The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) Read Online Free
Author: Émile Zola
and dictatorialism of Napoleon III), saw it not just as a reactionary low point in post-Revolutionary France but also as a masquerade of pomp and sleaze, aping the lost grandeur of Napoleon.
The Conquest of Plassans
shows the regime, as it were, from the margins and from the ground: while Paris might be the centre of national politics, the towns and provinces have their own branchlines of corruption and power. Much as Balzac divided his novels between Parisian centre and provincial edges, so Zola reveals the connections between the different levels of national life, which seem so far apart but are in fact intimately linked. We may also think of the Russian novelists Gogol and Dostoevsky, who paint the banal dramas of provincial life in all their cut-throat absurdity and ruthlessness, with their political functionaries and their rival families, ugly microcosms of the country itself. We have the reprobate Monsieur de Condamin and his flighty but scheming wife; the ugly and resentful, but easily-bought, Paloque couple; and the cynical Doctor Porquier who allows Mouret to be committed to the asylum. There is Monsieur de Rastoil and his family, Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies, and the town’s mayor, Monsieur Delangre. Some are Bonapartists, some Legitimists, and,as Mouret explains to the newly arrived Faujas: ‘on my right, I have at the Rastoils’ the flower of the Legitimists, and on my left, at the sub-prefect’s, the bigwigs of the Empire’ (p. 36). With a dramatic irony Zola is fond of, Mouret warns Faujas not to get involved in politics . . . Amid this melee we also have rival priests and a lazy, ineffectual bishop, a docile layer of bourgeois and business interests, and a marginalized working and peasant population outside town and beyond the narrative’s parameters.
Zola is a skilful novelist of foreboding: from the moment we see the Mourets, we know that their peace is fragile, and when we meet the sinister, silent Abbé Faujas himself, arriving early and inopportunely to take up his room in their household, we sense a darkness we cannot quite define. While nothing can prepare us for the novel’s violent ending, the signs accumulate from the start: the house and garden, the family unit that is fraught with imprecise unease, the distracted, languid Marthe and her unstable husband, the mention of the asylum in the first few pages, the unwelcome intrusion of the inscrutable priest and his looming mother . . . all of these factors are choreographed by Zola with a skill that is the hallmark of a novelist and not a mere recorder of facts. For a writer who rarely stinted on description and documentation, Zola was also able to make it all count on the narrative, the symbolic, or the psychological levels too. In his own way, Zola is a novelist of economy: he makes the apparent excess of information and description germane to the reader’s experience, a skill he shares with Balzac. Sometimes doing less with more—catching the world’s overspill and channelling it towards a coherent but unreductive end—is just as good as the more conventionally admired skill of doing more with less. Zola does not always economize on words; his novels are voraciously inclusive—of data, facts and figures, descriptions and details—but he rarely repeats himself. While it is true that
The Conquest of Plassans
is, by Zola’s standards, a lean and plot-driven novel, it is also full of lyrical description and recurring symbolic motifs.
Faujas, whose name contains the French for ‘false’,
faux
, is a strict and unmaterialistic priest who installs himself in the Mouret house and makes it his centre of operations. Faujas is the cuckoo in the nest, and the Mourets’ house and garden are chosen because they lie between two opposing political camps that Faujas must reconcile in order to put forward his masters’ candidate for election. Thiscandidate, revealed towards the end of the book, is to be a yes-man who, when elected, votes with the
The Conquest of Plassans
shows the regime, as it were, from the margins and from the ground: while Paris might be the centre of national politics, the towns and provinces have their own branchlines of corruption and power. Much as Balzac divided his novels between Parisian centre and provincial edges, so Zola reveals the connections between the different levels of national life, which seem so far apart but are in fact intimately linked. We may also think of the Russian novelists Gogol and Dostoevsky, who paint the banal dramas of provincial life in all their cut-throat absurdity and ruthlessness, with their political functionaries and their rival families, ugly microcosms of the country itself. We have the reprobate Monsieur de Condamin and his flighty but scheming wife; the ugly and resentful, but easily-bought, Paloque couple; and the cynical Doctor Porquier who allows Mouret to be committed to the asylum. There is Monsieur de Rastoil and his family, Monsieur Péqueur des Saulaies, and the town’s mayor, Monsieur Delangre. Some are Bonapartists, some Legitimists, and,as Mouret explains to the newly arrived Faujas: ‘on my right, I have at the Rastoils’ the flower of the Legitimists, and on my left, at the sub-prefect’s, the bigwigs of the Empire’ (p. 36). With a dramatic irony Zola is fond of, Mouret warns Faujas not to get involved in politics . . . Amid this melee we also have rival priests and a lazy, ineffectual bishop, a docile layer of bourgeois and business interests, and a marginalized working and peasant population outside town and beyond the narrative’s parameters.
Zola is a skilful novelist of foreboding: from the moment we see the Mourets, we know that their peace is fragile, and when we meet the sinister, silent Abbé Faujas himself, arriving early and inopportunely to take up his room in their household, we sense a darkness we cannot quite define. While nothing can prepare us for the novel’s violent ending, the signs accumulate from the start: the house and garden, the family unit that is fraught with imprecise unease, the distracted, languid Marthe and her unstable husband, the mention of the asylum in the first few pages, the unwelcome intrusion of the inscrutable priest and his looming mother . . . all of these factors are choreographed by Zola with a skill that is the hallmark of a novelist and not a mere recorder of facts. For a writer who rarely stinted on description and documentation, Zola was also able to make it all count on the narrative, the symbolic, or the psychological levels too. In his own way, Zola is a novelist of economy: he makes the apparent excess of information and description germane to the reader’s experience, a skill he shares with Balzac. Sometimes doing less with more—catching the world’s overspill and channelling it towards a coherent but unreductive end—is just as good as the more conventionally admired skill of doing more with less. Zola does not always economize on words; his novels are voraciously inclusive—of data, facts and figures, descriptions and details—but he rarely repeats himself. While it is true that
The Conquest of Plassans
is, by Zola’s standards, a lean and plot-driven novel, it is also full of lyrical description and recurring symbolic motifs.
Faujas, whose name contains the French for ‘false’,
faux
, is a strict and unmaterialistic priest who installs himself in the Mouret house and makes it his centre of operations. Faujas is the cuckoo in the nest, and the Mourets’ house and garden are chosen because they lie between two opposing political camps that Faujas must reconcile in order to put forward his masters’ candidate for election. Thiscandidate, revealed towards the end of the book, is to be a yes-man who, when elected, votes with the
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