Émile Zola, La Confession de Claude

Abstract

This volume is testimony to the scope of the Classiques Garnier ambition (see French Studies, 72 (2018), 448–49) to provide new editions of all Zola’s writing. For La Confession de Claude, his first-ever novel, remains largely unread, even by specialists. It was not a commercial success when it appeared in 1865 and it is unlikely to be a good investment, however admirable, for its modern publisher. Nicole Savy’s bibliography of critical studies devoted to it is revealingly thin. It is a text occasionally mentioned in passing, either in the context of Zola’s hesitant beginnings or in relation to its oblique autobiographical dimension. Savy rehearses the latter in her introductory essay, while insisting that this ‘n’infirme en rien le fait que c’est une œuvre littéraire, à lire en tant que telle et non comme un journal intime’ (p. 9). The challenges involved in such a revaluation have to overcome Zola’s own judgement of it, in a letter of 8 January 1866 partially cited here, that ‘il est faible en certaines parties, et il contient encore bien des enfantillages […]. Le poète reparaît, le poète qui a bu trop de lait et mangé trop de sucre. L’œuvre n’est pas virile; elle est le cri d’un enfant qui pleure et qui se révolte’ (p. 15). It did nevertheless have the intended consequence of bringing his name to wider attention, as a result of certain contemporary reviewers objecting to his ‘scandalous’ portrayal of the relationship between a grisette and her two lovers. To today’s readers, this portrayal seems pretty bland, veiled as it is by the mawkish stereotypes of la vie de bohême to which the novel is indebted. Even the report by the official censors concluded that, in spite of ‘la crudité des images et le cynisme du détail’, it should not be ‘condamné comme contraire à la morale publique’ (p. 224). Savy argues, however, that the question posed by ‘ce roman d’un premier amour irrémédiable, roman de la faiblesse humaine, est celle de la tension intolérable entre l’idéal et la chair, entre l’amour sacré et la souillure terrifiante du sexe’ (p. 15). Beneath its residue of Romantic euphemisms, she detects a more hard-edged discourse prefiguring that of his mature fiction. Zola himself allowed the work to be republished in 1880 as evidence of the distance travelled since this literary apprenticeship. Savy also makes a case for its formal qualities on the basis of its ‘plusieurs structures, assez savamment imbriquées’ (p. 21). More suggestively, given her own professional background at the Musée d’Orsay (she is the author of a number of brilliant analyses of Manet’s 1868 portrait of the writer), Savy alerts us to the ways in which Zola’s early engagement with the visual arts leaves its mark on descriptive segments of the text. It is not by chance that La Confession de Claude is publicly dedicated by Zola to Cézanne as well as to their mutual friend, Jean-Baptistin Baille. The text itself is barely 150 pages in length. This edition is filled out by several appendices, the most substantial of which is devoted to the novel’s critical reception in 1865–66, reprinting for the first time each and every reference to it in the Parisian and provincial press.