This “absolute and total satisfaction” is altogether kinetic. Zola’s enumeration of visual stimuli—balconies, signs, sidewalks, benches, storefronts—moves as rapidly as the lovers’ coupé, as if to signal slyly that the blur of motion is essential, that none of these delights can bear much scrutiny or be lived with for very long without turning into ennui, the affliction that drives Renée to sin.¹¹The curious insubstantiality of modern pleasure is driven home by the stark contrast with the ponderous and “unusable” satisfactions of a relatively static past, conveniently enclosed within the walls of Renée’s ancestral home, the Hôtel Béraud:

Long suites of vast rooms with high ceilings dwarfed the old furniture, which was built low of dark wood. The dusky gloom was peopled solely by the figures in the tapestries, whose large, colorless bodies could barely be made out. All the luxury of the old Paris bourgeoisie was represented here, a luxury as unusable as it was unyielding: chairs whose oak seats were barely covered by a cushion of hemp, beds with stiff sheets, linen chests whose rough boards were singularly hard on frail modern finery.

Although Zola makes a half-hearted attempt at the end of his book to depict this sepulchral solitude as a moral order that would have yielded Renée, his latter-day Phèdre, a happy life had she only bent herself to it, one feels through his pen the libidinal pull of the modern spectacle. He was the son, after all, of a civil engineer, a builder of bridges and canals, a proto-Haussmann possessed of heroic, visionary energy yet caught in the toils of stealthy financiers, who join with death to frustrate him of his prize.¹²Hence the heroic myth of modernity—Enlightenment made flesh—is one that the son can wholeheartedly embrace. Light indeed becomes a physical and palpable presence in the novel of modern life. Everywhere in Zola’s capital light is the ethereal creator of the new:

All the crystal on the table was as thin and light as muslin, devoid of engraving, and so transparent that it cast no shadow. The centerpiece and other large items looked like fountains of fire. Lightning flashed from the burnished flanks of the warming ovens. The forks, spoons, and knives with their handles of pearl could have been mistaken for flaming ingots. Rainbows illuminated the glassware. And amid this shower of sparks, this incandescent mass, the decanters of wine added a ruby tinge to table linen as radiant as white-hot metal.

Or, again:

It was not yet midnight. Down below, on the boulevard, Paris went rumbling on, prolonging the blaze of daylight before making up its mind to turn in for the night. Wavering lines of trees separated the whiteness of the sidewalks from the murky blackness of the roadway with its thunder of speeding carriages and flash of headlights. At intervals on either side of this dark strip newsdealers’ kiosks blazed forth like huge Venetian lanterns, tall and strangely gaudy, as if they had been set down in these precise places for some colossal illumination. At this time of night, however, their muffled glow was lost in the glare of nearby storefronts.

Similar passages could be multiplied at will. If this light—this very physical light, this blazing gaslight, so different from the notional, metaphorical light of “enlightened” eighteenth-century thought— was to dispel the funereal gloom of the old order, mountains had to be moved: again, mountains real and not metaphorical, mountains of fill and debris, and to mobilize the army of laborers needed to accomplish this, mounds of cash had to be accumulated.¹³Therein, for Zola, lay the rub. Heroism, noble when visionary and selfless, was obliged to consort with vulgar money men of contemptible ethics, or so Zola imagined them when he placed Saccard’s vulturine sister Mme Sidonie outside the Bourse every afternoon at three o’clock, holding “court for characters as suspect and dubious as herself.” Zola, himself a clerk at Hachette earning 600 francs a month at a time when his heroine was racking up a clothing bill of 257,000 francs, could have known this milieu only at second hand, and he gave in to stereotypes that left no room for the Saint-Simonian social vision that put the brothers Jacob and Isaac Pereire at odds with their coreligionist Baron Rothschild as to the best means of stoking the engines of progress.¹⁴Zola’s grasping capitalists are not Jews—Jewish blood does not figure among the hereditary determinants of the Rougon line—yet they partake of the characteristics of the Jew as set forth in anti-Semitic journalism and literature. Indeed, Mme Sidonie in her inevitable black dress would have taken up her station outside the Bourse just a stone’s throw from “the apartment occupied by the anti-Semitic journalist Edouard Drumont of La Libre parole, who shook his fist at it every morning.”¹⁵Ironically for the man who was ultimately to be celebrated as the champion of Capt. Dreyfus, “certain Russian papers” would claim that he was not only an admirer of Drumont, like his friends Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt, but that he had actually collaborated with Drumont on his notorious anti-Semitic screed La France juive. Zola vehemently denied the charge—“the statement is quite simply imbecilic”—yet his agents of Haussmannization are, like Drumont’s Jews, outsiders masked as insiders and manipulating the rules of the game from within.¹⁶

Still, if Saccard is the hidden face of empire, its cash nexus, he also stands for a boldness of vision, a will to conquer, that Zola, student of heredity that he was, would have seen as his own father’s legacy.¹⁷ Standing above the capital on the Buttes Montmartre like a general on the eve of battle, Saccard explains the broad outlines of his superior’s strategy to a woman who, to his subsequent relief, will carry the secret with her to an early grave, for this is a war that can be won at far less cost if its victims are unaware that it is being waged: “[E]xtending his open hand and wielding it like the sharp edge of a cutlass, he made as if to slice the city into four parts.” Then he speaks to his doomed first wife:

Look, follow my hand. From the boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, one cut; then, over this way, from the Madeleine to the Monceau plain, another cut; and a third cut in this direction, a fourth in that direction, a cut here, another farther out. Cuts everywhere. Paris slashed to pieces with a saber, its veins laid open to provide nourishment for a hundred thousand excavators and masons . . .

Saccard’s “cutlass” lifts the action from the Bourse, which for Zola belongs to the register of the base, the ignoble, to the battlefield, the arena of nobility par excellence. The character of Saccard thus succinctly embodies the ambivalence that always attends what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” We warm ourselves at Prometheus’ fire and complain of liver troubles attendant on the sedentary ways we adopt in order to remain close to the hearth.

AMBIVALENCE AND ANDROGYNY

“Ennui is the enemy,” a guide to the French capital observed in 1867, “and I confess that I cannot understand how anyone can feel bored in Paris.” Yet Renée Saccard, riding in her carriage in the Bois de Boulogne circa 1861, is heard to exclaim, “Oh, I’m bored! I’m bored to death.” The contradiction is more apparent than real, however: variety of sensation not only cannot ward off ennui but is likely to induce it— such is the perversity of the laws of pleasure. Paris, for Henry James, was “the biggest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes . . . such a beauty of light.”¹⁸Yet lust, whether of the eyes or the flesh, leads to lassitude: “I would say you’ve tasted every conceivable apple,” Maxime tells his stepmother, but when he asks her what she dreams of, she has no answer other than to say, “I want something different.” Don Juan himself could not have expressed more succinctly the insatiability of mere appetite, as distinct from the more profound desire whose aim is not to fill a recurring void in the desiring subject but to effect an inner metamorphosis. Metamorphosis, however, calls for roundness of character, and Zola’s individuals are, as James accurately lamented, “simple and shallow,” so that “our author’s dealings with [them] . . . maintain their resemblance to those of the lusty bee who succeeds in plumping for an instant . . . into every flower-cup of the garden.” James concedes, however, that “we see enough of the superficial among novelists at large . . . without deriving from it, as we derive from Zola at his best, the concomitant impression of the solid.”¹⁹