III

Paris est comme la statue de Nabucodonosor, en partie or et en partie fange.
Voltaire, to the comte de Caylus, January 1739

Paris is like the statue of Nebuchadnezzar, part gold and part filth.

The physical remodeling of the city topography—the buildings torn down and rebuilt, the grand boulevards cut across the maze of streets—are only the most visible manifestations of a more profound transformation of urban society. Haussmann's Paris is revolutionary because it is modern, and it is modern because, with individuals continually crossing geographical and social boundaries and with the boundaries themselves shifting, it requires movement on so many levels. Modernizing society breaks down customs and practices of every sort. If it does not eliminate social barriers altogether, it certainly obscures the familiar boundaries between one domain and another. The greater the movement across boundaries, the less fixed, the less defined those boundaries seem. Continual movement, or mobility, necessarily brings a crisis of identification for the individuals concerned and also for the collectivity. What is the city in an urban society defined by movement and flux? Such are the questions posed in and by the Paris constructed by Haussmann and the haussmannized Paris represented by Zola. Topographical transfigurations in Zola's descriptions intersect on every level with social transformations in his plot. Furthermore, the vitality of this nexus owes everything to the essence of haussmannization at work in the actual city, in the continuous erasure and remarking of spatial and social boundaries. Zola's novel and Paris meet over streets where none previously existed, over easier circulation across the wide boulevards that replace the convoluted, narrow streets of the past, and over a general destruction of the past that enables the future to dominate the present.

Perhaps the most striking example of the obliteration of boundaries in the city itself comes more subtly with the annexation of the immediate suburbs in 1860. The pen, in the redistricting, proved as mighty as the bulldozer. An administrative decree more than doubled the area of the city and increased its population by one-third.

That population was itself changing. The reconstruction of Paris needed workers, and those workers came from the provinces. The

migration of unskilled and semiskilled labor into Paris augmented the lower-class population. These inhabitants were concentrated in certain quartiers, and notably in the faubourgs. When Zola chose la Goutte d'or in Belleville as the setting for L'Asssommoir, he had just these social differences in mind. When Gervaise Macquart and Lantier arrive from Provence in the early 1850s, they settle in Belleville, which was then outside the city proper. For Gervaise and the whole neighborhood (with the exception of one bourgeois), Paris looms in the distance, "over there" ("là-bas"), definitely foreign territory. Zola enacts the correlation of physical distance and social distance in the trip of Gervaise's wedding party into central Paris. Not only do the faubouriens get lost in the Louvre, they themselves become the spectacle for the bourgeois habitués of the museum. When the group climbs the column in the Place Vendôme, their bird's-eye view reveals nothing except their own neighborhood, which they locate only with considerable difficulty, outside the city. As Zola makes clear, the integration of Belleville into the city proper can only intensify the already dramatic contrasts within Paris.

La Curée stages the topographical and demographic mobility of Second Empire Paris. The mobility encouraged by the transformation of the city governs Saccard and provides the model for relations in every domain. The multiple mobilities of the novel blur boundaries of every sort—sexual, social, and spatial. Zola's moral geography, in sum, equates mobility with transgression.

The most fundamental of these transgressions is sexual. Sexual license defines the novel—the ubiquity of shady financial practices tolerated by the state is mirrored in the promiscuity of Second Empire elite society, where the reader can hardly keep track of all the liaisons in the making and unmaking. The reader is unsure how many lovers to attribute to Renee Saccard. The "whirlwind of expenditures" that Haussmann unleashes on Paris is personified, dramatized, and amplified by this rampant promiscuity. This novel, as Zola indicated in the preface with an image to which he would return more than once, showed "this life of excess" ("la vie à outrance"), which converted the whole regime into a bawdy house ("mauvais lieu").

