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Table of Contents
Title Page
INTRODUCTION - Arthur Goldhammer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
NOTES
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
About the Author
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
Arthur Goldhammer
Several years after Emile Zola’s novel The Kill 1 had run afoul of the Republic’s censor for its outrage to public morals and “gross materialism,” a poet for whom the words of literary language were but the pulsating ghosts of a material world a
“The intermittence of modern life”: the phrase is especially apposite of The Kill, whose style, in its best passages, is “swift and transparent, like the glance of a contemporary, of your reader,”5and whose subject, more than the incestuous relationship between Renée Saccard and her stepson Maxime or the frenetic speculations of Aristide Saccard—husband of the one and father of the other—is in fact “the capital of modern life,” the city of Paris itself. For neither the speculation nor the incest would be conceivable without the modernity that is Paris, and that, far more than the “brutal indecency” of illicit sex, is the true object of Zola’s meditation. And at the heart of that Parisian modernity is ambivalence, for the modern has no fixed identity. It is never anything but the antagonist in a perpetual “quarrel of ancient and modern,” a quarrel in which the ancient, the world we are perpetually losing, provides the only beacons in relation to which the identity of its ineluctably if ephemerally triumphant opponent can be located.
THE CAPITAL OF MODERN LIFE
In The Kill we gaze upon Paris as if attempting to get a fix on our precise location from a variety of angles: from the window of a restaurant high above the city on the Buttes Montmartre; from the children’s aerie atop the Hôtel Béraud on the Ile Saint-Louis; from a carriage ambling through the scenic trumpery and social snobbery of the Bois de Boulogne or racing along new boulevards that paved the gas-lit way to perdition; from a mansion built in obedience to the dictates of “the style Napoléon III, that opulent hybrid of every style that ever existed”;6from across the di
A violence akin to nature’s own: it was a problem for a novelist of Zola’s epic ambition that the order of the new, being u
The lovers were in love with the new Paris. They often dashed about the city by carriage, detouring down certain boulevards for which they felt a special affection. They took delight in the imposing houses with big carved doors and i