Zola in The Kill does indeed flit among flowers. Renée in her flouncy finery resembles the flowers of the conservatory in which she makes love to her stepson. Her lips are said to beckon like the petals of the Chinese hibiscus covering the wall of the Saccard mansion. Maxime appears as a flower in the tableau vivant that casts him as Narcissus and Renée as Echo:

He was changing into a flower. His limbs seemed to turn green and grow longer inside his green satin tights. His supple trunk and slightly curved legs seemed to sink into the ground and take root, while the upper part of his body, festooned with wide strips of white satin, opened out into a marvelous corolla. Maxime’s blond hair completed the illusion, as his long curls could be taken for yellow pistils with white petals all around.

Yet if Zola permits himself to mock the bathos of the feckless prefect’s attempt to modernize the myth of Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he is quite content on his own account to derive whatever ironic profit he can from the conceit that what is tragic about Renée’s love for Maxime—if love is not too grand a word—is precisely that it lacks the tragic dimension of Phèdre’s for Hippolyte. Zola cannot sustain the note of ambivalence between ancient and modern that he strikes repeatedly throughout the novel: he must, time and again, resolve the issue in favor of a tradition, a status quo ante, in which he no longer believes, and in so doing he falls short of tragedy as surely as the prefect whose pretentiousness he ridicules falls short of sublimity. Instead of tragedy, Zola settles for moral satire.

Nevertheless, Renée is not an insignificant creation. Unconvincingly and rather matter-of-factly Zola does provide her with justification for her defiance of convention by portraying her as the victim of a rape. But this violation merely incites and exacerbates a preexisting will to acquire forbidden knowledge—a will whose origin the author, half a generation older than Freud, locates squarely in the prelapsarian paradise of the “children’s room,” from which lofty height Renée is free to indulge her curiosity about the male bodies on display at the swimming school below. Even her vanity is a response to the cruelty of other children, who mock her untutored adherence to outmoded preferences in schoolgirl attire. It is curiosity about the meretricious glamour of the demimonde that lures her out of the cosseted cocoon of her fabulous dressing room, at once womb and lair. If Renée’s author succumbs at times to the conventions of la belle dame sans merci, painting her as huntress, nymph, or sphinx, he inflects mercilessness by inflicting it primarily upon the merciless beauty herself. So great is her narcissism that she cannot imagine another victim worthy of her cruelty. If she is vapid, it is because she willfully starves her imagination.

For this starvation Henry James sees no excuse. Renée possesses by default the wherewithal that James’s huntresses spend so much of themselves in acquiring. Think of Charlotte Stant in The Golden Bowl, which, like The Kill, is set under the sign of “flesh and gold.” Indeed, James wrote The Golden Bowl in 1903, the same year in which he produced his retrospective essay on Zola, whom he congratulates on his “bold free linguistic reach—completely genial” yet castigates for “his unequipped and delusive pursuit of the life of the spirit and the tone of culture.”²⁰The “tone of culture” James certainly supplied in abundance, almost as if correcting the heavy touch of Zola’s earlier portrait of a lady as manfully unabashed in her pursuit of her prey as Charlotte. Yet in order to bring out the “tone of culture” James is obliged to banish from his text precisely what Zola wishes above all to bring in. “What we quarrel with,” James wrote, is Zola’s “decoction of ‘nature’ in a vessel unfit for the purpose, a receptacle—in need of scouring.” Zola might have replied that the golden bowl into which James poured his “decoction” of culture was altogether too dainty a vessel to contain the effluvia of the civilization it epitomized. For that a quite different receptacle—something like the basket in which the “business woman” Mme Sidonie lugs the paraphernalia of chicanery and pettifoggery with her around Paris—was required:

This basket, which never left her side, was a whole world unto itself. If she opened it even slightly, all sorts of things spilled out: date books, folders, and above all bundles of paper bearing official stamps whose illegible writing she deciphered with remarkable dexterity. She had in her the makings of a business broker and a clerk of court. She lived among defaulted bills, writs, and court orders.

For James, the Naturalists—Daudet, Goncourt, Zola—were “men of truly infernal intelligence” who did “the only kind of work, today, that I respect; and in spite of their ferocious pessimism and their handling of unclean things, they are at least serious and honest.”²¹It is all the more striking, therefore, that, twenty years after meeting Zola and writing this letter, James would “handle” precisely the same “unclean thing” that Zola had handled: an incestuous relationship between a father’s second wife and, in the one case, a child, an androgynous son; in the other, the spouse of a child, of a daughter similarly baffled in her sexual maturation by her closeness to her father. Characteristically, James would make his Charlotte as much a model of subtlety and intelligence as Renée is of coarseness and vapidity. He imparts the “tone of culture” to his heroine in precisely the same measure that he deprives her husband Adam Verver of whatever qualities of competitive fitness permitted him to emerge from the jungle of Gilded Age capitalism with his lion’s share. Verver, we may assume, had something in him of the “verve” that Zola ascribed to Saccard. We shall never know, however, because James banished that unclean American energy from his work. He would have recoiled instinctively from Zola’s comparison of the financier to a dramatic artist: Saccard, Zola wrote, “would have taken possession of the property long ago if he hadn’t imagined this whole drama in advance, but it would have given him less pleasure if it had come to him more easily.”

Stendhal famously compared the realistic novel to a mirror paraded alongside a road. In The Golden Bowl the mirror reflects a distorted image: we see fabulous wealth deformed by the curved and gilded surface of a flawed goblet. The Kill distorts as well, but not by the magnifying and diminishing effects of an artfully modulated style. Its method is rather to shine an arc light—the rayon électrique that makes a precocious appearance in two places in the text—into dark recesses. None is darker than the conservatory of the Saccard mansion, that domesticated jungle whose dominant fragrance is what Zola calls the odor of love: there the lovers “were a thousand leagues from Paris, far from the facile life of the Bois and official receptions, somewhere in the jungles of India or in some monstrous temple, where the black marble sphinx was god.” James of course understood the urge to introduce this note of wildness. If the American writer’s problem was to overlay the “barbaric yawp” of the New World with the “tone of culture,” James remarked, the French writer’s was to cope with “a language in which everything has been said and re-said. . . . Daudet spoke of his envy and admiration of the ‘serenity of production’ of Turgenev—working in a field and a language where the white snow has as yet so few footprints. In French, he said, it is all one trampled slosh—one has to look, forever, to see where one can put down his step.”²²In The Kill Zola was searching for fresh snow. Thirty years later, James would cross the same white waste and intersect Zola’s path only once, at the point of incest. The note of imaginative obsession is too powerful in the work of both men to suggest that either exhausted, or was limited by, the reality of the time. Yet in the convergence of their two phantasmagorical visions it is impossible not to feel that one has passed near the pole of a civilization’s discontents.