But Paris goes beyond that bawdy house. The sexuality that pervades the novel signals a more fundamental perversion, a corruption of nature. Mobility in the realm of sexuality can only mean sexual ambiguity. The degeneration of the entire Rougon-Macquart family,

and of the society that they incarnate, is rooted in the physiological degeneration of "a race that has lived too fast and which ends in the man-woman of corrupt societies." Sexual ambiguity pervades the entire novel. Maxime, Saccard's son from his first marriage, is a "strange hermaphrodite . . . in a society that was rotting" (152). If Maxime is the "man-woman" with "a temperament of a courtesan" (269), with the "indulgences of a neuter being" (211) Renee is his counterpart. For Zola their liaison is not just incestuous, but profoundly unnatural in the reversal of the most basic roles that nature creates. At the Café Riche, the scene of the seduction, Maxime finds Renée "original. At times he wasn't really sure of her sex; the great wrinkle that crossed her forehead, the pouting of her lips, her indecisive nearsightedness, made her a tall young man" (184). Appropriately, Renée seduces Maxime and continues to dominate him until the stronger force of his father prevails.

And theirs is not by any means the only such instance of sexual mobility. Zola marks the blatant lesbianism of "the Inseparables," Mme d'Espanet and Mme Haffner, Renée's two friends from the convent, and the homosexuality of Baptiste, Saccard's valet, as further symptoms of a society so confused that it no longer recognizes the most elementary classifications. And lest we forget the necessary connection between these sexual deviations and the financial mobility, Zola shows us "the Inseparables" at the costume ball: "Gold and Silver [their costumes] were dancing together, lovingly" (317). In Second Empire Paris, Zola tells us, deviation is the norm. It is also completely reified in the ubiquitous social construct of money as gold and silver intertwine in full public view.

So great is the force that mobility exerts on sexuality that Aristide Saccard himself puts all his energy into his speculations, taking mistresses primarily because spending money on women is part of his plan of conspicuous consumption. But Aristide prefers money (156) and intrigue. Similarly, Sidonie has invested all her sexual energy in myriad transactions, deals, trades: "The woman was dying in her; she was no longer anything but a broker" (95). Aristide recognizes her "appetite for money" as his own. But in her case "the common temperament" had produced "this strange hermaphrodism of a woman who had become neuter, all at once businessman and procuress" (96).

The incest of Renée and Maxime that directs the novel provides a striking llustration of the pervading sexual license while offering the most flagrant manifestation of the breakdown of the family. This disintegration in turn, in the customary synecdoche, signals as it produces the disintegration of society. Marriage becomes one more speculation, and family ties offer little more than a privileged access to potentially profitable connections. Both brothers plan to change their names, Aristide after some prodding by Eugène: "We will bother each other less" (87). (Eugène Rougon in fact keeps his name.) Elsewhere, the relations between father and son depend on the use each can make of the other. Ever the speculator, Saccard "couldn't for long be near a thing or a person without wanting to sell it, somehow to profit by it. His son wasn't yet twenty before he thought about how to use him" (160).

Zola invokes commercial practices to characterize the deviant family unit formed by Aristide, Renée, and Maxime. They are not a family at all but Saccard Ltd—a company of limited responsibility, Saccard et Cie S.R.L. (Société à responsabilité limitée ) "The idea of a family was replaced for them by the notion of a sort of investment company where the profits are shared equally" (152). Renée finally realizes just how limited that responsibility is. She is herself one more element in Saccard's financial strategies: "Saccard had thrown her down like a bet, like an investment . . . She was a stock in her husband's portfolio" (312). The ending of the novel, which sees the reconciliation of Saccard and Maxime over a financial transaction and the elimination of Renée, can be reconstrued in financial terms as the reassertion of patriarchy with the transformation of Saccard et C^ie into Saccard Père et fils, following nineteenth-century commercial custom.

