A Love Story Read online

  A Love Story gives only glimpses of Zola’s most characteristic and powerful gifts as a novelist. Its muted tone and style reflect the writer’s aim to produce a relatively inoffensive work after the provocative hyperrealism of L’Assommoir. The silent streets of bourgeois Passy contrast with the proletarian clamour of the Rue de la Goutte d’Or. However, while deliberately eliminating a satirical tone and suggesting an innocuous surface, Zola conveys a sharp critique of bourgeois values. The novel deals with bourgeois adultery and the moral laxity beneath respectable appearances (from that perspective, it is a kind of genteel prelude to the savagely satirical Pot Luck). But the novel is primarily interesting as a psychological study. It stands out in Zola’s fiction for its intense focus on the protagonist and her shifting emotional states. Its basic theme, Zola stated in his planning notes, is sexual passion — its birth, development, effects, consequences, and death.

  Paris, Symbolism, and a Dream World

  An outstanding feature of A Love Story is the series of panoramic descriptions of Paris, in varying seasons and conditions of light, that close each of the five parts of the novel. These descriptions are a literary equivalent of the cityscapes the Impressionists were producing at the time Zola was writing his novel; and they call to mind the celebrated series of paintings by certain Impressionists, notably Monet’s versions of the Gare Saint-Lazare and of Rouen Cathedral, and Pissarro’s repeated reworkings of such Parisian vistas as the Pont-Neuf and the Boulevard Montmartre.1 Zola himself claimed that he not only championed the Impressionists but also translated them into literature. One painting in particular is powerfully present in A Love Story, for it is so clearly connected with the novel’s themes and effects. It is the painting used to illustrate the cover of this volume: Berthe Morisot’s On the Balcony (1872). In this painting, a woman dressed in black (mourning black?) and a little girl look out over a vast panorama of Paris, from the elevated vantage-point of a balcony on the Rue Franklin, a quiet street in Passy (where the Morisot family actually resided).

  Zola’s extended descriptions of Paris in A Love Story are far from being self-contained virtuoso exercises in style. The appearance of the city changes so as to reflect Hélène’s (and later, Jeanne’s) emotional states: sunrise, and the awakening of love; Paris ablaze with light as Hélène’s passion kindles; Paris in a stormy deluge at passion’s consummation; Paris in the snow, as Hélène looks forward to a cold and indifferent future. Moreover, the descriptions of Paris are integrally related to Zola’s use of space and symbolism throughout his novel. The symbolic decor of A Love Story reflects the conflicts within Hélène, both conscious and unconscious. Images of open space and immensity are contrasted with images of enclosure and isolation: ‘Her solitude opened out on to this immense vista’ (p. 22). Spatial claustration is opposed to liberation. This opposition is articulated round the space of the apartment and the linking image of the window. The window motif marks the dividing line between constraint and constriction on the one hand, excitement and potential release on the other. The closing chapters of the first three parts all begin with Hélène’s gesture of opening wide the window. Indeed, what better symbol of the central drama than Jeanne’s replacement of her mother at the window? In Part Five the alienation between Jeanne and Hélène is embodied in the image of Jeanne at the window looking down at her mother in the garden; a little later, Jeanne stays by the fire while Hélène goes out every day; and when Jeanne is about to die, Dr Bodin opens the window as she tries once more to look out over Paris.

