Phèdre: Tragedy by French dramatist Jean Racine (1639–1699), based on the Greek myth of Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, who conceived an incestuous love for Hippolytus, her stepson. Hippolytus rejected her overtures but was falsely accused of assaulting her; to punish his son, Theseus invoked the aid of the god Neptune, who sent a sea monster to devour Hippolytus. Phaedra then poisoned herself out of remorse.
Bou fes: The Bouffes-Parisiens was a theater for light and comic opera established by Jacques Offenbach in 1855.
Olympus: abode of the gods in Greek mythology.
Chapelle Expiatoire: somber neoclassical church designed by Pierre Fontaine in 1815.
Mid-Lent Thursday: the Thursday before the fourth Sunday in Lent, sometimes celebrated as a holiday in order to encourage the faithful to continue through the penitential season of Lent.
CHAPTER 6
Narcissus: in Greek mythology, a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool; he was loved by the nymph Echo, but after he failed to return her affection, she retreated to a cave and died of longing, and only her voice was left.
Mohammed’s houris: the beautiful maidens that the prophet Mohammed said would await the devout Muslim in Paradise.
Henry III’s mignons: Henry III, king of France from 1574 until his death in 1589, bestowed many favors on a select group of handsome young men known as his mignons.
Juno: the wife of Jupiter, who punished Echo for her idle chatter by condemning her to do nothing but repeat the words of others.
Pradier: the sculptor James Pradier.
Lesbos: island in the Aegean Sea; as the home of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, it was associated with female homosexuality.
cotillion: an elaborate ballroom dance with frequent changing of couples carried out under the leadership of a single person or couple.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: poetic work that retells classical myths concerning love and transformation, by the Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 17).
Charenton: site of the insane asylum where the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), famous for his erotic writings and elaborate sexual perversions, was finally committed.
CHAPTER 7
loves of Louis XV: The favorite mistress of French king Louis XV (1710 –1774) was Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), who wielded great power over the French court; in later years she allowed the king to take other mistresses.
Régence: the period 1715–1723, during which France was ruled by Philippe d’Orléans, while Louis XV was still a minor.
Mont-Valérien: fort built on a hill west of Paris, near the suburb of Suresnes.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER, an affilitate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, has translated some ninety works from French. His translations have earned him numerous awards, including two French-American Foundation Translation Prizes and the Médaille de Vermeil of the Académie Francaise. He is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
A. S. Byatt
Caleb Carr
Christopher Cerf
Ron Chernow
Shelby Foote
Charles Frazier
Vartan Gregorian
Richard Howard
Charles Johnson
Jon Krakauer
Edmund Morris
Azar Nafisi
Joyce Carol Oates
Elaine Pagels
John Richardson
Salman Rushdie
Oliver Sacks
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Carolyn See
William Styron
Gore Vidal
1. The present work is a translation of La Curée, which Zola wrote in 1870–71 and which first appeared serially in the newspaper La Cloche in September 1871. Publication was halted in November when the publisher received a warning from the censor, but the entire text appeared in book form a few months later. A word about the title: la curée refers to the portion of the kill fed to the hounds after a hunt. The English word quarry has this French word as its root and according to the Oxford English Dictionary possesses this archaic meaning: “Certain parts of a deer placed on the hide and given to the hounds as a reward; also, the reward given to a hawk which has killed a bird.” The novel has been translated twice before: once under the title The Rush for the Spoils: A Realistic Novel, with an introduction by George Moore (the translator is not named), in an undated edition published by C. Marpon and E. Flammarion in Paris (and identified in the Widener Library catalog as “the suppressed English edition”); and once under the title The Kill, in a translation done in 1895 by A. Teixeira de Mattos and published by the Lutetian Society in 1895 but reprinted by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1954 with an introduction by Angus Wilson.
2. Henry James, “Letter from Paris: Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, ” in Henry James, Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 861.
3. Henry James, “Une Page d’Amour,” ibid.
4. Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 343– 4.
5. Ibid., p. 344.
6. All quotes not otherwise identified are from this translation of The Kill.
7. Zola was already an indefatigable researcher. His description in the novel’s opening scene of the procession of carriages in the Bois de Boulogne was lifted almost verbatim from a newspaper account; only the names were changed. And the contrast between ancient and modern in the realm of architecture was worked up from notes of the author’s explorations around the Parc Monceau and on the Ile Saint-Louis. See Emile Zola, Carnets d’enquêtes: une ethnographie inédite de la France, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris: Plon, 1986), and D. Baguley et al., La Curée de Zola: ou “La vie à outrance”: actes du colloque du 10 Janvier 1987 (Paris: SEDES, 1987).
