Page 10 of For a Night of Love


  The curate was so nice, so very nice! While from up in his pulpit he was talking of bones cracking and limbs roasting, the little Baroness, half asleep as she was, saw him at her table, blissfully wiping his lips, telling her, ‘My dear madame, this is a bisque which would ensure you found grace in the sight of God the Father, if your beauty were not already sufficient for you to be certain of a place in paradise.’

  5

  The curate, having resorted to anger and threats, began to sob. This was his habitual tactic. Almost on his knees in the pulpit, with only his shoulders visible, then, all at once, rising to his feet and bending forward as if overcome by sorrow, he would wipe his eyes, with a great rustle of starched muslin, he would throw out his arms to right and left, adopting the pose of a wounded pelican. This was the crowning piece, the grand finale for full orchestra, the wild, climactic denouement.

  ‘Weep, weep,’ he whimpered, his voice failing; ‘weep for yourselves, weep for me, weep for God…’

  The little Baroness was completely asleep, her eyes still open. The heat, the incense, the deepening shadows, had quite numbed her. She had curled up into a cocoon, wrapped in the voluptuous sensations she was feeling; and, in this snug secrecy, she was dreaming of the most delightful things.

  Next to her, in the chapel of the Holy Angels, there was a big fresco, depicting a group of handsome, half-naked young men, with wings growing out of their backs. They were smiling the smiles of bashful lovers, while their postures, bowing or kneeling, seemed to be adoring some invisible little Baroness. What handsome boys, sweet lips, satin-smooth skin, muscular arms! The worst of it was that one of them was the absolute image of the young Duke of P***, one of the Baroness’ good friends. As she dozed, she wondered if the Duke would look good naked, with wings growing out of his back. And, at times, she imagined that the big pink cherub was wearing the Duke’s black tails. Then, the dream grew clear: it really was the Duke, in a very short frock-coat, who, from out of the darkness, was blowing her kisses.

  6

  When the little Baroness awoke, she heard the curate’s voice pronouncing the sacramental words: ‘And it is grace that I wish you.’

  For a few moments she was overcome with surprise; she thought the curate was wishing her the young Duke’s kisses.

  There was a great scraping of chairs. Everyone left; the little Baroness had guessed quite correctly, her coachman was not yet waiting at the foot of the steps. That devil of a curate had dispatched his sermon very rapidly, robbing his penitent ladies of at least twenty minutes of eloquence.

  And as the little Baroness waited impatiently in a side aisle, she met the curate bustling out of the sacristy. He was looking at his watch, with the hurried air of a man anxious not to miss an appointment.

  ‘Ah, how late I am, dear madame!’ he said. ‘You know, I’m expected at the Countess’. There’s a concert of sacred music, followed by a light meal.’

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  Emile Zola was born in April 1840 and grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he befriended the artist, Paul Cézanne. In 1858, Zola moved to Paris with his mother. Despite her hopes that he would become a lawyer, he in fact failed his baccalaureate, and went on to work for the publisher Hachette, and to write literary columns and art reviews. He lost his job at Hachette on publication of his autobiographical novel, La Confession de Claude (1865), before his earliest venture into naturalistic fiction, Thérèse Raquin (1867). His series of over twenty volumes, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93) is a natural and social history of one family under the Second Empire in France, individual volumes exploring social ills and the influence of nature and nurture on human behaviour. L’Assommoir (1877) concerned drunkenness and the Parisian working-classes, Nana (1880) addressed sexual exploitation, and Germinal (1885) considered labour conditions. Other novel sequences followed, always entailing vast amounts of research.

  Zola’s later life as a writer was famously punctuated by his involvement in the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. In a newspaper letter entitled ‘J’Accuse’ (1898), Zola challenged the establishment and invited his own trial for libel, the author later removing briefly to England to escape the subsequent prison sentence. Emile Zola died in 1902, apparently asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes when asleep. Naturalism declined after his death, but his depictions of ‘Nature seen through a temperament’ were an important influence on writers such as Theodore Dreiser and August Strindberg.

  Andrew Brown studied at the University of Cambridge, where he taught French for many years. He now works as a freelance teacher and translator. He is the author of Roland Barthes: the Figures of Writing (OUP, 1993), and his translations include Memoirs of a Madman by Gustave Flaubert, The Jinx by Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Scudéri by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Theseus by André Gide, Incest by Marquis de Sade, The Ghost-seer by Friedrich von Schiller, Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac, Memoirs of an Egotist by Stendhal, Butterball by Guy de Maupassant, With the Flow by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Life of Castruccio Castracani by Machiavelli, and A Fantasy of Dr Ox by Jules Verne, all published by Hesperus Press.