  The calm and order of Hélène’s existence before her feelings are disturbed by the doctor are intimately associated with her apartment: ‘She liked this huge, peaceful room with its homely luxury’ (p. 21). When she returns after her ‘fall’, she seems to need to revisit all the rooms of the apartment, returning as if to a refuge: ‘All the furniture was in its place; she was glad to see it again’ (p. 215). But this refuge has been furnished by Rambaud, and it reflects his stolid bourgeois nature. The room gives reassurance, but its association with Rambaud suggests claustrophobia. Hélène’s insulation from life is identified with the apartment, as temptation is identified with descent: ‘It was as if they had been halted on the threshold of a world whose eternal spectacle lay in front of them and they refused to enter’ (p. 50). The image of Hélène on the threshold of an unknown world, suspended between temptation and seclusion, emphasizes the attraction of Paris. With its dark, indistinct shapes, the city becomes a metaphor of sensuality, inviting but dangerous and disturbing: ‘Paris often made them anxious when she sent them her warm and troubling vapours’ (p. 50). The city is persistently evoked in images of liquidity and ever-changing light. The variety and mobility of the visual scene set off the intimacy and immobility of Hélène’s apartment. The solidity of the furnishings emphasizes the sense of fixity, which is opposed to the later, pervasive moods of floating and suspension that characterize Hélène’s dreamlike states, and also to the images of dissolution and erosion associated with the development of her feelings. Images of height and depth set off her unexciting past life, evoked as a quiet walk along a straight path. Open space and images of promise are juxtaposed with the dark, damp house of her childhood, with memories of the emotional aridity of her past: the monotony of childhood followed by twelve years of marriage to a man she never loved. Rambaud and Abbé Jouve are associated with Hélène’s past through their previous acquaintance with her husband. Zola thus builds up a coherent pattern of connotations: apartment–reclusion–ignorance–Rambaud–past–claustrophobia as opposed to Paris–open space–immensity–the unknown–temptation–descent–knowledge–release.

  The second scene of contemplation by the window, precipitated by the doctor’s declaration of love, adds a new element to the equation: Deberle. Hélène’s reactions to her bedroom, supported by the returning image of the past, mark the progress of her passion:

  Back up there in the gentle, cloistered atmosphere of her room, Hélène felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She was astonished to find it so calm, so shut away, so soporific beneath its blue velvet furnishings, when she was bringing to it the breathless fire of this passion that so agitated her. Was this really her room, this solitary, dead place that she found so stifling? She flung open a window and leaned out in the direction of Paris. (p. 94)

  The tensions between passion and constraint, agitation and calm, merge into violent revolt as the dullness of Paris after the rain is changed into a resplendent vision dominated by images of gold and fire, and Hélène’s fear gives way to delicious self-abandonment: ‘It was a fatal passion, she had to admit, and Hélène was helpless to defend herself against it’ (p. 98). The wish to escape from the confines of the apartment becomes a desire for a deep, almost transcendent, passion which would be concentrated into a single moment: ‘she was begging for the fall, she wanted it to be immediate and profound. Her revolt boiled down to this one imperious desire. Oh, to disappear in an embrace, to live in one minute all that she had not lived up till now!’ (p. 99).

  Hélène’s apartment is opposed to the places in which her love is excited — places that are foreign and unfamiliar, liberating from everyday attachments and associations. The scene of the first indirect meetings between Hélène and Henri is Mother Fétu’s attic room, in which stiff deference gives way to deep sympathy:

  in his drawing room she would have displayed the wary reserve natural to her. But here they were far away from the world, sharing the only chair, almost cheerful about this wretchedness and ugliness which brought them together in mutual compassion. By the end of the week they knew each other as though they had lived side by side for years. In their common kindness towards her, Mother Fétu’s hovel was filled with light. (p. 29)

  Hélène’s ‘fall’ takes place in Malignon’s secret bachelor apartment, which is close to Mother Fétu’s hovel: ‘This room was unknown to her, the objects in it meant nothing to her’ (p. 205). And in her later confession to Abbé Jouve, Hélène recognizes
that ‘she would never have given in to that man if Jeanne had been with her. She had been obliged to go and meet him in that secret room’ (p. 241).

