CHAPTER 3
Beau Brummel: English dandy (1778–1840) who was a leader of fashion in the early nineteenth century.
tilbury: a light two-wheeled carriage.
Sibyl on her tripod: prophetess of Greek mythology, who made cryptic pronouncements as the voice of an oracle.
Psyche’s dreamy butterfly: In Greek mythology, Psyche (or the Soul), the lover of Cupid, was sometimes represented as a butterfly.
Saint-Ouen: a northern suburb of Paris, bounded on the northwest by the Seine, where a quarry was located.
Chaillot: an area of high ground on the Right Bank of the Seine.
Trocadéro: the neighborhood of the Trocadéro Palace.
Champenois: characteristic of the Champagne region of France.
Mabille: a park in Paris where prostitutes met clients after dark.
Champs-Elysées: a broad avenue in Paris that stretches from the Arc de Triomphe to the place de la Concorde.
Grand Cordon: decoration associated with the Legion of Honor.
CHAPTER 4
black satin domino: Earlier Renée had said she was going to wear a blue domino; a domino is a long hooded cloak, usually worn with a half-mask as a masquerade costume.
Epinal print: illustrated broadsheets printed in Epinal, France, during the nineteenth century; they told religious stories, patriotic histories, and fairy tales using a cartoonlike narrative form.
Piron’s obscene poetry: Alexis Piron (1689–1783) was a French playwright and writer of obscene verse whose “Ode to Priapus” was considered “a masterpiece of licentious verse.”
Sèvres: fine porcelain, often elaborately decorated, made at the royal factory at Sèvres, France.
Chaplin: Charles Chaplin (1825–1891), a fashionable painter of the period.
CHAPTER 5
Vincennes: former royal hunting preserve east of Paris, which was converted into a fortress in 1840.
Musée Campana: museum housing the collection of the marquis de Campana.
Bal de l’Opéra: the opera house ball.
La Belle Hélène: heroine of the 1864 operetta of the same name by French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880), who used the story of Helen of Troy to comment satirically on Parisian society.
Tannhäuser: grand opera by German composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883), written in 1845 and revised in 1860 for performance in Paris, where it was badly received.
Théâtre-Italien: theater in Paris offering Italian-language performances of a range of classic plays.
Ristori: Italian actress Adelaide Ristori (1822–1906) won international renown for her performances in tragic roles.
Phèdre: Tragedy by French dramatist Jean Racine (1639–1699), based on the Greek myth of Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, who conceived an incestuous love for Hippolytus, her stepson. Hippolytus rejected her overtures but was falsely accused of assaulting her; to punish his son, Theseus invoked the aid of the god Neptune, who sent a sea monster to devour Hippolytus. Phaedra then poisoned herself out of remorse.
Bou fes: The Bouffes-Parisiens was a theater for light and comic opera established by Jacques Offenbach in 1855.
Olympus: abode of the gods in Greek mythology.
Chapelle Expiatoire: somber neoclassical church designed by Pierre Fontaine in 1815.
Mid-Lent Thursday: the Thursday before the fourth Sunday in Lent, sometimes celebrated as a holiday in order to encourage the faithful to continue through the penitential season of Lent.
CHAPTER 6
Narcissus: in Greek mythology, a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool; he was loved by the nymph Echo, but after he failed to return her affection, she retreated to a cave and died of longing, and only her voice was left.
Mohammed’s houris: the beautiful maidens that the prophet Mohammed said would await the devout Muslim in Paradise.
Henry III’s mignons: Henry III, king of France from 1574 until his death in 1589, bestowed many favors on a select group of handsome young men known as his mignons.
Juno: the wife of Jupiter, who punished Echo for her idle chatter by condemning her to do nothing but repeat the words of others.
Pradier: the sculptor James Pradier.
Lesbos: island in the Aegean Sea; as the home of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, it was associated with female homosexuality.
cotillion: an elaborate ballroom dance with frequent changing of couples carried out under the leadership of a single person or couple.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: poetic work that retells classical myths concerning love and transformation, by the Roman poet Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 17).
Charenton: site of the insane asylum where the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), famous for his erotic writings and elaborate sexual perversions, was finally committed.
CHAPTER 7
loves of Louis XV: The favorite mistress of French king Louis XV (1710 –1774) was Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), who wielded great power over the French court; in later years she allowed the king to take other mistresses.
Régence: the period 1715–1723, during which France was ruled by Philippe d’Orléans, while Louis XV was still a minor.
Mont-Valérien: fort built on a hill west of Paris, near the suburb of Suresnes.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
ARTHUR GOLDHAMMER, an affilitate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, has translated some ninety works from French. His translations have earned him numerous awards, including two French-American Foundation Translation Prizes and the Médaille de Vermeil of the Académie Francaise. He is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
A. S. Byatt
Caleb Carr
Christopher Cerf
Ron Chernow
Shelby Foote
Charles Frazier
Vartan Gregorian
Richard Howard
Charles Johnson
Jon Krakauer
Edmund Morris
Azar Nafisi
Joyce Carol Oates
Elaine Pagels
John Richardson
Salman Rushdie
Oliver Sacks
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Carolyn See
William Styron
Gore Vidal
1. The present work is a translation of La Curée, which Zola wrote in 1870–71 and which first appeared serially in the newspaper La Cloche in September 1871. Publication was halted in November when the publisher received a warning from the censor, but the entire text appeared in book form a few months later. A word about the title: la curée refers to the portion of the kill fed to the hounds after a hunt. The English word quarry has this French word as its root and according to the Oxford English Dictionary possesses this archaic meaning: “Certain parts of a deer placed on the hide and given to the hounds as a reward; also, the reward given to a hawk which has killed a bird.” The novel has been translated twice before: once under the title The Rush for the Spoils: A Realistic Novel, with an introduction by George Moore (the translator is not named), in an undated edition published by C. Marpon and E. Flammarion in Paris (and identified in the Widener Library catalog as “the suppressed English edition”); and once under the title The Kill, in a translation done in 1895 by A. Teixeira de Mattos and published by the Lutetian Society in 1895 but reprinted by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1954 with an introduction by Angus Wilson.