The Rush for the Spoil (La Curée): A Realistic Novel

The public and the press have agreed that L'Assommoir is M. Zola's chef d'œuvre . Against this verdict I have no objection to offer. I believe it will meet with posterity's endorsement. But although L'Assommoir may lift its head the highest, there are many other volumes in the Rougon-Macquart series which stand on, and speak from equally lofty platforms of art. In my opinion, these are La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, La Conquête de Plassans, and La Curée.
I have spoken before of Zola as an epic poet: he is this more than he is anything, and as he is more epic in La Curée than elsewhere ( L'Assommoir and La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret always excepted), it follows that it must be one of the best and most characteristic of his works. The qualities that endow a book with immortality exist independent of the artist's will, and the process of penetrating, of animating the whole with life, is accomplished as silently and unconsciously as the seed-grain germinates in the earth, as the child quickens with life in the womb. And, doubtless, Zola intended in the beginning to write merely the passionate love story of a woman who, oppressed and wearied of luxury, is forced to seek, in violent ways and fierce fancies, oblivion of golden idleness, of an aimless and satiated existence. This idea might have been worked out, and adequately worked out, in the analysis of the mind of a duke's daughter, who, after five years of husband hunting in London drawing-rooms, runs away and lives with her groom at Hampstead. And taken out of its setting, M. Zola's story is quite as simple. Renée is a young girl of the upper middle classes; she has been seduced; she is enceinte; it is necessary to find her a husband. Under such circumstances, it would be vain to be too particular, and an adventurer called Saccard is chosen. He is a genius who is waiting for a few pounds to make a million. Renée's fortune enables him to do this; he places her in a magnificent house in the Parc Monceaux; he gives her everything but an interest in life: to gain this she falls in love with her stepson, Maxime Saccard. The story of this incestuous passion becomes the theme of the book; and when Maxime deserts his stepmother to get married, she dies of consumption. That is all; but this slight outline soon began to grow, to take gigantic proportions in Zola's mind; and it was not long before he saw that his story was an allegory of the Second Empire. Renée became Paris; her dressmaker—Worms—became the Emperor; her dresses, the material of which costs sixty, the making-up of which, with the accumulated interest, costs six hundred, are the boulevards and buildings with which the city was adorned at ruinous expense. In the clamour of the fêtes in the Parc Monceaux, the demands of the creditors are silenced, and when Renée dies her debts are paid by her father—that is to say, by the Republic of M. Thiers.