Le Salon jaune (La Fortune des Rougon)

While Antoine burns with jealousy for the bourgeois high life of his half-brother Pierre and sister-in-law, the Rougons themselves, once they retire from the olive oil business, find themselves hard pressed to keep up the middle-class lifestyle.

As a result, they rent an apartment at the edge of the artisan quarter, one that looks out at the houses of the rich. One especially, that of the local receveur particulier (a financial sinecure) is the obsession of Félicité Rougon, who looks longingly out her window as at that wealthy man’s house, the target of her ambitions. And in the end, that fellow is shot by friendly fire during the rebellion, and Pierre succeeds to his office and place in society.

The Rougons become the hosts of the salon of the town’s reactionaries. It’s quite a menagerie of old cranks: Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, anything but Republicans. But it is the rather threadbare yellow living room, “le salon jaune” that troubles them above all.

The “salon jaune” is a dismal haunt of petty bourgeois aspiration. Félicité has done what she could with the apartment, but with limited money there was little to do. In terms of improving it.

Le salon avait ainsi pris une étrange couleur jaune qui l’emplissait d’un jour faux et aveuglant ; le meuble, le papier, les rideaux de fenêtre étaient jaunes ; le tapis et jusqu’aux marbres du guéridon et des consoles tiraient eux-mêmes sur le jaune.”

(The living room had thus taken on a strange yellow color which filled with a false and blinding daylight; the furniture, the wallpaper, the felt curtains were yellow; the carpet, even the marble of the table and credenza tool on the yellow tint.”

This shabby room, with worn upholstery and fly-specks on the lampshade, is nevertheless the place where the fortune of the Rougons is born. And the co-conspirators and self-absorbed fools are as shabby as the surroundings. At one point, Félicité invites her physician son, Pascal, hoping to help him make connections to expand his practice.

For Pascal, the doctor and scientist, the whole human menagerie in the salon has scientific interest, in that it reveals the bestiality of human behavior.

La première fois, il fut stupéfait du degré d’imbécillité auquel un homme bien portant peut descendre. Les anciens marchands d’huile et d’amandes, le marquis et le commandant eux-mêmes lui parurent des animaux curieux qu’il n’avait pas eu jusque-là l’occasion d’étudier.

(The first time [he visited the salon], he was stupefied by the degree of imbecility to which a healthy man could descend to. The old oil merchants and almond merchants. The marquis and the commander struck him as strange animals he hadn’t until then had the chance to study.)


As the only objective observer in the novel, he brings the same curiosity to his own family.

Pascal fixait un regard pénétrant sur la folle, sur son père, sur son oncle ; l’égoïsme du savant l’emportait ; il étudiait cette mère et ces fils, avec l’attention d’un naturaliste surprenant les métamorphoses d’un insecte.

(Pascal fixed a penetrating look at the mad woman, on his father, on his uncle; the egoism of the scientist carried him away; he studied that mother and those sons, with the attention of a naturalist coming upon the metamorphoses of an insect.”

Pascal like Zola contemplates the various branches of the Rougon-Macquart, sees the same patterns, the same characteristics, the appetites pop up different variations as the same plant stock varies in different soil, sun, and water conditions.

There’s no doubt that Zola identifies with Pascal, the country doctor, who will get his own novel in the series. It is the role of the naturalist, the scientific observer that Zola aspires to, and like Pascal, he is fascinated with the behaviors of his characters. The “science” of literary naturalism is pretty bogus; Zola is great because of his art as a describer and a storyteller. Like Pascal, who risks his life treating the rebels without actually signing up with them, and who is more eager to treat the poor than make the bourgeois career his mother pushes him to, at heart a humanitarian as much as a scientist.

La Fortune des Rougon: Winter in Provence

The first book in Zola's Rougon-Maquart series, La Fortune des Rougon is also one of Zola's earliest novels, surprisingly (to me) fully conceived, carefully written, and masterfully-structured.

Unlike Balzac’s Comédie humaine, the overall plan of the series is sketched out in this first book, which introduces this complex family, a score of its members, and a hint of the obsessions of both the characters and Zola himself.



There are two main narrative lines: The story of the youth Silvère, an apprentice carriage-maker and republican idealist and his young love Miette, a servant-girl at a vegetable farm; the second is the resistible and sometimes comical rise of Pierre Rougon as he goes from being the son of a peasant to the most prominent man on the small Provençal city, the fictional Plassans (a version of Zola’s native Aix-en-Provence.

First, the lovers’ plot. I had not expected that the master satirist/detailed observer Zola could write so lyrically and wondrously as he does in the first section. Silvère and Miette, both orphans and in dire circumstances, meet after hours and secretly in an old graveyard, now converted to a lumberyard. They hold on to each other with desperate (unconsummated) love.

Most of the chapter has these two very young lovers – he is around 18, she is 14, as I remember – literally walking as one through the beauties of the frosty landscape outside the town. Both are wrapped n Miette’s capacious woolen “pelisse,” a custom, we are told, for wooing couples in the South of France. Muffled and hooded in the cloak, they are unidentifiable, free from scandal.

They are clutching to each other fro warmth, both body warmth and the warmth of affection, something they otherwise lack in their lives. They shuffle along as one in the folds of the pelisse, losing all human form.

They wander by the river, fields and woods, all dimly lit and magical:

“Par cette nuit de décembre, sous la lune claire et froide, les champs fraîchement labourés s’étendaient aux deux abords du chemin, pareils à de vastes couches d’ouate grisâtre, qui auraient amorti tous les bruits de l’air. Au loin, la voix sourde de la Viorne mettait seule un frisson dans l’immense paix de la campagne.”

(On this December night, under a clear, cold moon, the freshly plowed fields stretched out on both sides of the road, like vast layers of grayish cotton, which would deaden all noises in the air. Far away, only the muffled voice of the Viorne added a tingle to the immense peace of the countryside.)

But the idyll is soon interrupted by the (anticipated) arrival of ghostly columns of rebels, supporters of the Republic, both peasantry and working-class rising defend it, singing the Marseillaise. Like a catalog of Homeric heroes, Silvère describes to Miette each contingent as it passes by. From neighboring town and village they march, each carrying what weapons they can gather: carbines for the poachers and smugglers, old blunderbusses and muskets for tradesmen, axes for the lumbermen, scythes for pitchforks by the peasants.

The chapter ends with Silvère joining the ranks, and Miette ending up taking the standard, becoming a kind of mascot for the troops, who march on into Plassans.

The dreamlike nature of this chapter is reinforced by its lack of specificity in terms of the wider world. Which of a number of uprisings in French history could this be? We are given no clear idea yet, though we’ll soon enough get a complete context.

The night, the cold, the former graveyards (from which bones still occasionally emerge), and the ghostly army all point toward a tragic ending for the two lovers. And of them, we still know very little beyond what happens in the few hours of the events of this chapter.

Zola suspends the story at this point, to fill in 50 years of retrospective narrative. We won’t learn the lovers’ fate until much later in the book. The dreamy beginning is impressively contrary to (my) expectations.