  The idea of a secret place in which supreme happiness will be achieved gives rise to moments of intense daydreaming. During Jeanne’s second convalescence, Hélène’s growing resentment of her daughter’s jealousy is matched by a vision of wish-fulfilment: ‘some vague dream where she imagined herself walking with Henri into an unfamiliar, idyllic world’ (p. 137). The revelation of bourgeois morality at the Deberles’ reception (Part Four, Chapter 1) marks a similar release of fantasy. Accompanied by the tinkling of the piano, ‘she was lulled into a dream: Henri had rid himself of Juliette and she, Hélène, was with him as his wife in far-off countries with unknown tongues’ (p. 168). Hélène’s torment as to the whereabouts of the rendezvous between Juliette and Malignon merges into the feverish near-fantasy of half-sleep as she imagines a ‘secret little room’ (p. 172) in a cheap hotel, then ‘a delightful apartment with thick hangings, flowers, huge bright fires burning in every hearth’ (p. 172); and suddenly the dream-image of Juliette and Malignon is replaced by that of Henri and herself, ‘in the depths of this cosy hideaway where the sounds of the world outside could not reach them’ (p. 172). Whereas the returning image of the past marks important stages of feeling, dream-moments often project us into an imagined future. Dream, constantly punctuating the narrative and closely linked to spatial imagery, lies at the heart of the novel, expressing unconscious feelings and translating the tensions on which the novel is built. Hélène is often immersed in reveries, in which recurring words and images evoke undercurrents of desire:

  In her heart she felt indignation, pride and anger, as well as a secret, undeniable desire (p. 96)

  Her will failed, unspeakable thoughts were doing their secret work in her (p. 183)

  This vertiginous lifting and dropping delighted her (p. 40)

  . . . she felt giddy, her mind reeled (p. 265) (my italics)

  Vertigo is associated with falling, the sexual connotations of which are clear.

  Pressures of feeling reach a climax in Part Four, with its sustained mood of somnambulism. Much of Parts Four and Five conveys a strongly dreamlike impression: the sense of detachment from external reality, the lack of a sense of time and space, the dramatic intensity of particular sensations and images. Part Four, Chapter 2, which leads up to Hélène’s ‘fall’, epitomizes the movement and texture of the novel, for it offers a striking synthesis of its dominant imagery and atmosphere. The ambivalence of Hélène’s feelings, a mixture of fascination and disgust, is crystallized in the opposition of images — between the claustrophobic associations of her apartment and the mysterious attraction of Malignon’s ‘rose-coloured room’ (p. 175) in Mother Fétu’s tumbledown house — which are held in tension by her mood of reverie. Her frustration wells up by the window: ‘It was that room that was making her ill. She loathed it now, cross at having spent two years in it’ (p. 177). The images of squalor associated with the ‘rose-coloured room’, and the emphasis on the muddy weather, reflect a vision of Hélène’s imminent ‘fall’ as a nauseous obscenity, a descent into the ‘id’. The room is surrounded by ugliness and poverty: the stairs oozing with damp, the dirty yellow doors on every floor. Hélène’s descent down the Passage des Eaux, contrasting with her enjoyment of its shaded seclusion at the time of her first visits to Mother Fétu (now transformed into a kind of Goyaesque procuress), is portrayed as a slow act of self-abasement. The sense of falling or being sucked up (‘The passage opened up below her like a black chasm. She couldn’t see the bottom’, p. 179) is associated with feelings of guilt. Freud writes that in dreams women ‘almost always accept the symbolic use of falling as a way of describing a surrender to an erotic temptation’.2 Hélène hesitates as she holds the handrail to support herself. The shadows, the walls that seem to close in, and the giant shapes of contorted branches, are menacing omens. With the imminence of her ‘fall’, the black mud becomes a surging torrent.

