Money (Oxford World’s Classics) (4 page)

The novel is structured by means of contrasts, contrasts both between and within the characters. Saccard, the ruthless brigand, also shows compassion and kindness; the rapacious Busch is also the tender and loving carer of his brother. Gundermann, the king of the Bourse, the rock of logic on which Saccard’s ship will founder, is also the frail, indulgent grandfather. Gundermann’s logic and patience are set against Saccard’s passion and impatience; and as a hoarder, accumulating wealth, Gundermann is opposed to Saccard, the spendthrift capitalist who spends for his personal pleasure but also for the furtherance of great and useful ventures. Because of his German origins Gundermann is also seen as Prussia, pitted against Saccard’s France. The capitalist Saccard, with his passion for money, is set in conflict
with Sigismond, the socialist philosopher who wants to ban money altogether. And money itself partakes of the general ambiguity: filthy and evil on the one hand, and potentially good as the agent of progress on the other.

Some scenes recur with contrasting variations, that underline the volatility of things. Delcambre’s discovery of Baroness Sandorff with Saccard is doubled by Saccard’s discovery of Sandorff in the arms of Sabatani. The first view of the beautiful Mazaud family in their beautiful apartment is savagely transformed when Madame Caroline comes upon Mazaud’s body dripping blood on to the rich carpet while his wife utters unearthly screams of grief. Those screams will later be echoed in the screams of Busch, cradling the dead body of his brother. Madame Caroline remembers hearing such screams before, so that in quasi-Proustian fashion Madame Mazaud’s cries are intermingled with those of Busch. People and events in this novel are complex, ambiguous, resistant to stable definition.

Nothing seems really solid: decay, corruption, and death are all around. The worm is indeed in the fruit, as suggested in the first chapter—the worm of greed, excess, and deceit. Zola shows the old landed aristocracy, in the persons of the impoverished Countess de Beauvilliers and her daughter, cruelly brought low and humiliated, while the ‘aristocratic’ Marquis de Bohain, with no probity and no substance, continues to thrive, with his little head atop his very large frame. Speculation is rife, as greed takes over one person after another. Not only Baroness Sandorff, but also the Maugendres, Dejoie, even little Flory, all fall prey to the gambling bug. Even the Hamelins are tainted, having accepted some of the profits of Saccard’s speculation.

The social inequalities of the regime are vigorously highlighted in Madame Caroline’s visit to the Cité de Naples. The dark and hideous makeshift hovels, the mud and the stinking open sewers, create a scene like something out of a horror movie. It reaches its climax when, through Madame Caroline’s eyes, we see the filthy mattress on the ground where ‘Mother’ Eulalie lies, with her ulcerated legs, then Victor, with his stupefying resemblance to Saccard, suddenly revealed by the light from the open door. To underline the gap between destitution and luxury, Madame Caroline goes straight from the Cité de Naples to the sweet-scented apartment of Maxime. Such contrasts and oppositions question the very bases of this society. The contrast between the lives of Saccard’s two sons could hardly be more stark,
and Madame Caroline again reflects on the role of money: was it penury that gave rise to such degradation on one side, and was it money that led to such luxury and elegance on the other? ‘Could money then mean education, health, and intelligence?’ (p. 350), she wonders. But Maxime, in his idleness and self-centred, callous indifference to others, seems as corrupted by wealth as his half-brother by destitution.

In the diametrically opposed views of Saccard and Sigismond we see the confrontation of capitalism and socialism, highlighted by Sigismond’s three appearances, in the first chapter, the ninth, and the last. Sigismond is not really much of a Marxist—Zola had not studied Marx, but based Sigismond’s ideas on what he had read of socialism,
¹³
and Sigismond’s theories are presented as visions and dreams, rather than solid constructions. In the first chapter, Sigismond explains to an uneasy Saccard his notion of a world with no money, no business deals, and no Stock Exchange, and Saccard, looking down from the high window, sees the Bourse not only shrunk by distance, but also threatened: what if this dreamer were right? … Sigismond sees money as a corrupting evil, standing in the way of progress, an evil to be banished. Saccard, on the other hand, sees it as the very tool of progress. In their later interview Sigismond is much changed by his illness, grown thin and pale, ‘with the eyes of a child, eyes drowning in dreams’ (p. 261). Saccard finds him reading his ‘Bible’, the work of Karl Marx, which, in Sigismond’s view, demonstrates the inevitable destruction of the capitalist system. In a world without money, ‘work vouchers’ would be the only currency, a notion that horrifies Saccard: ‘Destroy money? But money is life itself! There would be nothing left. Nothing!’ (p. 263). Saccard’s capitalist economy is, according to Sigismond, unconsciously but inevitably working towards the great ‘Collectivist’ takeover, and the idyllic future he has mapped out and planned in detail in his papers. But it is indeed a paper future, and even Sigismond’s papers will be destroyed.
¹⁴

