.) There is a hothouse in the Saccard mansion whose exotic and erotic plants forced out by the artificial heat make for a gloriously atmospheric parallel to the Renée and Maxime story. And the long sequence in which Aristide negotiated a deal to marry Renée while his wife lay dying is magnificently brilliant and magnificently nasty .

Anyone working on adapting this book needs to remember that Zola tried - and, basically, failed - to create an effective dramatisation of the book himself. His version, entitled Renée, opened on 16 April 1887 at the Théâtre  du Vaudeville on the Boulevard des Capucines (the theatre which is now the Gaumont Opéra movie theatre). It was quite a saga getting it on. Ten years previously, Sarah Bernhardt had seen in the novel a vehicle for her distinctive talents and whenever they met urged Zola to adapt it for her with the words 'Songez-vous à moi? À quand ma pièce?' (Mitterrand 2001, p. 599). Of course, Zola wasn't going to pass up the chance to have France's greatest actress perform his work on the stage of the Comédie Française and he set to work. His main problem was, of course, the incest, which surely the public would not tolerate being performed on a modern stage. He had, in the meantime, written a short story, 'Nantas' (1878), in which a young man marries a young woman - in similar circumstances to Aristide's engagement to Renée - but with the instruction that he will never consummate the marriage. In the story, against his wishes, he falls in love with his wife and, consumed with jealousy, plans to take his own life. At the last moment she bursts in, discovers him and immediately declares her love: 'I love you!' she declares 'I love you because you are so strong!' (Zola 2013, p. 161). It occurred to him that La Curée might become acceptable if mixed with the situation in 'Nantas'. In other words, if the marriage between Aristide and Renée were purely a loveless marriage and remained unconsummated, he thought, perhaps this would lessen the offence of her act? She would not be an adulterer, very strictly speaking, nor would (as in the book) her relationship be strictly incestuous: Renée and Maxime are, after all, not blood relatives. 

This was a naive thought, of course. M Perrin, administrator at the Comédie, wrote to him on 20 June 1881, full of praise for the adaptation, but insisting 'May I say that I believe the performance of your play, in its current form, from the third act onwards, is a constant danger' (Zola 1887, p. 4). Zola rewrote the play a little, after discussions with Perrin, but even so, the play stalled as the veteran sociétaire Edmont Got, who was asked to read the script, declared that 'it remains dangerous' and Bernhardt herself, to whom Zola appealed, was nervous, already imagining the hissing from the stalls (Mitterand 2001, p. 601). Six years later, following the acclaimed theatrical adaptation of Le Ventre de Paris at the Théâtre de Paris, interest was revived in the project. Zola met with the directors of the theatre Deslandes and Carré who were very enthusiastic about the play, finding 'a hint of classical tragedy in this bourgeois drama' (ibid. p. 844). Zola made some rewrites, at their suggestion, to intensify the climactic drama (introducing a scene not from the book in which Renée tells her father about her love for her stepson). The title change suggests that Zola was keen to place some distance between the book and the play.

He has indeed made some considerable changes in adaptating the novel. The circumstances of the marriage are a little cleaner. The financial arrangements are played down and the main motor of the first act is Renée's refusal to love Aristide. Sidonie has disappeared and been replaced with the less sinister Mlle Chuin. Of course, the great scenes of the book - the Imperial ball, the masquerade, the carriage ride in the Bois du Boulogne - as well as the book's continual evocation of the streets of a Paris in transformation - are all gone. Instead he gives us a five-act play. Aristide woos Renée; Aristide builds up his fraudulent finance and property empire; Renée's father suspects the truth about her and Maxime; she lets slip her secret to Mlle Chuin who, furious at not being paid off, tells Aristide that his wife has a lover; in the final act, Aristide goes to see Renée to confront her lover, who he believes will be there, but Renée, discovering that Maxime is to be married, shoots herself with his gun.

Zola saw the faults of his script - its compromises with convention, the tendency of his dialogue towards diatribe, the uncertainties in the characterisation of Maxime - but he was buoyed by a full house and some positive press commentary when the show opened (Mitterand 2001, p. 847). However, Perrin's prediction, six years earlier, came to pass as whispers and catcalls began to be heard in the fourth act and to continue right through the fifth.

