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- Herausgeber: e-artnow Collections
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Chronicle of 19th-Century French Society – 3 Classic Political Intrigue Novels offers a profound exploration of the tumultuous socio-political landscape of France during a pivotal century. This anthology presents an array of literary styles, ranging from the realistic depictions of society to the intricate dissection of human motives, each work highlighting the dynamic interplay of politics and personal lives. Such intricate narratives serve both as thrilling stories and as critical commentaries on the shifting tides of power and influence in 19th-century France. The collection brings together the literary giants Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, and Émile Zola, whose individual contributions collectively illuminate the complexities of their time. Stendhal, with his keen psychological insight, alongside Balzac's exhaustive detail and Zola's naturalist precision, capture the era's ethos. Their writings embody movements such as realism and naturalism, reflecting both the disillusionment and hope of a society in flux, offering readers varied insights into the socio-political undercurrents shaping modern France. This anthology is indispensable for those seeking to understand the multiplicity of perspectives and styles that defined 19th-century French literature. Readers will appreciate the educational opportunity provided by this collection, gaining a nuanced appreciation of the socio-political nuances and human experiences embedded in these classic novels. As you engage with this volume, anticipate a compelling dialogue between the masterful works of three authors whose narratives continue to resonate with vital themes of power, ambition, and the ever-evolving landscape of society.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Chronicle of 19th-Century French Society – 3 Classic Political Intrigue Novels
Table of Contents
Introduction
Curatorial Vision
Chronicle of 19th-Century French Society – 3 Classic Political Intrigue Novels assembles His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] by Émile Zola, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, and The Secrets of a Princess by Honoré de Balzac to survey how power is pursued, staged, and defended across the century’s social terrain. Each novel scrutinizes the passage from private desire to public consequence, whether in ministries, salons, or provincial drawing rooms. Read together, they sketch a composite anatomy of influence: ambition learning its masks, institutions refining their tactics, and society rewarding the clever while punishing the incautious. The grouping privileges comparison over isolated appreciation.
At the heart of this collection lies a through-line of calculated self-fashioning. The Red and the Black presents the intensity of a young striver measuring himself against hierarchical codes; The Secrets of a Princess observes aristocratic networks where discretion is power’s preferred currency; His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] foregrounds the bureaucratic theater in which authority both orchestrates and is orchestrated. Across them, identity operates as a performance adjusted to audience and occasion. The novels ask how far conviction can coexist with strategy, how loyalty survives opportunism, and how language—compliments, petitions, promises—becomes the true coin of public life.
By presenting these works as a triptych, the collection traces an arc from interior ambition to social choreography to institutional mechanism. Stendhal’s rigorous psychological lens clarifies the impulses that propel aspiration. Balzac’s acute observation details the codes by which desire must circulate to gain acceptance among the well-connected. Zola’s systemic focus maps the machinery that converts personal aims into policy and patronage. The aim is to spotlight recurrent motifs—career, reputation, secrecy—while showing their altered stakes as the arena shifts. Readers encounter not a single portrait of intrigue but a sequence of vantage points, each tightening the definition of power.
Unlike encountering each novel alone, this arrangement emphasizes reciprocal illumination. Scenes of promotion, favor, and disgrace echo across titles, encouraging attentive comparison of methods and consequences. The Red and the Black sharpens the psychological costs recognized in The Secrets of a Princess; Zola’s His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] supplies the administrative context that renders earlier calculations either effective or futile. Together, the works reveal a continuum rather than discrete examples, turning isolated episodes into a patterned study of procedure. The collection’s difference lies in this orchestrated juxtaposition, which foregrounds structure and strategy over anecdote and preserves the tension among perspectives.
Thematic & Aesthetic Interplay
Across the three novels, recurring motifs translate ambition into visible signs: uniforms, visiting cards, invitations, and carefully timed letters. The Red and the Black interrogates the uniform as a passport to recognition; The Secrets of a Princess uses the discreet message as a lever within closed circles; His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] exposes dossiers and decrees as instruments of selective visibility. These tokens operate as symbols of admission or exclusion, binding private motives to public procedures. Underneath, a common dilemma persists: does sincerity advance or endanger one’s position? Each work answers by staging the cost of candor under watchful eyes.
Tonally, the novels create a productive counterpoint. Stendhal favors swift, ironic analysis, compressing social ascent into moments of intense moral calculation. Balzac slows the tempo, attending to the protocols of conversation, the pacing of visits, and the fine gradations of deference that structure aristocratic life. Zola accelerates again, shifting attention to procedural scenes, where memoranda, appointments, and alliances form a choreography of governance. The interplay invites readers to register how speed, texture, and vantage alter the feel of intrigue. What seems a romantic crisis in one setting appears as etiquette in another, and as statecraft in the third.
Their dialogue also unfolds through shared ethical knots. Each novel tests the boundary between personal integrity and tactical role-playing, weighing the allure of authenticity against the efficacy of disguise. The Red and the Black isolates choice at the level of conscience. The Secrets of a Princess refracts the same choice through kinship, reputation, and reciprocal favor. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] reframes it as a question of loyalty to structures rather than persons. Without asserting direct borrowing, the resonances are unmistakable: a gesture of deference in one book becomes, in another, a signal of complicity or a prelude to command.
Intertextually, the volume invites recognition of shared materials transformed by differing emphases. The relentless self-scrutiny of The Red and the Black identifies the raw energies that The Secrets of a Princess channels into codified exchange, which His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] then routes through administrative circuits. The progression does not claim dependency; rather, it highlights how techniques echo across authors. An ambitious gaze, a guarded conversation, a carefully staged public moment—these recur with altered meanings. What begins as a personal tactic hardens into custom, and finally into procedure, creating a subtle chain of allusions from inner motive to institutional effect.
Enduring Impact & Critical Reception
These novels remain vital because they clarify the grammar of power: how careers pivot on perception, how information travels, and how allegiance is manufactured. Contemporary readers recognize the persistence of reputation economies, mediated access, and transactional speech. The Red and the Black models the psychology of ambition under constraint; The Secrets of a Princess anatomizes networked influence; His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] details the workings of administration. Together they supply a toolkit for interpreting public life without reducing it to cynicism. The result is a living handbook of motives and maneuvers, alert to the pressures that still shape decisions and destinies.
