The arrival for review of Rachel Bowlby’s new book Emile Zola, part of Oxford University Press’s Writing Modern Life series, reminded me that I ought to read more Zola. Germinal has long been a favourite. I know I’ve read Thérése Raquin and some of the short stories and I’m pretty sure I once read La Bête Humaine because I remember the trains. But beyond that it’s all a bit of a blank so I ordered Une Page D’Amour which Helen Constantine’s 1990 translation gives as A Love Story.
Hélène is widowed and rather reclusively raising her adored 11 year old daughter Jeanne in a spacious, late nineteenth century Parisian apartment with the help of her servant Rosalie. Jeanne, however is a delicate child, and her mother has to call in, Henri Deberle, a doctor she doesn’t know because their regular one is attending a woman in childbirth. Thus begins a rather tortured, drawn out liaison which does eventually culminate in sex – just once. Meanwhile Hélène (and Jeanne) are befriended by the nearby Deberle family and there is jealousy, misunderstanding and a great deal of condoned adultery. Of course though, this is Zola, after all so there is bound to be plenty of anguished agonising, a certain amount of tragedy and no happy ending.
As with everything I’ve read by Zola I’m struck by how very different it is from British fiction of the same period. For a start it’s sexually quite explicit. At one point, for example, Henri pulls off Hélène’s stocking and smothers her leg with kisses, his lips straying ever higher. This novel was published in 1877 – fourteen years before the censorship laws in Britain ensured that Thomas Hardy had to make the seduction in Tess of the D’Urbervilles so subtle that it’s easy to miss it altogether.
I also marvel at the attitude to children – they are present, noisy, relishing their food and drink, getting bored, misbehaving and telling adults what they think. In short they act like flesh and blood children. It’s a far cry from the “children should be seen and not heard” Victorian attitude, whiffs of which were still around in the 1950s when I was growing up. If children appear at all in British late Victorian fiction they are usually cardboard cut-outs.
Jeanne, in particular, is both perceptive and manipulative, although she is genuinely ill. Zola respects her as a character in her own right and shows us what she’s thinking and feeling even when it’s unattractive, thereby anticipating Henry James’s What Maisie Knew by twenty years.
Paris itself – in all weathers and seasons – features extensively in A Love Story. Hélène and Jeanne gaze out of the windows a great deal and Zola tells us at rather tedious length what they’re seeing from dawn to dusk and from snow to bright sunshine. It’s partly symbolic because it reflects mood – the all too familiar “pathetic fallacy” – but there is too much of it in what is otherwise quite a compelling read although it’s not in the same league as Germinal.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips by Michael Morpurgo