Symptomatic of the general decadence is the absence of a mother worthy of the name to anchor the family. Saccard's first wife Angèle dies at an opportune moment and in any case was never a significant figure. Not surprisingly in a novel that dramatizes the tension between the immobilier and the mobilier, she is likened to "a troublesome piece of furniture" (82). Angèle and Aristide's little daughter, Clotilde, is shipped off to her uncle in Plassans as soon as her mother dies. Saccard accepts Renée's unborn illegitimate child as his for a fee—her dowry and for the step up the social ladder he takes by marrying into the solidly established Parisian upper bourgeoisie. Further, his

"honor" remains intact, since Renee, as predicted by Sidonie (100, 111), has a well-timed miscarriage. Renée's maternal solicitude for Maxime (230-31) is a denatured love. The only true nurturance comes from the Seine, the mother substitute for the orphaned Renée and her sister Christine: "The Seine, the giant . . . [Renee] remembered their tenderness for the river; their love of its colossal flow . . . opening around them . . . in two arms . . whose great and pure caress they could still feel" (338). But the river offers no real refuge, contributing instead to the symbolism of movement and mobility that structures the novel as a whole. The image of the Seine that dominates the novel comes earlier: "And it seemed, at night . . . that the Seine was carrying, in the middle of the sleeping city, the filth of the city" (162).

As no mother nurtures in La Curée, no father governs. Aristide seems totally unaware of the customary bond between father and son. The authority that he exercises derives from the power of his purse. Maxime is an associate; he and Maxime are comrades, united by "a familiarity, an abandon" (156) that leads them to frequent the same demi-mondain milieu, to share the same pleasures and the same women—and this well before Renée takes up with her stepson. Vice is "the persistent perfume of this singular home" (158). Renee, abandoned by Maxime, cannot stand to see father and son together. She takes revenge by forcing Saccard to acknowledge the incest: "Now she would no longer see them making fun of her, arm in arm, like comrades" (327). But the final image of them in the novel brings father and son together again, in the Bois de Boulogne as the emperor passes, smiling at Aristide's "Vive l'empereur!" The relationship is more depraved still since the "man-woman" Maxime is "a kept man" ("entretenu," 312), and he is kept by his father. Zola had not read Marx, but Maxime's status recalls the end of The Eighteenth Brumaire, where Marx cites Delphine de Girardin's quip that France, for the first time, has a government of "kept men" ("hommes entretenus").

The blurring of boundaries, the confusion of identities, and the transgressions of norms that preside over the moral economy of the novel are at once sign and symptom of a complex interplay between moral and physical space. From the omnipresent mirrors to the tableaux vivants at the end, the theatricality of the novel dramatizes the confusion between public and private. The obscuring, to the point of

obliteration, of the boundaries between inside and outside has significant moral implications. The Bois de Boulogne is a boudoir, the Saccard apartment an extension of the rue de Rivoli. "The street came up into the apartment, with its rumbling carriages, its jostling stranger., its permissive language" (153). Given the promiscuity that attends its transformation, Haussmann's Paris is an active agent in Renee's degradation, madness, and death; and this same "complicitous city" (338) is also the necessary setting for the corruption of the Second Empire. The merging of outside and inside is symptomatic of the larger ideological confusion between public and private. The society of La Curée, Saccard in the lead, can make no distinction between the two. Typically, Saccard manages to get himself named to the commission d'enquête charged with evaluating property to be expropriated by the state for the city, in which capacity he is able to give his own property (owned under a fictitious name) an astronomical assessment.

La Curée scarcely mentions old Paris. The Second Empire redefines the royal palace by completing the Louvre. The Communards who burn the Tuileries in 1871 attack not the bastion of the monarchy and vestgie of the ancien régime but the new Louvre, the work of the Second Empire. But the true monument to this regime and to this city, the true repository of their archives, is the extravagantly sumptuous home that Saccard builds off the Parc Monceau, constructed on property "stolen from the city" (163). This hôtel is notable for more than the highly eclectic architecture and the incredibly lavish furnishings that have all Paris agog. The same identification with the regime that leads Saccard to acclaim the emperor in the Bois de Boulogne leads him to turn his own home into a "small version of the new Louvre" (53). The extravagance and the excess deployed in this construction preside over the regime itself.