Across literary history, these books have anchored discussions of the political novel and of realism’s capacity to render social mechanisms. The Red and the Black is frequently cited for its incisive portrait of self-conscious ambition. The Secrets of a Princess is valued for its intricate mapping of aristocratic sociability as a form of soft power. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] is often invoked when examining bureaucracy, patronage, and the performative nature of authority. Their reputations rest not on spectacle but on clarity: each renders the invisible—calculations, norms, pressures—legible, thereby shaping how scholars and general audiences read power at work.
Beyond the page, the novels have encouraged reinterpretations across theater and screen, where the tension between inward motive and outward role suits performance. Public discourse often borrows their scenarios when debating merit, favoritism, and institutional ethics. In classrooms and salons alike, these titles have sparked conversations about whether ambition can be moral and whether systems can reward transparency. Quotations and situations from The Red and the Black, The Secrets of a Princess, and His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] continue to circulate as shorthand for certain postures: the mindful aspirant, the tactful mediator, the architect of policy.
Taken together, the three novels function as a chronicle in the strongest sense: a layered account of how 19th-century French society managed desire, reward, and risk. The Red and the Black sharpens the lens on character; The Secrets of a Princess demonstrates the conversion of character into currency; His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] exposes the ultimate marketplace where such currency is spent. The collection’s enduring impact stems from this composite view, which neither romanticizes nor condemns but insists on comprehension. It offers a disciplined way to read intrigue—not as gossip, but as a system of relations whose logic still instructs.
Historical Context
Socio-Political Landscape
These three novels chart French society as it recalibrated after revolution and empire. The Red and the Black surveys the Bourbon Restoration’s uneasy compromise with the past, as provincial hierarchies, clerical influence, and military memories battle for precedence. The Secrets of a Princess moves to the salons where a Legitimist nobility rehearses survival tactics under new regimes. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] exposes the machinery of the Second Empire, where centralized ministries, patronage, and plebiscitary authority govern ambition. Together they register how personal aspiration, social rank, and political power interlocked, revealing a continuum of intrigue from small-town rectories to imperial councils across 1815–1870, with recurring crises, amnesties, and realignments.
The Red and the Black unfolds under the Bourbon Restoration, when the monarchy returned amid foreign occupation, indemnities, and a polarized public sphere. Administrative posts and education were filtered through loyalist networks; the Church regained influence over schooling and censorship; veterans of the imperial armies navigated humiliation and nostalgia. Provincial towns became laboratories of social surveillance, where clergy, magistrates, and landowners arbitrated advancement. Military merit no longer guaranteed standing; pedigree and conformity did. The novel’s attention to ambition and mimicry emerges from this bottlenecked society, in which talent seeks narrow channels of ascent while scandal and gossip serve as political weapons as powerful as decrees.
The Secrets of a Princess is set against the July Monarchy’s world of notables, where the crown rested on bourgeois support and parliamentary maneuver. Salons mediated between public debate and private allegiance, hosting Legitimist aristocrats who cultivated memory, decorum, and strategic discretion. In this setting, reputation functioned as soft power: anecdotes became dossiers, letters substitutes for treaties, and flirtation a vehicle of ideological alignment. The monarchy presided over prosperity but also corruption and press skirmishes. Balzac situates aristocratic survival not on the battlefield but in drawing rooms, where lineage, discretion, and storytelling could secure influence after formal authority had migrated to bankers, deputies, and editors.
His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] anatomizes the Second Empire’s authoritarian modernization. Following the 1851 coup and the reconfigured regime, power flowed through ministries, prefectures, and an imperial court that fused spectacle and surveillance. Plebiscites conferred mass legitimacy while administrative centralization disciplined provinces, press, and speculation. Public works, railways, and credit expanded, yet advancement still required patronage and loyal service. Zola’s political arena is structured by dossiers, favors, and sudden reversals, showing how ideological language masks competitive clientelism. In this world, the minister embodies a regime that promises order and prosperity, yet thrives on the perpetual recalibration of alliances, purges, and carefully staged reconciliations.
The revolutions of 1830 and 1848 punctuate the background of these works, even when not depicted directly. The Red and the Black appeared in 1830, just as barricades redefined the political calendar and made ambition seem both urgent and perilous. The Secrets of a Princess reflects the consolidation that followed, when the rhetoric of citizenship met the realities of elite continuity. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] looks back on the Second Empire after its collapse, interpreting its techniques of control in the dawning Third Republic. Thus the novels collectively track the arc from restoration to reform to reaction, mapping how upheaval hardens into new orthodoxies.
Each text registers the contested frontier between Church and state. Under the Restoration, seminaries and pulpits shaped careers and consciences, drawing ambitious provincials toward clerical ladders even as military glory receded. In Balzac’s salons, Catholic identity underwrites Legitimist solidarity and codes of discretion, turning confession, gossip, and moral authority into instruments of worldly influence. Under the Second Empire, official rapprochement with religion bolsters regime stability while also creating rival jurisdictions over education and charity. These overlapping sovereignties structure choices about loyalty, marriage, schooling, and patronage, ensuring that political intrigue is rarely separable from religious affiliation and the performance of piety.
Economic and administrative transformations provide the stage machinery for intrigue. The spread of railways, growth of joint-stock banks, and speculative booms widen opportunities while intensifying dependence on information and timing. The Napoleonic civil code stabilizes property and inheritance, entrenching family strategy as a political calculus. Press laws cycle between restriction and relaxation, making newspapers potent yet precarious actors. Prefects, prosecutors, and police knit together a national network of dossiers that can elevate or ruin a career overnight. In all three novels, forms, petitions, letters, and rumors carry as much weight as speeches, revealing a society governed by paperwork and performance as much as by principle.
Intellectual & Aesthetic Currents
The anthology spans a spectrum from psychological realism to a harder sociological gaze. The Red and the Black refines introspection and irony to examine motive, self-fashioning, and the intimate theatre of ambition. The Secrets of a Princess extends realism to the cartography of salons, tracing the microeconomies of attention, memory, and tact. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] radicalizes observation into systemic analysis, depicting individuals as nodes within institutional circuits. Across the three, realism is not uniform: it ranges from fast, piercing scenes to encyclopedic documentation. Yet each treats politics as a lived texture, where gestures, décor, and paperwork articulate structures of power.