The critical reception was muted. Most people were disappointed by the play - the first single-authored full-length play by Zola since 1878. After ten years of his ceaseless agitation for a Naturalist theatre, was this it? Surely not. The problem with Renée, in the words of Charles Bigot in Le Siècle, was that 'it was a dramatic work that looked like many others' [quoted in ibid., p. 848). Edmond de Goncourt, a friend of Zola's (and with friends like these...), wrote in his immensely bitchy diary:

Hier, le première de Renée. Pas une scène où se sente de la vie vécue, et tout le temps, la tirade clichée du théâtre vieux jeu. Enfin, puisque naturalisme il y a, disons-le, il n'est pas une pièce de Dumas ou d'Augier qui ne soit cent fois plus naturaliste que ce drame, ressemblant à du Becque première manière. (Goncourts 2014, p. 31)

Yesterday, the premiere of Renée. Not a single scene in which you got a sense of life as it is lived, and throughout, the clichéd diatribes of the old-fashioned theatre. In a word, if there is such a thing as naturalism, let's be honest, there's not a play by Dumas or Augier that isn't hundred times more naturalistic than this play, which resembles an early effort of [Henry] Becque.*

Zola wrote a piece for Le Figaro later that month, vainly trying to rebut the 'legend that is in the process of getting built up around that premiere' (1887b, 1). But the production did not take off. In May, the box office takings fell away and it closed on 23 May, having played a respectable but unspectacular 38 performances.

It's a cautionary tale, I suppose, as is the relative failure of most adaptations of Zola's work in his lifetime. Zola was inhibited by a kind of censorship that I'm not; on Radio 4, if I wanted them to, my Renée and Maxime could fuck to their heart's content, at least as explicitly as they do in the novel (which is, actually, not very). It is also worth noting that a fortnight before the opening of Renée, the Théâtre Libre, at the northern edge of Paris, the first truly Naturalist theatre in the world had its first performance. In fact an adaptation by Hennique of a Zola short story formed part of the opening night bill. It may just be that the theatre had already seen the future and Zola's compromises were all the more sharply of the past.

But I should say, I was delighted to get to do this book. La Curée is, as you can probably tell, one of my favourites in the sequence. It's an early book and it's crude, youthful, angry, shocking. In a writer's meeting at the end of July 2015, in which we thrashed out how the second season of Zolas would go, it became clear that (a)  I would be doing this and Le Rêve, which suited me, since I love both books and they couldn't be more different and that (b) they would both by 45-minute Afternoon Dramas. That's quite a challenge. La Curée covers something like 15 years in total, has dozens of characters, and has a perspective that roams across Paris. Compressing the book into 45 minutes would be impossible, so I needed to think again.

What I've decided to do is to cut right against the panoramic scale of the novel and make it into a real-time intense, small-cast family drama. The whole thing takes place during a single meal in which everything comes out. Interestingly, I am to some extent - and I hope this isn't a bad sign - following in Zola's footsteps, in that he made his adaptation in the theatrical style of his time. I'm following that by making the play somewhat in the form of a pièce bien faite (well-made play), which is typically a rather artful construction, based on secrets, misunderstandings, well-timed entrances and exits, sharply choreographed misunderstandings, reversals and twists. I've formally tried to utilise every one of the eleven possible permutations of the four characters to wring the most out of the character structure. What I've done in the play which is not what Zola does in the book is make the reveal of the incestuous relationship a shock twist at the end.

I've also made a rather significant change to Zola's original. In La Curée Aristide's sister, Sidonie, brokers the original marriage to Renée but then, later, her life in disarray, she has a baby, Angelique, which is fostered from family to family and eventually becomes the heroine of La Rêve fifteen books later. In my version, to keep focus, I have removed Sidonie's role in the story (though she will reappear in an unexpected place in season 3). And so I decided to make Angelique Renée's daughter - and, as the play reaches its climax, we realise Maxime is the father. Angèle was Aristide's first wife so the name has a certain logic to it. By making Angelique the daughter of Maxime, it heightened the quasi-incestuous shock of the conclusion.

