ZOLA: FIRE

Emile Zola: Blood, Sex, Money 1.2

Fire is based on Zola’s La Conquête de Plassans, the fourth in the Rougon-Macquart series. It was serialised in Le Siècle between February and April 1874 and published in book form at the end of May that year.

SHORT PLOT SUMMARY: Abbé Faujas arrives in Plassans and soon begins to dominate the town, through a Rougon-Macquart couple, François (of the Macquart line) and Marthe (of the Rougon). His manipulation of this couple and of the town eventually come back on him when François, deranged by his cruel treatment, sets a fire to the house, destroying both himself and Faujas. For a longer summary see here.

As Sophie Ménard writes in the 2013 Classiques Garnier edition of the play, the title is, at first glance, mysterious. Hasn’t Plassans already been conquered? The first book of the series, The Fortune of the Rougons, shows how the brutal forces of the Imperial coup destroy Plassans’s attempt at resistance. As Silvere (François’s brother) is executed by the Emperor’s invading army, surely the conquest is complete? Zola is interested, here, in a different kind of conquest. The book is set a few years later, from around 1858 to perhaps the early 1860s and while there is still a political story being told, the conquest is hearts and minds rather than land and bodies. The political conspiracy of which Faujas is a part concerns the shifting fortunes of the imperialist and royalist factions in French right-wing politics and while it forms a backdrop of the novel the precise contours of the plan and its paymasters are kept wisely obscure. Faujas himself is an enigma, his dark clothes, his silence, his watchfulness all betokening a disturbingly inscrutable void that eventually seems to be a moral void. It is the nihilistic amorality of the world that seems to engage Zola.

But more, he’s turning to religion. He will do so again in the novels, most prominently in The Sin of Father Mouret, The Dream, and the final novel in the sequence Doctor Pascal. (The final two novels were the basis of my episodes Lovesick [2.3] and Ghosts [3.9].) Zola was implacably anticlericalism, though sympathetic to ordinary believers, particularly those who may be easy prey to the unscrupulous. Here, as in The Dream, he is interested in the way religious feeling, madness and sexuality combine. Zola’s (preFreudian) conviction appears to be that religion may be a kind of sublimation of desire. In this novel, Marthe’s drift towards the church is plainly connected to her feeling for Faujas and Zola finds many moments where piety mingles with arousal, worship with eroticism. In my adaptation, I have emphasised the ways that obedience, kneeling, the body of Christ, confession, sin can be all heavily sexualised, made heady with incense and desire. At one horrifying moment, Faujas administers a communion to Marthe in a way that seems very like a sexual assault. The tone is, I think, sadomasochistic and perverse, with Faujas demanding submission, asking Marthe if she really wants to be treated well, and Marthe offering herself as her vessel and addressing him, of course, as ‘Father’. She beats herself too, covering herself in bruises in an effort, she says, to free herself from sin, but perhaps also as a sexual act, accompanied by thoughts of the Abbé. Faujas himself is a kind of gaslighting figure, leading Marthe to madness, denying her and indulging her unpredictably, pretending (I think) not to know what her feelings for him are.

I was also interested in continuing to explore the way that Zola’s down-the-line naturalist determinism might shape the feel of the story but also be tested by it. The episode begins with Aunt Dide narrating the progress of a thought through the synapses and neurons of the brain into the muscles and body… all of that leading to the bathos of a knock on the door. But the motif is continued at the end with the process being repeated but now it’s a man lighting a match that will burn down his own house (we use that sound image of the match being struck to indicate the thought being formed at the beginning to). I think the episode asks whether this is a rather brutal and implausible way of thinking about François’s actions and by extension all the characters. Is Marthe really the helpless puppet of her blood, as Aunt Didi seems to believe, or is she struggling with overwhelming desires and choosing ways through these immensely strong feelings? Is Faujas merely the puppet of shadowy Bonapartists or does he have his own agenda, his own sexual satisfactions? Towards the end the motif is repeated with a variation as gossip about François fizzes around the town, growing and accumulating momentum and meaning like a meme (of course the characters don’t use that word!). Around 20 minutes into the episode, Didi also tells us how blood works (continuing the theme of the season from the previous episode). She tells a dazzling story of bloodlines battling in the human body - strong blood and weak blood, defects of the blood, etc. - but I hope, because it is characterised and Didi is rarely a dispassionate narrator, that the audience might quail at the rather eugenicist tone of her remarks. As with her comments in Animals (1.1), when Silvere and Miette first kiss, I hope there is a sense of misfit between the ideas and the story that opens upon a sense of debate and complexity to the way we hear the story.