Romantic legacies persist as both inspiration and foil. The Red and the Black channels the rhetoric of passion and glory only to test it against clerical hierarchy and provincial narrowness. The Secrets of a Princess cultivates aristocratic poise and mystery, yet probes the aesthetic labor required to sustain such illusions. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] counters sublime postures with bureaucratic routines, exposing how grand words are repackaged into administrative expedience. The tension between inward exaltation and external constraint energizes all three books, producing a dialectic in which style, desire, and calculation keep correcting, contaminating, and redefining one another.
Scientific and technological developments inform narrative method and theme. Statistical habits of mind, bureaucratic filing, and medicalized observation encourage attention to symptom, case, and type. The telegraph, railway, and modern postal system accelerate rumor, capital, and political instructions, making timing an aesthetic and ethical problem. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] integrates administrative jargon and infrastructure as plot drivers. The Secrets of a Princess treats correspondence as an instrument of power, where handwriting and delay become tactics. The Red and the Black deploys a clinical focus on self-consciousness, reading social behavior like a laboratory of passions under pressure from institutions and opportunity.
Rival conceptions of the novel shape the anthology’s internal dialogue. The Red and the Black privileges velocity, confession-like intimacy, and satiric clarity, asking the reader to judge a society that manufactures hypocrisy. The Secrets of a Princess builds a web of relations, accumulating detail until a social world becomes legible as a system of credit, favors, and carefully curated secrets. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] wagers on breadth and causality, following chains of influence through offices, salons, and provincial notables. The result is a triptych of techniques—analytic, panoramic, and documentary—competing to capture how power circulates through visible ceremony and hidden transaction.
Gendered sociability is an aesthetic engine. The Secrets of a Princess positions feminine authority at the hinge of politics and narrative, where elegance, silence, and selective confession move votes as effectively as speeches. The Red and the Black frames desire as a school of strategy, with courtship doubling as apprenticeship in manners, rank, and risk. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] centers male bureaucratic networks yet acknowledges the indispensable labor of spouses, hostesses, and confidantes who stage consensus and offer cover for deals. These texts show that intrigue is not merely institutional; it is rehearsed in parlors, bedrooms, and antechambers where performance becomes policy.
Legacy & Reassessment Across Time
Initial receptions traced divergent paths. The Red and the Black, published amid the upheaval of 1830, confronted readers with a bracing portrait of ambition that some found abrasive or unseemly; its stature grew as later audiences recognized its diagnostic precision. The Secrets of a Princess was consumed as a keyhole view into aristocratic codes, its subtle politics sometimes mistaken for mere anecdote. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] provoked debate for its unsentimental portrait of an imperial regime still vivid in memory. Over time, the three were grouped as complementary case studies in how modern societies translate desire into office, reputation, and rule.
Under the Third Republic, interpretations shifted decisively. The Red and the Black became a cautionary tale about merit frustrated by caste and clerical gatekeeping, well suited to republican classrooms and civic pedagogy. The Secrets of a Princess was revalued as a sociological document of Legitimist persistence, useful for understanding how elites adapt without conceding identity. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] turned into a touchstone for analyzing the Second Empire, repeatedly mined for insight into plebiscitary authority, administrative centralization, and the cultivation of spectacle. Together they served a retrospective narrative of emancipation through critique, even as they warned against new forms of conformism.
Twentieth-century readers, confronting mass politics and expanding bureaucracies, found fresh resonances. The Red and the Black’s portrait of calculated self-fashioning anticipated debates about careerism and authenticity. The Secrets of a Princess illuminated public relations before the term became common, showing how image, rumor, and curated access engineer consensus. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] offered an anatomy of opportunism stabilized by files, favors, and staged unanimity. Adaptations across stage and screen amplified these themes, translating salons into newsrooms and ministerial corridors into modern offices, while scholarship emphasized how narrative technique itself replicates or resists administrative logic.
Recent criticism has diversified approaches. Scholars read The Secrets of a Princess as a manual of aristocratic media strategy, foregrounding gender, performance, and the politics of discretion. The Red and the Black invites inquiries into social mobility, secularization, and the moral economies of provincial France, with attention to interior monologue and self-surveillance. His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] supports institutional and network analyses that track the circulation of petitions, contracts, and favors. Digital methods map character interactions; political theology frames debates about legitimacy and charisma; book history highlights serialization and reception contexts that shaped how intrigue was imagined and consumed.
Global circulation has only sharpened their relevance. Translations and classroom canons present these novels as laboratories for understanding the modern state’s entanglement with intimacy. Readers compare the Restoration’s bottlenecks, salon politics, and imperial patronage with contemporary bureaucracies, media ecosystems, and reputation markets. The Red and the Black models the costs of upward striving under moral scrutiny; The Secrets of a Princess decodes elite resilience; His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon] exposes managerial populism before the term existed. Ongoing debates concern whether these works ultimately endorse prudence, cynicism, or reform, a productive tension sustaining their interpretive afterlives.
Chronicle of 19th-Century French Society – 3 Classic Political Intrigue Novels
Power, Politics, and Public Life
Ambition, Class, and Private Morality
Émile Zola
His Excellency [Son Exc. Eugène Rougon]
PREFACE
We live at such high speed nowadays, and the Second French Empire is already so far behind us, that I am inclined to place Son Excellence Eugène Rougon in the category of historical novels. In some degree it certainly belongs to another class of fiction, the political novel, which in Great Britain sprouted, blossomed, and faded away contemporaneously with the career of Benjamin Disraeli. But, unlike Disraeli's work, it does not deal with theories or possibilities. Whatever political matter it may contain is a record of incidents which really occurred, of intrigues which were matured, of opinions which were more or less publicly expressed while the third Napoleon was ruling France. In my opinion, with all due allowance for its somewhat limited range of subject, Son Excellence Eugène Rougon is the one existing French novel which gives the reader a fair general idea of what occurred in political spheres at an important period of the Empire. It is a book for foreigners and particularly Englishmen to read with profit, for there are yet many among them who cherish the delusion that Napoleon III. was not only a good and true friend of England, but also a wise and beneficent ruler of France; and this, although his reign began with bloodshed and trickery, was prolonged by means of innumerable subterfuges, and ended in woe, horror, and disgrace.