  The ‘fall’ scene itself occupies several pages. There is a superimpression of significant details in which different threads of the novel are gathered up in a play of associations. When Hélène is left alone in the ‘rose-coloured room’ with Henri, the image of an abyss, the emphasis on slow slipping and falling, sapped strength and inevitability, recall the descent of the Passage des Eaux: ‘It was like an abyss into which she herself was sliding’ (p. 202). Hélène yields to Henri in dreamlike acquiescence: ‘She forgot everything, she yielded to a superior force. It seemed to her natural and inevitable’ (p. 202). The resonances of sensation evoke dreamlike memories of childhood. The interpenetration of silence and memory, the blending of past and present, converge in a sense of oblivion, an ineffable, self-contained moment in which the external world, time, and space recede, suggesting both sensuous liberation (the memory of the summer day with the windows open and the chaffinch flying into the room) and harmonious identity with the unconscious. Simultaneous associations of death and ‘the delicious annihilation of her whole being’ (p. 203) are evoked by Hélène’s memory of a similar winter evening of her childhood when she had nearly died in a small, airless room, also before a large fire. The intensity of the dream-atmosphere is marked by a hallucinatory feeling of detachment from reality.

  They were far from the world, a thousand leagues away from the earth. And this forgetfulness of the bonds that attached them to beings and things was so absolute they seemed to have been born there at that moment and would die there in a little while when they took each other into their arms. (p. 204)

  The scene ends on a strikingly deflatory note: ‘When Hélène came back in her bare feet to fetch her slippers from in front of the dying embers, it occurred to her that never had they loved one another less than they had that day’ (p. 205). This statement, together with the introduction of the motif of death, leads us into Jeanne’s attitudes. There is a modification of perspective as the child assumes a more dominant role in the narrative.

  Jeanne

  Part Four, Chapter 5, in which Jeanne contemplates Paris from the window while her mother is with Henri, might be analysed as a dream, for it is a dream-landscape that we see, highly sexual in its symbolism. The projection of Jeanne’s feelings on to the scene offers, as Jean Borie points out, the most coherently anthropomorphic of the novel’s window-scenes.3 Borie also makes the pertinent observation, following Freud, that a dream-landscape is most often a representation of the sexual organs.4 The female sexual connotations of the landscape are plain: the focal centre of the city is the Seine, with Paris seen as an immense valley. The violence of a storm as it sweeps across the city matches the phallic significance of the Panthéon, in which Jeanne momentarily imagines her mother to be: ‘that was the building she found most astonishing, enormous as it was and sticking up in the air like the city’s plume’ (p. 210). She tries to identify what is hidden and forbidden: ‘She had a vague feeling that her mother was somewhere where children are not allowed to go’ (p. 209). Then, resuming the leitmotiv of Part Four, Chapter 2, Hélène is identified with the mud of the city. The scene Jeanne witnesses, and dies of witnessing, is the primal scene, presented as a scene of ‘cloacal copulation’:5

  what was that very black monument? And that street in which there was something big running? And all that district she was afraid of, because for certain there were fights going on there. She could not make it out clearly. But truth to tell, there was something moving there, it was very ugly, little girls ought not to look . . . Paris the unknown, with its smoke, its constant rumbling, its powerful life, was breathing out an odour of poverty, putrefaction, and crime which made her young head spin, as if she was leaning over one of those pestilential wells, which exhale their invisible mud . . . Then, at a loss, she remained there, afraid and ashamed, and she couldn’t rid herself of the idea that her mother was there among these sordid things, exactly where, she couldn’t tell, over there in the distance. (pp. 210–11)<
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  The sexual nature of the knowledge she and her mother had wished to have while resisting it, and which now causes Jeanne such torment, is clear. The sexual implications of the convulsion that shakes the city, the sharp pain Jeanne experiences simultaneously with Hélène’s ‘fall’, and the transformation of the city into a river of mud, make evident the suggestion of metaphorically lost virginity (‘Just now, something in her had been broken, that was certain’, p. 213) and clinch the cumulative associations between sexuality — shame — nemesis. Jeanne’s lost innocence seems to cry out under the constantly falling rain: ‘she lamented for something that could never be mended’ (p. 213). The vision translated through her — through her body — is of a sexuality that is unwanted: