Émile Zola, La Curée
Our Reading Journey
Aristide Saccard remarries into Second Empire Paris at exactly the right moment: his new wife, Renée, is the wealthy, convent-raised daughter of a magistrate, and Saccard is a speculator riding Baron Haussmann's demolition and reconstruction of the city, buying up condemned blocks before the boulevards are cut through them and reselling at a fortune. Renée fills her days with dressmakers, gambling, and a restlessness she can't name in a house shared with Maxime, her husband's son from his first marriage, a beautiful, indolent young man closer to her age than his father's. The two spend their idle hours together while Saccard is occupied with contracts and expropriations, and the novel starts pulling them toward each other before either one seems to notice.
Everything in this novel runs on the same logic of speculation, whether it's Saccard buying up doomed buildings on inside knowledge of where Haussmann's boulevards will cut through next or Renée and Maxime drifting toward a transgression neither of them calculates in advance. Zola makes the comparison explicit by calling Renée a new Phèdre, borrowing Racine's tragedy of a stepmother's forbidden desire and setting it down in a city being torn apart and rebuilt for profit. The parallel holds because both stories share the same shape: a household that looks orderly from outside, a passion nobody chooses so much as slides into, and a sense that the ground itself, moral or literally the streets of Paris, is being sold out from under everyone standing on it. Money and desire follow the same grammar in this book, both of them chasing yield, neither one satisfied for long.
About the Author
Émile Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840, and by 1868, at twenty-eight, had conceived the twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle that would occupy him for the next twenty-five years. La Curée, published in 1871, is the second volume, written against the backdrop Zola had just lived through: the Prussian siege of Paris and the bloody suppression of the Commune, events he watched from a cautious distance in Bordeaux before returning to a capital he described as devastated. The novel's frankness about speculation and desire unsettled contemporary critics well before L'Assommoir made him properly famous six years later, and its portrait of Haussmann-era real estate fortunes draws on scandals that were still fresh in Parisian memory when Zola wrote it. He died in Paris in 1902.