The present translation of M. Zola's book was not made by me, but I have revised it somewhat severely with the object of ensuring greater accuracy in all the more important passages, and of improving the work generally. And, subject to those limitations which deference for the opinion of the majority of English-speaking readers has imposed on the translator and myself, I consider that this rendering fully conveys the purport of the original. During the work of revision I was struck by the great care shown by M. Zola in the handling of his subject. There is, of course, some fiction in the book; but, again and again, page after page, I have found a simple record of fact, just deftly adapted to suit the requirements of the narrative. The history of the Second Empire is probably as familiar to me as it is to M. Zola himself—for, like him, I grew to manhood in its midst, with better opportunities, too, than he had of observing certain of its distinguishing features—and thus I have been able to identify innumerable incidents and allusions, and trace to their very source some of the most curious passages in the book. And it is for this reason, and by virtue of my own knowledge and experience, that I claim for His Excellency the merit of reflecting things as they really were in the earlier years of the Imperial régime.
Against one surmise the reader must be cautioned. Napoleon III. and the Empress Eugénie figure in the following pages without disguise; and wherever the name of the Count de Marsy appears, that of the infamous Duke de Morny—whom Sir Robert Peel, in one of his most slashing speeches, did not scruple to call the greatest jobber in Europe—may be read without a moment's hesitation. But his Excellency Eugène Rougon is not, as many critics and others have supposed, a mere portrait or caricature of his Excellency Eugène Rouher, the famous Vice-Emperor of history. Symbolism is to be found in every one of M. Zola's novels, and Rougon, in his main lines, is but the symbol of a principle, or, to be accurate, the symbol of a certain form of the principle of authority. His face is Rouher's, like his build and his favourite gesture; but with Rouher's words, actions, opinions, and experiences are blended those of half-a-dozen other personages. The forgotten ones! the men whose names were once a terror, but who are as little remembered, as little known, in France to-day, as the satraps of the vanished Eastern realms, as the eunuchs who ruled the civilised world on behalf of effete Emperors when Byzantium, amidst all her splendour, was, like Paris, tottering to ruin. Baroche, Billault, Delangle, Fialin alias Persigny, Espinasse—there is something of each of these, as well as something of Rouher, in the career of Eugène Rougon as narrated by M. Zola. Words which one or another of these men wrote or uttered, things which one or another of them actually did, are fathered upon Rougon. He embodies them all: he is the incarnation of that craving, that lust for power which impelled so many men of ability to throw all principle to the winds and become the instruments of an abominable system of government. And his transformation at the close of the story is in strict accordance with historical facts. He salutes the rise of the so-called 'Liberal' Empire in the very words of Billault—the most tyrannical of all the third Napoleon's 'band.'
Rougon has a band of his own—they all had bands in those days, like the Emperor himself; and since that time we have in a similar way seen Gambetta and his queue and Boulanger and his clique. And, curiously enough, as in Rougon's case, those historic coteries were in each instance the prime factors in their leader's overthrow. Thus we have only to turn to the recorded incidents of history to realise the full truth of M. Zola's account of the Rougon gang. It is a masterly account, instinct with accuracy, as real as life itself.
And Rougon, on whatever patchwork basis he may have been built, is a living figure, one of a nature so direct, so free from intricacy, that few ignorant of the truth would imagine him to be a patchwork creation at all. Surely, to have so fully assimilated in one personage the characteristics of half-a-dozen known men in such wise that, without any clashing of individual proclivities, the whole six are truthfully embodied in one, is a signal proof of that form of genius which lies in the infinite capacity for taking pains.
If we pass from Rougon to Marsy we find another embodiment of that principle of authority which both help to represent. Rougon, as M. Zola says, is the shaggy fist which deals the knock-down blow, while Marsy is the gloved hand which stabs or throttles. Years ago, when I was unacquainted with this comparison, and was contrasting the rising genius of Emile Zola with that of his great and splendid rival, Alphonse Daudet, I likened M. Zola to the fist and M. Daudet to the rapier. A French critic had previously called the former a cactus and the latter an Arab steed. The cactus comparison, as applied to M. Zola, was a very happy one; for I defy anybody, even the smuggest of hypocrites, to read M. Zola's works without some prickings of conscience. And verily I believe that most of the opposition to the author of the Rougon-Macquart series arises from that very cause.
But I must return to Marsy, though he need not detain me long, for he only flits across the following pages with his regal air and sardonic smile. For a fuller and, in some degree, a more favourable portrait, one must turn to the pages of Daudet, who of course could not write ill of the man to whom he owed his start in life. In the present work, slight as is the sketch, Marsy, or Morny, the name signifies little, is shown as he really was—venal, immoral, witty, and exquisitely polite. Then there is Delestang, who, physically, represents M. Magne; while in like way Beulin-d'Orchère, the judge whose sister marries Rougon, is copied from Delangle, whose bulldog face is alluded to by most of the anecdotiers of the Empire. La Rouquette is, by name at all events, a connection of Forcade de la Roquette—a step-brother of Marshal St. Arnaud—who rose to influence and power in the latter days of the Empire; and M. de Plouguern, the profligate old senator, reminds me in some respects of that cynical and eccentric Anglomaniac, the Marquis de Boissy. The various members of Rougon's band are sketched from less-known people. Kahn I cannot quite identify, but I suspect him to be the deputy who was mixed up in the scandal of the Graissesac railway line, to which M. Zola refers as the line from Niort to Angers. However, there is no member of the band that I like better than Béjuin, the silent deputy, who never asks a favour, and yet has favours continually showered upon him. I have known a man of that character connected with English public life.
To return to those of M. Zola's masculine characters who may be identified with real personages, none is more genially, more truthfully, portrayed than Chevalier Rusconi, the Italian or, more correctly, Sardinian, Minister in Paris. Here we have that most amiable of men, Chevalier Nigra, of whom Prosper Mérimée once said in my presence: 'C'est un bohème tombé dans la diplomatie.' Withal, Chevalier Nigra—who, though very aged, still serves his country, I believe, with distinction at Vienna—was a very good diplomatist indeed; one of Cavour's right-hand men, one of those to whom Italy owes union and liberty. And what a career was his in France, and what memoirs might he not write! Few diplomatists ever had stranger experiences: from all the secret plotting which so largely helped to make Victor Emmanuel King of Italy to the surveillance so adroitly practised over the Empress Eugénie, whose support of Pope Pius IX. was ever an obstacle to Italian aspirations. For her Nigra-Rusconi became the handsome, gallant courtier; he was a musician, could sing and dance, was proficient in every society accomplishment, and before long the Empress's Monday receptions at the Tuileries, those petits Lundis enlivened by the wit of Mérimée, were never complete without him. Yet, all the time, a stern duel was being fought between him and the consort of Napoleon III. And so long as her husband ruled France she kept her adversary at bay. Rome, capital of Italy, was but the fruit of Sedan. Yet Nigra was chivalrous. When the bitter hour of reckoning arrived, he stood by the woman who had so long thwarted him. He and Prince Richard Metternich smuggled her out of the Tuileries in order that she might escape to England, beyond the reach of the infuriated Parisians.
