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'Everything revolved around their love. They were constantly bathed in a passion that they carried with them, around them, as though it were the only air they could breathe.'Helene Grandjean, an attractive young widow, lives a secluded life in Paris with her only child, Jeanne. Jeanne is a delicate and nervous girl who jealously guards her mother's affections. When Jeanne falls ill, she is attended by Dr Deberle, whose growing admiration for Helene gradually turns intomutual passion. Deberle's wife Juliette, meanwhile, flirts with a shallow admirer, and Helene, intent on preventing her adultery, precipitates a crisis whose consequences are far-reaching. Jeanne realizes she has a rival for Helene's devotion in the doctor, and begins to exercise a tyrannous holdover her mother.The eighth novel in Zola's celebrated Rougon-Macquart series, A Love Story is an intense psychological and nuanced portrayal of love's different guises. Zola's study extends most notably to the city of Paris itself, whose shifting moods reflect Helene's emotional turmoil in passages of extraordinarylyrical description.… (more)
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Hélène, who is from the Marseille branch of the diseased Rougon-Macquart family tree, has been living in Paris with her 11-year-old daughter Jeanne since the death of her husband. She has a small legacy to live on, and her friend the Abbé Jouve has found them an apartment in Passy and a country girl to be their servant. When the sickly Jeanne needs urgent medical attention late one night, it's their neighbour, the dishy doctor Deberle, who is called in. Significant Glances are exchanged. But, unfortunately, Deberle turns out to be married...
Zola subverts the adultery plot we're trained to expect from almost every conceivable angle: he pushes Hélène into intimacy with Mme Deberle and her friends, he prevents Hélène and the doctor from stealing more than the occasional moment together, he deploys an unpleasant old crone to foreground the disagreeable nature of what their instincts are pushing them towards, and above all he encourages Jeanne's selfish possessiveness of her mother. Jeanne is superficially the angelic, vulnerable Victorian child, but we soon realise that she is a little monster, an emotional blackmailer every bit as ruthless as the professional beggar Mère Fétu.
Of course you can't keep Zola locked up in 60 square metres in Passy, even if that's what he's doing to his human characters, so the biggest character in this story, commenting on events with magnificently ironic detachment, is the ever-changing view of the city of Paris as seen out of Hélène's windows. In Technicolor and wide-screen, and don't spare the adjectives.
Zola seems to want us to bear in mind what we've been reading in L'assommoir and use it to put the tribulations of bourgeois life into some kind of perspective: the biggest set-piece scene of this book is Mme Deberle's Children's Ball, a supremely extravagant and wasteful entertainment that clearly has everything to do with the pleasure the mothers get from competing to put their children in the most adorable costumes, and little or nothing to do with the kids themselves having any fun. Positively heartbreaking when we put it alongside the parties in L'assommoir, where the participants are constantly aware how much this is costing them and what sacrifices they have committed themselves to by blowing their savings on this essential bit of relaxation. And Zola clearly now has the same kind of trouble taking seriously the erotic difficulties imagined for themselves by middle-class ladies.
(This is the book where Zola first published his famous drawing of the family tree - he'd intended to keep it for the last book in the sequence, he tells us, but he's including it now after multiple requests from readers and to prove to us that he has a plan and isn't just making it up as he goes along.)