Before the novel quite ends Zola brings Sigismond back on stage
once more, to explain, this time to Madame Caroline, the ideas that will carry mankind to universal peace and happiness. Zola positions this last appearance of the now-dying Sigismond alongside Madame Caroline’s encounter with La Méchain, accompanied as ever by her huge black bag, bulging now with dead Universal shares. Earlier described as a predatory bird, feeding on the corpses of the battlefield, La Méchain is like an attendant Fury who has waited and watched and finally gathered up her prey.

In Sigismond’s ideal city everything would be owned by the community. There would be no more prejudice against manual labour: everybody would work, ‘a work at once personal, obligatory, and free’ (p. 365). Sigismond’s idealistic socialism contrasts sharply with Saccard’s capitalist, even imperialist, notion of conquering the Middle East through finance and industrialization. Both men, in their different ways, are visionaries, and just as Saccard in his prison cell still radiates hope and vitality, so the dying Sigismond still sees in the distance the ‘happy city, triumphant city, toward which mankind has been marching for so many centuries’ (p. 367).

Money
has an intrinsically cinematic quality, with its lively and varied visual scenes—excited clamouring in the Bourse, richly furnished interiors and salons, the streets of Paris with their bustling crowds and horse-drawn traffic, the horrific filth of the Cité de Naples—and Zola’s narrative operates in a quite cinematic manner, with multiple changes of angle and perspective, moving through panning panoramas, close-ups, ‘flashbacks’, and expansions, changing the lighting and making expressionist transformations. Zola even manages his huge cast of characters like a film-director, giving each new character some special feature or recognizable ‘tag’—Massias the jobber, always running; La Méchain with her sinister, bulging bag; Flory with his enveloping beard; Madame Conin with her pretty curls. This cinematic style, along with the topicality of the subject in the late 1920s, no doubt encouraged Marcel L’Herbier in 1928 to make his silent film of the novel, updating it from the 1860s to his own times; it is now regarded as a classic.

Zola shows the sort of writerly self-consciousness generally associated with the twentieth-century novel in its reflexivity, that is, the
reflection of the work within the work. Repeatedly foregrounding the act of writing, Zola points obliquely to his own authorial activity, and in so doing subverts the Naturalist stance.

In the financial operations of Saccard the accountancy term ‘jeux d’écritures’ is used over and over. Translated as ‘juggling the books’ or ‘false accountancy’, it is literally ‘games (or play) of writing’, and there is a great deal of ‘writing play’ in this novel—everyone is writing and creating. The villainous Busch accumulates and classifies his papers with their histories of debt and deceit, then works to create something profitable out of them, while in the next room Sigismond is writing the work that outlines a new future for mankind. It is Hamelin’s letters to his anxious sister that keep her on track, with their accounts of the great changes taking place abroad. Jantrou too is a writer, creating the persuasive fictions, the ‘little novels’ of his brochures, the advertisements that sell the Universal Bank to a gullible public. Saccard, writing a speech for Hamelin, is well pleased with the turn of phrase by which ‘the ancient poetry of the Holy Land’ colours the presentation of the Carmel Silver Mines. Even in his prison cell Saccard, surrounded by files, is writing up his account of events.

It is from the drawings, plans, maps, and watercolours tacked on the wall of the Hamelins’ workroom that great new schemes arise, brought to life by Saccard’s imagination and eloquence, just as it is from Zola’s notes and tellingly named
ébauches
(‘sketches’) that the novel arises, brought to life by Zola’s imagination and eloquence. And it is those maps and sketches and watercolours that Madame Caroline takes down and rolls up in the final chapter, as if enacting the closure of the narrative. In a further instance of reflexivity, Jordan, the honest, hard-working writer, forced by poverty into journalism but whose novel at last succeeds, is a pale reflection of the young Zola himself. In his earlier work
The Masterpiece
(
L’Oeuvre
, 1886), Zola had introduced the writer Sandoz, who declares that he will create a series of novels based on one family. And in the last novel of the series, Dr Pascal, like Zola, gathers together the whole history of the Rougon-Macquart family; Pascal’s notes are destroyed, but Zola’s happily survive, embodied in the Rougon-Macquart novels.