8. Here Mallarmé was writing about Une page d’amour, but the comments apply equally well to The Kill. Quoted in Brown, Zola, p. 396.
9. Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 179.
10. Higonnet, Paris, p. 193.
11. “Sin” here is intended in a nostalgic sense, an “ancient” category with no counterpart in modern life. For Zola, there can be no sin in the modern capital because there is no Judge. It is this absence of judgment that deprives Renée of the singular damnation she expects as a reward for the audacity of her transgression. But no one will condemn her action as she desires: not her upright magistrate father, who in old age is so bewildered by the vertiginous changes in society that he has lost his bearings; not her husband, for whom profit trumps punishment; and not God, who has vacated the heavens above the Bois de Boulogne: “Above the still lake and squat trees and singularly unrelieved vista stretched the hollow of the sky, the infinite emptiness, wider and deeper than what lay below. There was something thrilling, something vaguely sad, about such a huge expanse of sky hanging over such a tiny patch of nature.” These lines were published a decade and a half before Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
12. See Brown, Zola, p. 40, on Zola’s mother’s efforts to reclaim part of that prize by way of litigation, reminiscent of Mme Sidonie’s litigiousness in The Kill.
13. See Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
14. See Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
15. Higonnet, Paris, p. 194.
16. Brown, Zola, p. 579: “All my works bear witness against the possibility of my having contributed to a book whose form and philosophy, whose means and end are equally obnoxious to me.”
17. Although the character of Eugène Rougon was widely believed to have been modeled after the imperial politician Eugène Rouher, Zola’s friend Paul Alexis said that it was in fact the character Zola would have been had
he chosen to invest his intelligence in politics rather than literature.
18. Higonnet, Paris, p. 289.
19. Henry James, “Emile Zola,” in James, Literary Criticism, p. 894.
20. Ibid., p. 892.
21. Letter to W. D. Howells, quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), p. 300.
22. Letter to T. B. Aldrich, quoted in Edel, Henry James, p. 300.
EMILE ZOLA
Emile Zola was born in Paris in 1840, the son of François Zola, a civil engineer of Italian extraction, and his wife Emilie. In 1843 the family moved to Aix-en-Provence, where Emile lost his father at the age of six. In youth he became friendly with the future painter Paul Cézanne, after whom Zola would model a character in L’Oeuvre, a novel about bohemian Paris that put a severe strain on their friendship.
The widow Zola moved with her son to Paris in 1857 to pursue legal matters stemming from the tangled business affairs her husband had left behind after his death. An indifferent student, Emile twice failed the examination for the baccalauréat and eventually took employment as publicity director for the publisher Hachette. His first book, a collection of stories entitled Les Contes à Ninon, appeared in 1864. A novel, Thérèse Raquin, published in 1867, established his reputation. By 1869 he had conceived the ambitious plan of writing a series of twenty novels that would trace the fortunes of a family, the Rougon-Macquart. With these books Zola intended to give a vivid illustration of contemporary theories about the influence of heredity and milieu on human development while at the same time bestowing dramatic form on the history of the French nation. The Kill (La Curée in French) was the second title to appear in that series, in 1871. His reputation grew with the publication of L’Assommoir in 1877, and the sensation caused by Nana in 1880 made him wealthy as well as notorious and catapulted him to the head of the literary movement known as Naturalism.
By the 1890s he had become France’s most famous writer, extolled by some, reviled by others. At his country seat in Médan he received the nation’s literary elite and with assiduous effort rounded out the Rougon-Macquart saga he had first conceived a quarter of a century earlier. He might have ended his life as an eminent man of letters had it not been for the Dreyfus Affair. It took some time for Zola to be drawn into the movement that had grown up in protest against the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French artillery and a Jew, on charges that he had betrayed France. At last convinced that the evidence against Dreyfus had been fabricated, Zola mustered up the considerable courage needed to brave the howls of anti-Semites and nationalists that greeted the publication of his famous open letter, “J’accuse,” in L’Aurore in 1898. Charged with slander, he fled to England, where he remained until 1899. In 1902 he died of asphyxiation in his Paris apartment.
2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Translation and introduction copyright © 2004 by Arthur Goldhammer
Biographical note copyright © 2004 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The map is used by permission of the Map Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Zola, Emile.
[Curée. English]
The kill / Emile Zola; translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
p. cm.
1. Goldhammer, Arthur. II. Title.
PQ2499.C9E
www.modernlibrary.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43234-6
v3.0
Emile Zola, The Kill
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