We catch a few glimpses of the Empress in the pages of His Excellency. We find her at Compiègne surrounded by the ladies of her Court; we also see her riding in state to Notre Dame to attend the baptism of her infant son. A great day it was, when the Empire reached its zenith: a gorgeous ceremony, too, attended by every pomp. On referring to the newspapers of the time I have found M. Zola's description of the function to be remarkably accurate. We espy the Man of December raising the Prince Imperial in his arms, presenting the heir of the Napoleons to the assembled multitude—even as once before, and in the same cathedral, the victor of Austerlitz presented the infant King of Rome to the homage of France. But neither the son of Marie-Louise nor the son of Eugénie de Montijo was destined to reign. And what a mockery now seems that grand baptismal ceremony, as well as all the previous discussion in the Corps Législatif, of which M. Zola gives such an animated account. What a lesson, too, for human pride, and, in the sequel, what a punishment for human perversity! I often read, I often hear, words of compassion for the Prince Imperial's widowed mother, but they cannot move me to pity, for I think of all the hundreds, all the thousands, of mothers who lost their sons in that most wicked and abominable of wars in the declaration of which the Empress Eugénie played so prominent a part. Her evil influence triumphed in that hour of indecision which came upon her ailing husband; and her war—ma guerre à moi—ensued, with fatal consequences, which even yet disturb the world. And so, however great, however bitter, her punishment, who will dare to say that it was undeserved?
But whilst I consider the Empress to have been, in more than one momentous circumstance, the evil genius of France, even as Marie Antoinette was the evil genius of the crumbling Legitimate monarchy, I am not one of those who believe in all the malicious reports of her to be found in la chronique scandaleuse. That she threw herself at the Emperor's head and compelled him to marry her, may be true, but that is all that can be alleged against her with any show of reason. She undoubtedly proved a faithful wife to a man who was notoriously a most unfaithful husband. There are those who may yet remember how one November morning in the year 1860 the Empress arrived in London, scarcely attended, drove in a growler to Claridge's Hotel, and thence hurried off to Scotland. Her flight from the Tuileries had caused consternation there. For four days the Moniteur remained ominously silent, and when it at last spoke out it was to announce with the utmost brevity that her Majesty was in very delicate health, and had betaken herself to Scotland—in November!—for a change of air. This ridiculous explanation deceived nobody. The simple truth was that the Empress had obtained proof positive of another of her husband's infidelities.
It is needless for me to enlarge upon the subject; I have only mentioned it in corroboration of the portrait of Napoleon III. which M. Zola traces in His Excellency. The Emperor was an immoral man—the Beauharnais if not the Bonaparte blood coursed in his veins—and the names of several of his mistresses are perfectly well known. For the rest, M. Zola pictures him very accurately: moody, reserved, with vague humanitarian notions, and as great a predilection for secret police spying as was evinced by Louis XV. The intrigue between him and M. Zola's heroine, Clorinde, is no extravagant notion. Here again a large amount of actual fact is skilfully blended with a little fiction. Clorinde Balbi at once suggests the beautiful Countess de Castiglione; but in the account of her earlier career one finds a suggestion of the behaviour which innumerable scandalmongers impute—wrongly, I believe—to the Empress Eugénie. In Clorinde's mother, the Contessa Balbi, there is more than a suggestion of Madame de Montijo, who was undoubtedly an adventuress of good birth. Both the Balbis are very cleverly drawn; they typify a class of women that has long flourished in France, where it still has some notorious representatives. It is a class of great popularity with novelists and playwrights, possibly because contemporary history has furnished so many examples of it, from the aforementioned Countess de Castiglione who laid siege to Napoleon III. in order to induce him to further the designs of Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, to the Baroness de Kaulla, who ensnared poor General de Cissey that she might extract from him the military and Foreign Office secrets of France. And with half-a-dozen historical instances in my mind, I find no exaggeration in the character of Clorinde as portrayed in His Excellency.
Having thus passed M. Zola's personages in review, I would now refer to the actual scenes which he describes. The account of the sitting of the Corps Législatif, given in the opening chapter, is as accurate as the official report in the Moniteur of that time. The report on the estimates for the baptism of the Prince Imperial is taken from the Moniteur verbatim. In Chapter III., when the Balbis are shown at home, the description of the house in the Champs Élysées is assuredly that of the famous niche à Fidèle. The baptism, described in Chapter IV., is, as I have already mentioned, very faithfully dealt with. I have by me an account of the day's proceedings written for the Illustrated Times by my uncle, the late Frank Vizetelly, who was killed in the Soudan; and I find him laying stress on the very points which M. Zola brings into prominence, often indeed using almost the same words. However, this is but one of the curious coincidences on which malicious critics found ridiculous charges of plagiarism; for I am convinced that M. Zola never saw the Illustrated Times in his life, and moreover he knows no English. Passing to Chapter V., which narrates the horse-whipping administered by Clorinde to Rougon—an incident which it has been necessary to 'tone down' in this English version—I may remark that this is founded on contemporary scandal, according to which the true scene of the affair would be the Imperial stables at Compiègne, and the recipient of the whipping none other than Napoleon III. himself. In Chapter VI., the scheme for reclaiming the waste Landes of Gascony is well-known matter of history. Suggested to the Emperor, this scheme was ultimately taken up by him with considerable vigour, and though it was never fully carried out it may rank as one of the few really beneficent enterprises of the Imperial régime.
