It is interesting to contemplate a tangled
bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes,
with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp
earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different
from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all
been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense,
being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by
reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions
of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a
Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing
Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.
This extract is taken from the
final paragraph of Charles Darwin’s The
Origin of Species (1851). It is perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century
description of the implications of evolutionary theory — the interconnectedness
of all living things and the inescapable importance of our genetic inheritance,
yet still the potential for variation from what has come before and the
relationship between death and extinction and survival.
Emile Zola suggested that an
alternative title to The Fortune of the
Rougons (1871), the first in a 20-novel cycle involving the Rougon-Macquart
family, might be Origins. The novel
deals with the emergence of this multi-branched family in the fictional town of
Plassans (based on Aix-en-Provence) at the nascence of the Second Empire,
Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’etat in 1851.
In keeping with his Naturalist preoccupations, Zola traces the origins of the
Rougon-Macquarts’ hereditary weaknesses — their cowardice, greed and
susceptibility to nervous attacks or mental illness — that will form the basis
of the nineteen later novels. In The
Fortune of the Rougons, the Rougon portion of the family rises to
pre-eminence in the chaos of social unrest, but only through spilling the blood
of others — rivals, random strangers and, of course, relatives.
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| The family tree of the Rougon-Macquarts |
The foil to the scheming of the
novel’s long list of characters is an innocent pair of teenage sweethearts —
Silvere and Miette — caught up by the idealism of the Republican insurgents.
The novel opens with the lovers meeting at the Aire Saint-Mittre, a piece of
land that bears a resemblance to Darwin’s ‘entangled bank’, a former graveyard
now teeming with life:
The thick vegetation and the eerie stillness of the old cemetery
can still be seen and felt in this lane, where the walls are covered in moss
and the ground seems like a woollen carpet. On the hottest days you can feel
the warm, voluptuous breath of the dead rising from the old graves. Around
Plassans there is no spot so exciting, more alive with emotion, so heavy with
warmth, solitude and love. It is a wonderful place for lovers. When the
cemetery was being cleared the bones must have been piled up in this corner,
for even today people feeling in the grass with their feet often kick up
fragments of skull.
No spot is more promising for the
fecundity of love than the resting place of former generations but Silvere and
Miette are doomed to die before the consummation of their match. Why? Silvere
simply lacks the requisite survival instincts of his crueller, more decisive,
more fertile Rougon-Macquart relatives. Here’s how Miette’s death is described:
In the hour of her agony, in the terrible struggle between death
and her sanguine nature, she regretted her virginity. Silvere, as he bent over
her, understood the bitter tears of this passionate girl. He heard the distant
cry of the old cemetery bones; he recalled their caresses and their burning
kisses in the night, by the side of the road; he remembered how she had thrown her
arms around him, yearning for his love, but he had not understood, and now he
was letting her go forever, a virgin, grieving at the thought of never having
tasted the deep pleasures of life.
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| Emile Zola (1840-1902) |
It is back in the graveyard that
Silvere meets his end, passive until just before the crucial moment, unlike his
peasant companion who fights ‘like a pig being slaughtered’. Only the
appearance of Miette’s cruel cousin Justin causes Silvere to long for survival:
[He] felt a surge of anger, a sudden desire to go on living. It
was the last revolt of his blood, just for a second.
It is too little, too late.
Silvere is not enough like his uncles to survive and second later he is shot,
his ‘skull burst open like a ripe pomegranate’.
In the Rougons’ drawing room, the
survivors feast, all marked out by the blood of those they have crushed in
their desire for advancement. This is how the novel concludes:
But the strip of pink fastened to Pierre’s buttonhole was not the
only splash of red that marked the triumph of the Rougons. A shoe with a
bloodstained heel lay forgotten under the bed in the next room. The candle
burning at Monsieur Peirotte’s bedside, on the opposite side of the street, shone
in the darkness with the lurid redness of an open wound. And far away, in the depths
of the Aire Saint-Mittre, a pool of blood was congealing on a tombstone.
What nineteenth-century novel
would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know — here, on
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