A Love Story | Émile Zola

_{The night light in the blue-tinged glass on the mantleshelf burned behind a book, which cast a shadow across half the bedroom. The quiet glow spreading over the bedside table and the chaise lounge, bathed the wide folds of the velvet curtains, and flooded the mirror on the rosewood cupboard between the two windows with azure. The harmonious tones of this homely room, the blue of the curtains, the furniture and the carpet acquired a softness, like clouds, at this time of the evening. And opposite the windows, in the shadow, the bed, also draped in velvet, was a dark shape, brightened only by the whiteness of the sheets. Hélène, a mother and a widow, her arms serenely crossed, was breathing lightly.}

In many ways, this opening paragraph tells us almost everything we need to know about Zola’s eighth Rougon-Macquart novel, Une page d’amour, A Love Story. Hélène Grandjean is a widow with an only child, 11-year-old Jeanne, who is fragile and prone to unexplained illnesses and passions. Their life is luxurious and bourgeois, but lonely and rather isolated. The character of Hélène appears to be calm, passive and aloof from the expected emotional fallout of becoming a widow at a young age in a strange city.

The day after she arrived in Paris, her husband fell suddenly ill whilst they were staying in the Hôtel du Var in the Rue de Richelieu. All alone in an unfamiliar city, she was befriended by acquaintances of her husband, the gentle, kind Abbé Jouve and his half-brother, Rambaud. They helped her to find a nice apartment of her own in Passy, in a nice neighbourhood near the Abbé’s church. Her new neighbours are Doctor Deberle, his wife Juliette and son Lucien. Doctor Deberle’s assistance is required at the beginning of the story, when Jeanne has a severe seizure in the middle of the night, and Hélène’s usual doctor is unreachable. So begins their friendship and the love story at the heart of the novel.

_{For more than an hour they chatted about a multitude of things, without for a moment wishing to allude to the loving feeling which filled their hearts. What was the point of talking about that? Did they not already know what they would have said to each other? All that was necessary to their pleasure was to be together, to agree on everything, to enjoy their carefree reclusion in that very place where he kissed his wife every evening in her presence.}

We learn that Hélène was from Marseilles where she lived with her father, Mouret, the hat-maker, when she caught the eye of the son of the wealthy Grandjean family. His family did not approve, and basically disowned him after the wedding (I’ve never understood how parents could do that to their own child). But as is the way with Zola, the so-called sins of the parents are visited upon their daughter Jeanne, who appears to have inherited the old family “neurosis” from the matriarch Adelaïde. Jeanne is sickly, fragile and prone to ‘jealous passions‘. Early on, Hélène says, “she gets so joyful and sad over the most trivial things, it worries me, they are so intense….it makes her weep when I kiss another child.”

I had to remind myself where Hélène fits into the Rougon-Macquart family tree. She is part of what Zola called his third branch of the family tree named after Ursule’s husband, Mouret. They are a mix of the other two – usually middle-class or bourgeoisie who tend to live more balanced lives than the other branches. However Adelaïde’s “deficiencies” often make themselves known in this particular branch via strange desires and passions in the grandchildren.

The growing passion between Hélène and Henri Deberle is not the only love story on offer however.

There is the more brotherly-like, sensible love of Rambauld for Hélène, and Jeanne’s innocent love of her friend Lucien then Rambauld as a father-like figure. Juliette’s younger sister, the delightful Pauline: “who, in spite of her being eighteen and having womanly curves, loved to romp around with very small children” is to be married off (love as contract) while the adulturous feeings that Juliette has for the caddish man-about-town, Malignon provide the contrast. Finally there is Zola’s love of of Paris as seen through Hélène’s apartment windows.

Going back to the quote above, the problems with this love story between Hélène and Henri are obvious and flagged early on by Zola. Besides the wife thing of course, we see that not talking openly about their feelings leads Hélène to make all sorts of assumptions about their compatibility and the mutuality of their desires. Henri is not necessarily a cad like Malignon, but he clearly will not be happy with the pleasures of just talking for long. Patient longing, yearning and loving chastely from afar are not what Henri has in mind, as we see when he takes the first opportunity to kiss Hélène.