 The episode was a challenge to write in some ways. The original novel covers several years but I felt strongly that the tone we needed was a heady intensity and a driving narrative, so I have crunched the actions to a few months, though I think it feels even quicker. The ambition of the series was always to let the books bleed into one another. While that proved more difficult than I had hoped because of limitations on cast size, we did manage to create more narrative unity between the books than Zola attempted. In this episode there is talk of a brothel where there are young girls and I have suggested that Grandmourin, the director of the Railway, has been seen there. He is a character from La Bête Humaine where he is also a sexual predator of girls and is murdered by Roubaud (in episode 1.8). In the novels, Didi is in the asylum of Les Tulettes and so, when François is committed, it seemed appropriate that he might be in a neighbouring cell - and then it seemed fun to think that she might have found a way to aid his escape.

Interestingly (maybe just to me), in the early planning of this series, I had conceived of a young woman, Marie, who is tracing the family history and pays a visit to Didi in Les Tulettes. I imagined the scene a bit like Clarice Starling’s first visit to Hannibal Lecter (‘Do not touch the glass, do not approach the glass, you pass him nothing but soft paper‘), this damaged, broken woman manacled to a chair, her eyes blazing with mad fury… I’ve very slightly allowed a nod to that when Marthe visits François and the guard gives similar advice (’Do not approach him. Do not attempt to make any contact with him. Do not raise your voice or contradict him…’). This is not the only hommage in the script. I note - though I can’t remember quite why I did this - that Félicité describe Young Mrs Condamin as living ‘entirely for pleasure these days’ and in doing so seems to be pre-empting Lady Bracknell. A little more mischievously, Faujas was involved in a scandal at his previous position in Besançon though what it involved is not made clear in the book. I have hinted at it with the help of clerical comedy Father Ted (‘the money was just resting in my account’)

There were two slightly contradictory demands on this episode that I worked hard to reconcile. The shape I devised for the first season was that it would start epic with The Fortune of the Rougons, spanning time and space, with lots of characters, setting out the timeline and the themes, telling the story of a coup d’état, battles in the country and the town. By the end of the season we would return to the grander scale, with La Bête Humaine, set on the rail networks and showing a whole country sliding into psychopathy and war. But in between, like an hourglass, we would gradually cinch in (until the central episode, based on L’Assommoir, which Oliver Emanuel wrote beautifully almost entirely as a monologue). This episode, going out second, needed to have a sense of grandeur and scale. But we also had budgetary constraints. We could have only a small cast (five new actors, plus Glenda Jackson as Didi and Fenella Woolgar as Félicité). This limited how epic the story could be. It was clear that we had to have François, Martha, and Faujas, which left us with only two other actors who had, between them, to play the entire rest of the town. I decided to sacrifice François and Martha’s children. Their existence could be inferred by later episodes. Faujas’s sister Olympe and brother-in-law Trouche are also brought into the house and participate in the invasion but it served the aim of retaining the focus on the Faujas-François-Martha triangle to remove them. A more difficult case was Faujas’s mother, an important and extremely sinister black-clad presence, a key part of the takeover. I took the risky decision to have her as a silent character. In radio a silent character is virtually an oxymoron, but by using sound and descriptions, and occasionally quiet cackling she has a presence in the episode and her silence becomes all the more unsettling. The key work here was achieved by the ever-brilliant director/producer Polly Thomas and sound designer Eloise Whitmore.

I was extremely lucky with the cast. Carla Henry as Martha creates sparky but vulnerable, loving and sexual, spiritual and defiant woman. David Annen I have worked with before (on Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day and And So Say All Of Us) and he’s a wonderful actor; his resonant, seductive voice is wonderful and he captures the crucial ambiguity between unworldly higher purpose and moral emptiness. The scene between Carla and David near the end, when she confronts him in his room is fantastic I think, two really strong actors going at it without reserve. Sam Troughton brings a charm and sense of everyman cheerfulness into the story and establishes that tone so well that I find it crushing that he is laid so low. Ursula Holden-Gill and Chris Jack play everyone else, Ursula in particular conjuring a whole salon of Plassans women. Glenda Jackson and Fenella Woolgar are, of course, superb, Glenda brooding balefully over proceedings and Fenella giving a waspish steer to them.

If you’d like to read the script, it’s HERE.