  SELECTED TITLES FROM HESPERUS PRESS

  Author Title Foreword writer

  Pietro Aretino The School of Whoredom Paul Bailey

  Jane Austen Love and Friendship Fay Weldon

  Honoré de Balzac Colonel Chabert A.N. Wilson

  Charles Baudelaire On Wine and Hashish Margaret Drabble

  Giovanni Boccaccio Life of Dante A.N. Wilson

  Charlotte Brontë The Green Dwarf Libby Purves

  Mikhail Bulgakov The Fatal Eggs Doris Lessing

  Giacomo Casanova The Duel Tim Parks

  Miguel de Cervantes The Dialogue of the Dogs

  Anton Chekhov The Story of a Nobody Louis de Bernières

  Wilkie Collins Who Killed Zebedee? Martin Jarvis

  Arthur Conan Doyle The Tragedy of the Korosko Tony Robinson

  William Congreve Incognita Peter Ackroyd

  Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness A.N. Wilson

  Gabriele D’Annunzio The Book of the Virgins Tim Parks

  Dante Alighieri New Life Louis de Bernières

  Daniel Defoe The King of Pirates Peter Ackroyd

  Marquis de Sade Incest Janet Street-Porter

  Charles Dickens The Haunted House Peter Ackroyd

  Fyodor Dostoevsky Poor People Charlotte Hobson

  Joseph von Eichendorff Life of a Good-for-nothing

  George Eliot Amos Barton Matthew Sweet

  F. Scott Fitzgerald The Rich Boy John Updike

  Gustave Flaubert Memoirs of a Madman Germaine Greer

  E.M. Forster Arctic Summer Anita Desai

  Ugo Foscolo Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis Valerio Massimo

  Manfredi

  Elizabeth Gaskell Lois the Witch Jenny Uglow

  Théophile Gautier The Jinx Gilbert Adair

  André Gide Theseus

  Nikolai Gogol The Squabble Patrick McCabe

  Thomas Hardy Fellow-Townsmen Emma Tennant

  Nathaniel Hawthorne Rappaccini’s Daughter Simon Schama

  E.T.A. Hoffmann Mademoiselle de Scudéri Gilbert Adair

  Victor Hugo The Last Day of a Libby Purves

  Condemned Man

  Joris-Karl Huysmans With the Flow Simon Callow

  Henry James In the Cage Libby Purves

  Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Martin Jarvis

  Heinrich von Kleist The Marquise of O– Andrew Miller

  D.H. Lawrence The Fox Doris Lessing

  Leonardo da Vinci Prophecies Eraldo Affinati

  Giacomo Leopardi Thoughts Edoardo Albinati

  Nikolai Leskov Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk GilbertAdair

  Niccolò Machiavelli Life of Castruccio Richard Overy

  Castracani

  Katherine Mansfield In a German Pension Linda Grant

  Guy de Maupassant Butterball Germaine Greer

  Herman Melville The Enchanted Isles Margaret Drabble
br />
  Francis Petrarch My Secret Book Germaine Greer

  Luigi Pirandello Loveless Love

  Edgar Allan Poe Eureka Sir Patrick Moore

  Alexander Pope Scriblerus Peter Ackroyd

  Alexander Pushkin Dubrovsky Patrick Neate

  François Rabelais Gargantua Paul Bailey

  François Rabelais Pantagruel Paul Bailey

  Friedrich von Schiller The Ghost-seer Martin Jarvis

  Percy Bysshe Shelley Zastrozzi Germaine Greer

  Stendhal Memoirs of an Egotist Doris Lessing

  Robert Louis Stevenson Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Helen Dunmore

  Theodor Storm The Lake of the Bees Alan Sillitoe

  Italo Svevo A Perfect Hoax Tim Parks

  Jonathan Swift Directions to Servants Colm Tóibín

  W.M. Thackeray Rebecca and Rowena Matthew Sweet

  Leo Tolstoy Hadji Murat Colm Tóibín

  Ivan Turgenev Faust Simon Callow

  Mark Twain The Diary of Adamand Eve John Updike

  Giovanni Verga Life in the Country Paul Bailey

  Jules Verne A Fantasy of Dr Ox Gilbert Adair

  Edith Wharton The Touchstone Salley Vickers

  Oscar Wilde The Portrait o Mr W.H. Peter Ackroyd

  Virginia Woolf Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches Doris Lessing

  Virginia Woolf Monday or Tuesday Scarlett Thomas

  Copyright

  Published by Hesperus Press Limited

  28 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7RD

  www.hesperuspress.com

  For a Night of Love first published in French as Pour une nuit d’amour in 1876; Nantas first published in French in 1878; Fasting first published in French as Le Jeûne in 1870

  This translation first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2002

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  Introduction and English language translation © Andrew Brown, 2002

  Foreword © A.N. Wilson, 2002

  Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–78094–089–2

 


 

  Emile Zola, For a Night of Love

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