In the ensuing chapter we come to Compiègne, and here I have found nothing to call in question. I was twice at Compiègne myself under the Empire, of course not as a guest, but in connection with work for the Illustrated London News, which brought my father and myself into constant intercourse with the Imperial Court over a term of years. And, judging by my personal recollections, I consider M. Zola's picture of life at Compiègne to be a very true one. He has been attacked, however, for having based his descriptions on a work called Les Confidences d'un Valet de Chambre. Some few years ago Mr. Andrew Lang, in criticising the French original of His Excellency in an English review, sternly reproved M. Zola for relying, in any degree, upon such back-stairs gossip. But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Whatever its title may be, Les Confidences d'un Valet de Chambre was not written by a valet de chambre at all. I have a copy of it among my collection of books relating to the Empire. It is brimful of information, bald in style, but severely accurate. As for its authorship, these are the facts: The Court's sojourn at Compiègne, which lasted for a month or six weeks every autumn—having been suggested in part by the Voyages à Fontainebleau of the ancien régime, and in part by the Empress's partiality for the place where she had been wooed and won by Napoleon—had long been the subject of tittle-tattle among the Parisians. The newspapers dared not publish any of the current scandal for fear of being immediately suppressed; however, the impression prevailed, especially among the lower classes, that the Court only betook itself to Compiègne to indulge in a month's orgie far from such prying eyes as might have spied upon any similar excesses at the Tuileries. So many reports circulated, that it was at last deemed expedient to give the entrée to the château to a Court chronicler, who should report what actually took place there, and in this way show the Parisians how foolish were the stories circulated through the cafés and wine-shops. The soi-disant valet de chambre was then, purely and simply, a journalist recommended by Théophile Gautier; and his accounts of the Court at Compiègne were published, in part at all events, by the Paris Figaro, and were subsequently collected in volume form. There is no scandal of any kind in the book: it simply chronicles the day's doings, with descriptions of the various rooms of the château, and accounts of certain Court customs thrown in here and there. Nobody desirous of describing life in Imperial circles at second-hand could do without this little volume, and it is only natural that M. Zola should have consulted it. Its general accuracy I can, by personal knowledge, fully confirm. Among the various incidents which M. Zola has adapted from it I may mention that of the aged dignitary who fondles first the Prince Imperial and afterwards the Emperor's dog Nero. This aged dignitary is a little bit of invention, the real hero of the incident having been a certain M. Leciel, an adjoint to the Mayor of Compiègne, who subsequently got into hot water with the Empress owing to his partiality for irreverent witticisms which usually turned upon his own name. In English we might have called him Mr. Heaven. His residence at Compiègne adjoined the somewhat dirty little inn of the Holy Ghost, which it was at one time proposed to demolish in order to build a new theatre, which was to have been connected with the château by means of a suspension bridge. This gave M. Leciel an opportunity for a most deplorable pun concerning himself and the inn, which he calmly repeated to the Empress, who was considerably incensed thereat. And in the result M. Leciel received no further invitations to the château.
But I must pass from Compiègne to M. Zola's next chapter, in which he deals, indirectly, with the famous Orsini conspiracy. Here we find a story of how the authorities were warned of the approaching attempt at assassination—a story which I have heard told by M. Claude, the famous ex-chief of the detective police, when I was his neighbour at Vincennes in 1881. Something similar, I believe, figures in the so-called Mémoires de M. Claude, but these, based on Claude's papers, which were 'worked up' after his death by an imaginative penny-a-liner, are worthy of little or no credence. It is, however, certain that the French authorities were not only warned from London about the Orsini plot, but obtained additional information in the manner described by M. Zola, and that the incident became the stepping-stone of Claude's subsequent fortune. In His Excellency the Orsini affair is followed by Rougon's return to power. For Rougon one should here read General Espinasse, to whom the Emperor undoubtedly addressed the words: 'No moderation; you must make yourself feared.' All that M. Zola says of the wholesale arrests of French Republicans at that time is quite true. Even the brief interview of the Prefect of the Somme with Rougon is based on historical documents; while that in which figures the editor whose newspaper publishes a story of feminine infidelity is derived from the autobiography of Henri de Villemessant.
In Chapter X., which deals with Rougon's experiences at Niort, we have the story of the arrest of the old notary Martineau. This, again, is true, line for line, almost word for word; but the incident really occurred at Charost, not Coulonges, and the notary's real name was Lebrun. He was a cousin of the illustrious parliamentarian, Michel of Bourges. And once again, fact is piled upon fact in Chapter XI., which describes the Ministerial Council at St. Cloud. The project for the creation of a new nobility emanated from Persigny and Magne; numerous documents concerning it were discovered in the Emperor's study after Sedan; and I may here remark en passant that M. Zola has frequently and rightly availed himself of those Papiers trouvés aux Tuileries as published by the Government of National Defence. And he carries accuracy to such a point that in Chapter XIII., when he is describing Rougon's resignation, he dates the Emperor's acceptance of it from Fontainebleau, as actually happened in the case of Espinasse; and gives us a charity fair at the orangery of the Tuileries as the scene of the minister's receipt of that acceptance—again an historical incident. And finally, in the last chapter, which, like the opening one, deals with the Corps Législatif, we read the very words of Jules Favre and Billault. Moreover, when we here find a clerical deputy exclaiming, 'It displeases me that proud Venice, the Queen of the Adriatic, should become the obscure vassal of Turin,' we must not attribute the remark to M. Zola's imagination; for those words were spoken in that very debate by Kolb. Bernard, who, with Vicomte Lemercier, led the parliamentary group which opposed the Emperor's liberal policy in Italy.
Some readers and some reviewers may think that I have acted somewhat unkindly to M. Zola in thus partially dissecting Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, in showing how little it is a work of imagination and how much a work based upon fact. I could have given many more instances than those I have quoted, but this preface has already stretched to such length that I must stay my hand. I would mention, however, that I could in a similar way dissect most volumes of the Rougon-Macquart series, for these books are novels in their arrangement only. Even when they do not deal with historical personages and publicly recorded facts, they are based on incidents which really happened, and more frequently than otherwise portray people who really lived. The whole series constitutes a truthful, life-like synthesis of a period; and if certain readers recoil from some of the portraits contained in it, this is simply because they will not face the monstrosities of human life. And far from doing my good and clear friend, the author of this imperishable literary edifice, an unkindness by pointing out where and how he has borrowed and adapted, I conceive that I am rendering him a service, for how often has not his accuracy been impugned! Moreover, it is not upon power of imagination that he particularly prides himself—though imagination, and of a high order, is undoubtedly a feature of his genius—he claims rank chiefly by reason of his power of delineation, his power of analysing, blending and grouping facts and characteristics. In one word, he is a Realist. And if he is to describe people as they have lived, incidents as they have really occurred, how can he do otherwise than turn to the records of actual experience, to the unchallenged descriptions of historical episodes? Plagiarism forsooth! When every situation, every dilemma, every experience, every characteristic and every emotion that can enter into the history of the human race have been dealt with time without number by thousands of writers of fiction, either in the form of the novel or the drama! How, then, is it possible for anybody, however great his genius, to be absolutely and perfectly original? Such originality is dead. Let us bow to its grave; we shall never see it more. The only genius in literature which can remain to the writers of to-day and to-morrow is that genius which may lie in the handling of one's materials. The human range of ideas is limited; even madmen—so closely allied to men of genius—cannot carry their fancy beyond certain bounds; and thus the old saws must crop up again and again, distinguished one from another simply by mode of treatment. And as for such charges of plagiarism that may have been brought against M. Zola, I apply to him the words which Molière applied to himself: Il prend son bien où il le trouve. And I will add that he does well in following this course, for over all he casts the magnificent mantle of powers which none of his contemporaries can equal.
