Savage Paris by Emile Zola. New York. 1955. Citadel Press. Translated from the French by David Hughes & Marie-Jacqueline Mason. Preface by Hugh Shelley. 296 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Pagram.
DESCRIPTION - Zola's theme in Savage Paris is the contrast, which he sees as a conflict, between the ‘lean and hungry' of this world and those that ‘are fat and sleep o'nights'; between the ascetic and the sensualist, the idealist and the materialist, the revolutionary and the conservative. Set in the great Parisian market, Les Halles, the book shows the impact on a complacent middle-class family, the Quenu's, of a lean, fanatical idealist, ex-political prisoner. Florent, Quenu's half-brother, who has suffered gaol and transportation for his share in the Revolution of 1848, is at first pitied and made welcome, for the Quenus are. by their lights, kindly folk; they try to tame him and persuade him to take the respectable job as inspector in the Halles. Florent, utterly unworldly, fails to satisfy them to compromise with corruption, or to make allowances for the petty intrigues and rivalries around him; he antagonises Quenu's wife Lise by his friendship with her rival Louise, the fishwife; and far from abandoning his subversive beliefs he joins a small group of left-wingers who eventually plot an uprising against the Emperor. The book ends tragically with Florent being taken back to gaol, while the superficial calm and prosperity that mask the inner corruption of the place return, as the scum forms again on a pond after a stone has momentarily disturbed it. And the last word is spoken by Claude Lantier, the painter who throughout acts as chorus, viewing the whole scene with an artist's detachment; ‘What rascals these respectable people are'! The most striking feature of the book is the exuberant and sustained descriptive power which gives us the appearance and atmosphere of the great market in all its , aspects-gives us its shapes and colours and its very smells, a triumph both of realism and of imagination. It is almost 50 years since Le Venire de Paris, the book's original title, was available in an English edition, and this sensitive and accomplished translation at last conveys to the English reader Zola's special genius in its full maturity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Émile François Zola (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse.
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