I have bookended the play with scenes outside. I didn't want to lose entirely Aristide's involvement in the destruction/rebuilding of Paris; however, much of the financial stuff in the book will make its way into season 3 of our adaptation (Money), so it didn't feel essential to put everything here. What I begin the play with is someone starting to demolish a house by pulling off the facade. For me, this is a very freighted image: it is one both negative and positive - negative because of the pulling down of Old Paris to serve the new financial interests, positive because it's an image of Naturalism's determination to open up the hidden spaces of contemporary culture for inspection. It's also an idea I'm working with at the moment for my book, the particular significance of that theatrical device of the fourth wall. I'm wondering how far that is a purely neutral effect and how far it may be connected to the recent history of Paris. Do houses with their facades torn down look like Naturalist stage sets? Or do Naturalist stage sets look like houses with their facades torn down?

I've also brought Eugene more firmly into the story. In part this is about the coherence of the week. The second episode, just before this, is an adaptation by Olly Emanuel of the love story portion of His Excellency Eugene Rougon. It felt useful to keep the flow between the episodes, which is something we wanted to do more of in season one.

Zola's sexual politics are very strange, to be honest. On the one hand, Zola is a liberal, a republican, a progressive, who thinks that bourgeois hypocrisy about prostitution, divorce, abortion, adultery and so on should be swept away and faced. On the other hand, he was someone who seemed to have a personal revulsion towards homosexuals and at times one gets the strong sense that he thinks the proper role for women is to sit at home and have babies. Of course, first of all, let's admit that people are complex and we shouldn't let our jaws drop in amazement if they don't comply with our twenty-first century notions of what is the right thing to think. To understand his views in context, the key thing to remember is the crisis of dénatalité, the plateauing birth rate in late twentieth-century France (while the rest of Europe's populations were increasing prodigiously). Zola, like many people on the left in France at the time, believed that V sexual decadence of Second Empire France was and, In part, responsible for this and so Naturalism's desire to face these sexual scandals is not necessarily about welcoming or promoting a more open attitude rather to get these social problems under control. Zola was, as a matter of policy, supportive of women's rights and indeed of homosexual rights. But this went along with a belief that France, if it is to revive its republican citizenry, needed to get procreating.

I've preserved his sense of moral outrage. The structure of my episode tries to slowly wind up the tension until by the end it's unbearable. There are, I think, some pretty good jokes on the way - and some powerful shocks. There's some little moments of shocking modern language which I hope bring it into full focus for the contemporary listener. But then I try to take us somewhere else at the end: Renée humiliated, it is Dide who speaks to us, another desiring woman, locked in an asylum, to note that her love, twisted though it is by a society gone mad, is still love for all that. And then the walls fall away and we get a glimpse of the next episode. 

I am beyond thrilled by the cast and the production. Robbie Jack plays Eugene, Anna Maxwell Martin plays Renée, John Heffernan is Maxime, and Sam West is Aristide. We recorded the whole thing on location in a beautiful house in Hebden Bridge and, the script being quite theatrical, it was rather extraordinary to see these remarkable actors rising to it with such elegance and wit and power. 

You can read the script HERE.

Notes

* Dumas and Augier were playwrights of a previous generation who helped set the conventions of the commercial theatre: everything that Naturalism should have been against. They are less sure-footed in their dismissal of Becque whose Les Corbeaux (1882) and La Parisienne (1885) have increasingly come to be seen as France's true masterpieces of Naturalist playwriting.

References

Goncourt, Edmond de, and Jules de Goncourt. Journal: Memories de la Vie Littérature 1887-1896.  Paris: Laffont, 2014.

Mittérand, Henri. Zola: Tome II. L'homme de Germinal 1871-1893.  Paris: Fayard, 2001.

Nelson, Brian. 'Introduction,' The Kill. By Émile Zola. Translated by Brian Nelson. World's Classics.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. vii-xxix.

Plessis, Alain. The Rise & Fall of the Second Empire 1852-1871. Translated by Jonathan Mandelbaum. Cambridge History of Modern France.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Zola, Émile. Renée: Pièce en Cinq Actes.  Paris: Charpentier, 1887a.

-----. 'Renée et la critique.' Le Figaro, 22 April 1887b, 1. 

-----. Nouvelles Roses. Edited by Henri Mitterand.  Paris: Livre de Poche, 2013.

-----. La Curée. Edited by François-Marie Mourad.  Paris: Flammarion, 2015,