The nouveau Louvre and Saccard's hôtel raise equivalent monuments to the Second Empire. Both represent the public as private—Saccard's theft of his property from the city, the financial dealings that take place at the dinners he gives—but also the private as so very public. All of Paris—le tout Paris in any case—knows virtually everything about the Saccard hôtel, from the salons and the traditionally public rooms to Renee's bedroom, her dressing room, and even her bathtub. "People spoke about 'the beautiful Madame Saccard's dressing room' just the way they speak about 'The Hall of Mirrors, at Ver-

sailles'" (209). Zola faces the problem of any historical novelist—how to deal with the necessary famous personages—by turning the Saccard hôtel into the Louvre in miniature. He does not need to show us the court around Napoléon III (he will do so a few years later in Son Excellence Eugène Rougon ) the goings-on in and around the Saccard hôtel convey by metonymy the depravation of the regime as a whole. Like the ruins of the petites maisons that serviced Louis XV's sexual appetites, the Saccard hôtel will one day stand as a reminder of a society that is no longer. Of the one and the other, distant observers will say, following the respectable businessman looking at what is left of the petites maisons, "What odd times those were" (325).

The new city under construction makes the public so very private. Like all the other couples in the novel, Renée and Maxime live their liaison in public. The seduction occurs half in public, in a private room ("cabinet particulier") in the Café Riche. More generally the lovers had the "love of the new Paris" (228), which they turned into their personal—but scarcely private—space. Their "carriage seemed to be rolling over a rug. . . . Every boulevard became a corridor of their hôtel" (229); "the Bois de Boulogne was their garden" (332). The Parc Monceau next to the Hôtel Saccard is "the necessary flower bed of this new Paris" (229), Renee's special domain to which she has her own key. The greenhouse (la serre ) in the hôtel itself offers the ideal site for Renée and Maxime's adulterous affair, a cross between a bordello and a hothouse. The strangely beautiful but also frighteningly exotic flowers exist only to mimic and stimulate desire (7680, 218-20). Renee herself becomes the most exotic flower in the greenhouse (80) and in the city that the greenhouse recalls. If the greenhouse evokes a bordello, the city—the bawdy house—reaches back to the hothouse. Renee is the "strange, voluptuous flower" that could grow only in this city under this regime (205-6).

Tradition survives in one place only, in the Hôtel Béraud on the Ile Saint-Louis. But this part of the city is of another time, placed under the sign of Henri IV, not Napoléon III. The ile, like the Hôtel Béraud, is a product of Henri IV's first Parisian urban renewal at the beginning of the seventeenth century. As Saccard's hôtel reproduces the new Louvre, the courtyard of the Hôtel Béraud presents a smaller version of the Place Royale, the center of court life under Henri IV (125). No wonder that Renee and Saccard find it "a dead house"

(126) in "a dead city" (124), "a thousand leagues away" from their promiscuous new Paris of light and noise and warmth.

No wonder either that Renée's father complains that "the city is no longer made for him" (234). His rare ventures off the ile take him to the Jardin des Plantes (another creation of the ancien régime), which, topographically and socially as well as horticulturally, lies at virtually the opposite end of Paris from the stifling greenhouse of the Hôtel Saccard, the Parc Monceau, and the new boulevards that demarcate the Paris of his daughter and son-in-law. M. Béraud Du Châtel's refusal to visit the Parc Monceau strikes the one note of political opposition in the entire novel. And it is, as it must be, altogether ineffectual. Renée's father offers silent opposition that holds out no alternative. After the death of his sister, he walls himself off—"cloistered" is Zola's term (336)—from any human contact. For if the new Paris is associated with vice, Zola's images, his similes and metaphors, again and again also associate this city with light, with the sun, with flames, heat, and color, with the din of incessant activity, in a word, with life.

Fueled by the heat of these images, Zola's modern Paris must expand, and life must win. The Hôtel Béraud and the Ile Saint-Louis may provide the geographical and moral center of the city; they could not be further from the social and political center. The Hôtel Béraud conveys a vision of the past, and Monsieur Béraud Du Châtel is a man marked for another age, by his rectitude, by his austerity, and above all by the privacy that he guards so zealously.