As beasts at a fair are urged on by the goads of their drivers, so certain fate pushes this wretched family forward into irrevocable death that is awaiting it. At each generation they grow more nervous, more worn out, more ready to succumb beneath the ravages of the horrible disease that in a hundred different ways is sweeping them into the night of the grave.
Even from this imperfect outline, what majesty, what grandeur there is in this dark design! Does not the great idea of fate receive a new and more terrible signification? Is not the horror and gloom of the tragedy increased by the fact that the thought was born in the study of the scientist, and not in the cloud-palace of the dreamer? What poet ever conceived an idea more vast! and if further proof of the epic faculty with which I have credited Émile Zola be wanting, I have only to refer to Pascal Rougon. Noah survived the deluge. Pascal Rougon, by some miracle, escapes the inherited stain—he, and he alone, is completely free from it He is a doctor, an advanced scientist, and he, in the twentieth volume, will analyse the terrible neurosis that has devastated his family.
In the upbuilding of this enormous edifice, Émile Zola shows the same constructive talent as he did in its conception. The energy he displays is marvellous. Every year a wing, courtyard, cupola, or tower is added, and each is as varied as the most imaginative could desire. Without looking further back than “L’Assommoir,” let us consider what has been done. In this work, we have a study of the life of the working people in Paris, written, for the sake of preserving the “milieu,” for the most part in their own language. It shows how the workers of our great social machine live, and must live, in ignorance and misery; it shows, as never was shown before, what the accident of birth means; it shows in a new way, and, to my mind, in as grand a way as did the laments of the chorus in the Greek play, the irrevocability of fate. “L’Assommoir” was followed by “Une Page d’Amour,” a beautiful Parisian idyl. Here we see the “bourgeois” at their best. We have seven descriptions of Paris seen from a distance of which Turner might be proud; we have a picture of a children’s costume ball which Meissonier might fall down and worship; we have the portrait of a beautiful and virtuous woman with her love story told, as it were, over the dying head of Jeanne (her little girl), the child whose nervous sensibilities are so delicate that she trembles with jealousy when she suspects that behind her back her mother is looking at the doctor. After “Une Page d’Amour” comes “Nana,” and with her we are transported to a world of pleasure-seekers; vicious men and women who have no thought but the killing of time and the gratification of their lusts. Nana is the Messaline of modern days, and, obeying the epic tendency of his genius, Émile Zola has instituted a comparison between the death of the “gilded fly,” conceived in drunkenness and debauchery, and the harlot city of the third Emperor, which, rotten with vice, falls before the victorious arms of the Germans.