E. A. V.
MERTON, SURREY, April 1897.
HIS EXCELLENCY
I
THE CORPS LÉGISLATIF
For a moment the President remained standing amidst the slight commotion which his entrance had caused. Then he took his seat, saying carelessly and in an undertone: 'The sitting has commenced.'
He next began to arrange the legislative bills lying upon the desk in front of him. On his left, a short-sighted clerk, with his nose close to the paper he held, read the minutes of the previous sitting in a rapid and confused manner, none of the deputies paying attention to him. In the buzzing noise that filled the Chamber, these minutes were only heard by the ushers, who maintained a very dignified and decorous bearing which contrasted with the lounging attitudes of the deputies.
There were not a hundred members present. Some were reclining in their red velvet-covered seats, with listless eyes, already half-asleep. Others, leaning over their desks, as though wearied by the compulsory labour of a public sitting, were beating a gentle tattoo on the mahogany with their finger-tips. Through the ceiling-window, which revealed a crescent of grey sky, the light of a rainy May afternoon streamed down perpendicularly upon the pompous severity of the Chamber. It spread over the desks in a sheet of gloomy ruddiness, brightening into a rosy glow here and there where some seat remained unoccupied; while, behind the President, the statues and sculpture-work showed in clear white patches.
One of the deputies on the third row to the right still remained standing in the narrow passage between the seats. He was rubbing his rough fringe of grizzly beard with a thoughtful air, but as an usher came by, he stopped him and asked a question in an undertone.
'No, Monsieur Kahn,' replied the usher, 'the President of the Council of State has not yet arrived.'
M. Kahn thereupon sat down, and, abruptly turning to his neighbour on the left, inquired, 'Tell me, Béjuin, have you seen Rougon this morning?'
M. Béjuin, a small, thin man of dark complexion and silent demeanour, raised his head nervously as though his thoughts were altogether elsewhere. He had drawn out the slide of his desk, and was writing a letter on some blue paper with a business heading formed of these words: 'Béjuin and Co. The Saint-Florent Cut-Glass Works.'
'Rougon?' he repeated. 'No, I haven't seen him. I did not have time to go over to the State Council.'
Then he quietly reverted to his work, consulting a memorandum-book, and beginning a second letter, amidst the confused buzzing murmur of the clerk, who was finishing his reading of the minutes.
M. Kahn leant back in his seat and crossed his arms. He had a face with strongly marked features, and his big but well-shaped nose testified to a Jewish descent. He seemed out of sorts. He gazed upwards at the gilt rose-work on the ceiling and listened to the plashing of a shower which at that moment burst down upon the skylight; and then with vaguely wondering eyes he seemed to be examining the intricate ornamentation of the great wall in front of him. His glance lingered for a few seconds upon two panels hung with green velvet and decked with gilt borders and emblems. Then, after he had scanned the columns between which allegorical statues of Liberty and Public Order showed their marble faces and pupil-less eyes, his attention was turned to a curtain of green silk which concealed a fresco representing King Louis Philippe taking the oath to the Constitution.
By this time the clerk had sat down; nevertheless, the scene remained one of noisy confusion. The President was still leisurely arranging his papers. He again and again pressed his hand on his bell, but its loud ringing failed to check any of the private conversations that were going on. However, he at last stood up amidst all the hubbub and for a moment remained waiting and silent.
'Gentlemen,' he began, 'I have received a letter——' Then he stopped short to ring his bell again, and once more kept silent, his grave, bored face looking down from the monumental desk which spread out beneath him with panels of red marble bordered with white. His frock-coat, which was buttoned up, showed conspicuously against the bas-relief behind him, rising like a black bar between the peplum-robed figures of Agriculture and Industry with antique profiles.
'Gentlemen,' he resumed, when he had succeeded in obtaining something like silence, 'I have received a letter from Monsieur de Lamberthon, in which he apologises for not being able to attend to-day's sitting.'
At this a laugh resounded on the sixth row of seats in front of the desk. It came from a deputy who could not have been more than twenty-eight years old. He was fair and effeminately pretty, and was trying with his white hands to stifle an outburst of girlish rippling laughter. One of his colleagues, a man of huge build, came up to him and whispered in his ear: 'Is it really true that Lamberthon has found his wife? Tell me all about it, La Rouquette.'
The President, however, had taken up a handful of papers. He was speaking in monotonous tones, and stray fragments of sentences reached the far end of the Chamber. 'There are applications for leave of absence from Monsieur Blachet, Monsieur Buquin-Lecomte, Monsieur de la Villardière—'
While the Chamber was granting these different requests, M. Kahn, who had probably grown weary of examining the green silk curtain stretched before the seditious portrait of Louis Philippe, turned to glance at the galleries. Above the wall of yellow marble veined with lake red, there was a gallery with hand-rests of amaranthine velvet spanning the spaces from one column to another; and higher up a mantle of embossed leather failed to conceal the gaps left by the suppression of a second tier of seats which had been assigned to journalists and the general public previous to the Empire. The narrow, gloomy boxes between the massive yellowish marble pillars, which stood in somewhat heavy splendour round the semicircle, were for the most part empty, although here and there they were brightened by the light-tinted toilettes of some ladies.
'Ah! so Colonel Jobelin has come!' murmured M. Kahn.