Zola paints this class of Parisian society as being superficial and frivolous, whilst being severely constrained by expectations and rules that have very little to do with morals and ethics and everything to do with power and control. Marriages appear to be arranged and passionless, religion a passing fad or a pleasurable pastime to take up and put aside as one needs. And as one would expect of a novel written at this time, it is Hélène, the woman, who pays the highest price for any passionate trangressions.

I thoroughly enjoyed Helen Constantine’s translation and appreciated her discussion on the choice of English title. Previous choices are listed below, but Constantine felt that the novel was more than “an adulterous relationship as implied in the title ‘A Love Affair’.”

I also get caughth up in locations, trying to visualise what it is that Zola and his characters are describing in such eloquent detail. Passy at this time was still very much a suburb on the periphery of Paris. Zola uses his descriptions of Paris through Hélène’s windows to match the progress of her feelings, with a sunrise, a sunset and a tremendous storm. The story finishes on a cold, snowy day in the cemetery.

_{She had grown especially fond of the Passage des Eaux. the steep street pleased her, its freshness and its silence, the invariably clean cobbles washed on rainy days by a stream running down from the heights. When she arrived at the top she had a strange feeling as she looked down at the steeply sloping alley that was most often deserted, since only a few people living in the streets around knew it was there. Then she ventured down through an arch under a house on the Rue Raynouard, and made her way gingerly down the seven wide steps, alongside the bed of a pebbly watercourse that took up half the the narrow passage….Occasionally an old woman climbed up, with the help of the shiny black iron railing fixed to the right-hand wall…But almost always she was on her own and these secret steps, shaded like a sunken lane in the woods, held a great attraction for her. At the bottom, she raised her eyes. The sight of the steep slope she had just climbed down made her feel a little fearful.}

Rue Raynouard was a street high up on the hillside – it had several offshoots going down towards the Seine by stairs, including the Passage des Eaux that Hélène liked to use. The old barrier of Passy was an important crossing point on the journey from Paris to Versailles. The fad of ‘taking the waters’ at Passy attracted aristocractic families who built large properties. During the 18th century Passy also became a popular place for artists and writers, including Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) who lived in a house there between Rue Berton and Rue Raynouard from 1840 to 1847 (this house is now a museum).

After the Revolution, the old aristocratic residences were poorly maintained, the adjoining parks were sold off and divided up. Then in the beginning of the 19th century Benjamin Delessert and his brothers François and Gabriel built a sugar refinery and cotton mill in Passy as well as private mansions at numbers 19 to 21. Gabriel was mayor of Passy from 1830 to 1834. In 1860 (just after the events of this story) Passy was incorporated into the city of Paris.

In the end, A Love Story will not rank as one of my favourites in the Rougon-Macquart series, but it also wasn’t one of the less than satisfactory ones (I’m looking at you La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret/The Sin of Father Mouret). It does make me wonder, though, what Zola was trying to say about women and adultery with this novel, given his own less-than-above board domestic arrangements.

• Complementary post: Let me look into that…on Jardinieres and Magot
• Read for Fanda’s Zoladdiction month
• Book 13/50 in my Classics Club list #3

Previous translations:  Hélène: a love episode, tr. Mary Neal Sherwood (1878); A Love Episode, Vizetelly-editions (1886/1895); A Page of Love, tr. T.F.Rogerson (1897); A Love Episode, tr. C.C.Starkweather (1905); A Love Affair, tr. Jean Stewart (1957)
ISBN: 9780198728641
Translator: Helen Constantine (2017)
Imprint: Oxford World Classics
Published: 1878
Dates Read: 1st - 19th April 2024 

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life recognises the continuous connection to Country, community and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and they are this nations first storytellers.