Introduction

Translator’s Note

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Émile Zola

MONEY

Explanatory Notes

T
HIS
translation is based on the text of the novel in volume 5 of Henri Mitterand’s excellent Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of
Les Rougon-Macquart
(Paris: Fasquelle et Gallimard, 1967), which offers, as well as a scrupulously annotated text, a critical study, and detailed information on Zola’s sources and preparation for the novel and the reception of the novel by critics of the time. Other editions were also consulted.

The first English translation available in England was made by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly in 1894—
Money
[
l’Argent
] by Émile Zola (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894). Some earlier translations had appeared in America, where Zola’s novels were translated piecemeal from serial episodes in the newspapers, before the novels appeared in volume form. Most of these have sunk without trace. Vizetelly mentions one as being ‘of merit’—
Money
by Émile Zola, translated from the French by Benj. R. Tucker (Boston, Mass.: Benj. R Tucker Publishers, 1891). Benjamin R. Tucker was the editor and publisher of
Liberty
, a fortnightly organ of ‘Anarchistic Socialism, the Pioneer of Anarchy in America’.

Vizetelly’s version is extensively expurgated, with whole episodes omitted, and new passages invented to fill consequent gaps in the narrative. Tucker also suffers from censorship, and comments angrily on an omission he had to make:

‘Disgraceful law’ does not, however, constrain Tucker nearly as thoroughly as Victorian ‘morality’ does Vizetelly, who has to omit, among other things, Saccard’s bidding for the favours of Madame Conin and the rape of Alice de Beauvilliers. Vizetelly also comments on the regrettable omissions: ‘Nobody can regret these changes more than I do myself, but before reviewers proceed to censure me… If they
desire to have verbatim translations of M. Zola’s works, let them help to establish literary freedom.’ Vizetelly deserves considerable gratitude for bringing a version of Zola to English readers, in the face of censorship difficulties which had sent his father to prison. However, it is regrettable that subsequent editions have all been versions of that same translation, despite its defects and heavy bowdlerization. Vizetelly commented that publication was very timely in 1894, in view of what he called ‘the rottenness of our financial world … and the inefficiency of our company laws’. It seems no less timely today for much the same reasons.

It has been a privilege to create the first new English translation of
Money
since the nineteenth century, a translation that can now cover the whole text. I have tried to keep the rhythm and emphases of Zola’s writing, and to make the novel read easily for contemporary readers, while keeping the flavour of its own period. Above all, I have tried to keep the verve, the energy, and the poetic dimension of Zola’s writing.

I should like here to thank those who, in different ways, have greatly helped me in this task, above all Nicholas Minogue, for untiring reading and helpful comment; Brian Nelson for advice and support; and Judith Luna for her unfailing (though sorely tried!) patience, support, and good humour.

L’Argent
was serialized in the newspaper
Gil Blas
from 30 November 1890 to 4 March 1891 and in
La Vie populaire
from 22 March 1891 to 30 August, 1891. It was published in volume form by Charpentier in March 1891. Paperback editions, with excellent critical introductions and notes, exist in the following collections: ‘Folio classique’, ed. Henri Mitterand, preface by André Wurmser (Paris, 1980); ‘Classiques de Poche’, ed. Philippe Hamon et Marie-France Azéma (Paris, 1998); GF Flammarion, ed. with introduction by Christophe Reffait, with illustrations, detailed notes, and financial lexicon (Paris, Éditions Flammarion, 2009). There is a very useful monograph on
L’Argent
by Colette Becker in the ‘Connaissance d’une Oeuvre’ series (Paris: Bréal, 2009). The invaluable
Dictionnaire d’Émile Zola
by Colette Becker, Gina Gourdin-Servenière, and Véronique Lavielle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1993) offers exhaustive and alphabetically indexed information on Zola’s life, work, and fictional characters. In
Cahiers naturalistes
, no. 86 (2012), 285–94, ‘Zola et la Crise’ by Christophe Reffait analyses the treatment of the Bourse in
L’Argent
, and outlines Zola’s understanding of the periodicity of economic crises.