And forthwith he smiled at the colonel, who had perceived him. Colonel Jobelin was wearing the dark-blue frock-coat which he had adopted as a kind of civilian uniform ever since his retirement from the service. He sat quite alone in the questors' gallery, and his rosette as an officer of the Legion of Honour was so large as to look almost like the bow of a cravat.
But M. Kahn's eyes had already strayed to a young man and woman who were nestling in a corner of the gallery of the Council of State. The young man was continually bending his head and whispering to the young woman, who smiled with a gentle air, but did not turn to look at him, her eyes being fixed upon the allegorical figure of Public Order.
'I say, Béjuin,' M. Kahn remarked, nudging his colleague with his knee.
M. Béjuin, who was now busy with his fifth letter, again raised his head with an expression of absent-mindedness.
'Look up there,' continued M. Kahn; 'don't you see little Escorailles and pretty Madame Bouchard? I'll be bound he's making love to her. What eyes she's got! All Rougon's friends seem to have made a point of coming to-day. There's Madame Correur and the Charbonnels up there in the public gallery.'
However, the bell sounded again for some moments, and an usher called out in a fine bass voice: 'Silence, gentlemen!'
Then the deputies began to listen, and the President spoke the following words, not a syllable of which was lost: 'Monsieur Kahn asks permission to publish the speech which he delivered on the bill for the establishment of a municipal tax upon vehicles and horses in Paris.'
A murmur ran along the benches, and then the different conversations were resumed. Quitting his own place, M. La Rouquette came and sat down near M. Kahn. 'So you work for the people, eh?' he said playfully, and, without waiting for a reply, he added: 'You haven't seen or heard anything of Rougon, have you? Everyone is talking about the matter, but it seems that nothing is definitely settled yet.' Then he turned round and glanced at the clock. 'Twenty minutes past two already!' he exclaimed. 'Well, I should certainly be off now, if it were not for the reading of that confounded report. Is it really to come off to-day?'
'We have all been notified to that effect,' M. Kahn replied, 'and I have heard nothing of any change of plans. You had better remain. The 400,000 francs[1] for the baptism will be voted straight off.'
'No doubt,' said La Rouquette. 'Old General Legrain, who has lost the use of both legs, has had himself carried here by his servant, and is now in the Conference Hall waiting till the vote comes on. The Emperor is quite right in reckoning upon the devotion of the whole Corps Législatif. All our votes ought to be given him upon this solemn occasion.'
While speaking the young deputy did his utmost to assume the expression of a serious politician. His doll-like face, which was ornamented by a few pale hairs, wagged gravely over his collar, and he seemed to be relishing the flavour of the two last sentences he had uttered—sentences which he had remembered from somebody else's speech. Then he suddenly broke into a laugh. 'Good gracious!' he exclaimed, 'what frights those Charbonnels are!'
M. Kahn and himself thereupon began to make merry at the Charbonnels' expense. The wife was wearing an outrageous yellow shawl, and her husband sported a country-cut frock-coat which looked as though it had been hewn into shape with an axe. They were both very short, stout and red, and were eagerly pressing forward, with their chins almost resting upon the balustrade of the gallery in order to get a better view of the proceedings, which, judging by their blank, staring eyes, were utterly unintelligible to them.
'If Rougon gets the sack,' said La Rouquette, 'I wouldn't give a couple of sous for the Charbonnels' case. It will be just the same with Madame Correur.' Then he inclined his head towards M. Kahn's ear, and continued in a very low tone: 'You, now, who know Rougon, just tell me who and what that Madame Correur is. She formerly kept a lodging-house, didn't she? Rougon used to lodge with her, and it is even said that she lent him money. What does she do now?'
M. Kahn assumed a very grave expression and slowly rubbed his beard. 'Madame Correur is a highly respectable lady,' he replied curtly.
This answer checked La Rouquette's curiosity. He bit his lips with the expression of a school-boy who has just been lectured. For a moment they both looked in silence at Madame Correur, who was sitting near the Charbonnels. She was wearing a very showy dress of mauve silk, with a profusion of lace and ornaments. Her face showed too much colour, her forehead was covered with little fair dollish curls, and her plump neck, still very comely in spite of her eight-and-forty years, was fully exposed to view.
Just at this moment, however, the sudden sound of a door opening and a rustle of skirts at the far end of the Chamber caused all heads to turn. A tall girl exquisitely beautiful, but strangely dressed in an ill-made sea-green satin gown, had entered the box assigned to the diplomatic body, followed by an elderly lady in black.
'Ah! there's the fair Clorinde!' said M. La Rouquette, who had risen to bow at random.
M. Kahn had also risen; but he stooped towards M. Béjuin, who was now enclosing his letters in envelopes: 'Countess Balbi and her daughter are there,' he said. 'I am going up to ask them if they have seen Rougon.'
The President meanwhile had taken a fresh handful of papers from his desk. Without ceasing his perusal of them he cast a glance at the beautiful Clorinde Balbi, whose arrival had given rise to a buzz of comments in the Chamber. Then, while he passed the papers one by one to a clerk, he said in monotonous tones, never even pausing to punctuate his words: 'Presentation of a bill to continue certain extra duties in the town of Lille ... of a bill to unite into one single commune the communes of Doulevant-le-Petit and Ville-en-Blaisais (Haute-Marne)——'
When M. Kahn came back again he seemed quite disconsolate. 'Really, no one appears to have seen anything of him,' he said to his colleagues, Béjuin and La Rouquette, whom he met at the foot of the semicircle. 'I hear that the Emperor sent for him yesterday evening, but I haven't been able to learn the result of their interview. There is nothing so provoking as being unable to get a satisfactory account of what happens.'
La Rouquette turned round and whispered into M. Béjuin's ear: 'Poor Kahn is terribly afraid lest Rougon should get into disfavour at the Tuileries. He might fish for his railway if that should occur.'
In reply M. Béjuin, who was of a taciturn disposition, said very gravely: 'The day when Rougon retires from the Council of State, we shall all be losers.' Then he beckoned to one of the ushers and gave him the letters which he had just written, to post.
The three deputies remained standing on the left of the President's desk, discreetly discussing the disfavour with which Rougon was threatened. It was an intricate story. A distant relation of the Empress, one Señor Rodriguez, had been claiming a sum of two million francs from the French Government since the year 1808. During the war with Spain, a vessel freighted with sugar and coffee, and belonging to this Rodriguez, who was a shipowner, had been taken in the Bay of Biscay by a French frigate, the Vigilante
