Money (Oxford World’s Classics) Read Online Free PDF

stance.
    In the financial operations of Saccard the accountancy term ‘jeux d’écritures’ is used over and over. Translated as ‘juggling the books’ or ‘false accountancy’, it is literally ‘games (or play) of writing’, and there is a great deal of ‘writing play’ in this novel—everyone is writing and creating. The villainous Busch accumulates and classifies his papers with their histories of debt and deceit, then works to create something profitable out of them, while in the next room Sigismond is writing the work that outlines a new future for mankind. It is Hamelin’s letters to his anxious sister that keep her on track, with their accounts of the great changes taking place abroad. Jantrou too is a writer, creating the persuasive fictions, the ‘little novels’ of his brochures, the advertisements that sell the Universal Bank to a gullible public. Saccard, writing a speech for Hamelin, is well pleased with the turn of phrase by which ‘the ancient poetry of the Holy Land’ colours the presentation of the Carmel Silver Mines. Even in his prison cell Saccard, surrounded by files, is writing up his account of events.
    It is from the drawings, plans, maps, and watercolours tacked on the wall of the Hamelins’ workroom that great new schemes arise, brought to life by Saccard’s imagination and eloquence, just as it is from Zola’s notes and tellingly named
ébauches
(‘sketches’) that the novel arises, brought to life by Zola’s imagination and eloquence. And it is those maps and sketches and watercolours that Madame Caroline takes down and rolls up in the final chapter, as if enacting the closure of the narrative. In a further instance of reflexivity, Jordan, the honest, hard-working writer, forced by poverty into journalism but whose novel at last succeeds, is a pale reflection of the young Zola himself. In his earlier work
The Masterpiece
(
L’Oeuvre
, 1886), Zola had introduced the writer Sandoz, who declares that he will create a series of novels based on one family. And in the last novel of the series, Dr Pascal, like Zola, gathers together the whole history of the Rougon-Macquart family; Pascal’s notes are destroyed, but Zola’s happily survive, embodied in the Rougon-Macquart novels.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
    T HIS translation is based on the text of the novel in volume 5 of Henri Mitterand’s excellent Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of
Les Rougon-Macquart
(Paris: Fasquelle et Gallimard, 1967), which offers, as well as a scrupulously annotated text, a critical study, and detailed information on Zola’s sources and preparation for the novel and the reception of the novel by critics of the time. Other editions were also consulted.
    The first English translation available in England was made by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly in 1894—
Money
[
l’Argent
] by Émile Zola (London: Chatto & Windus, 1894). Some earlier translations had appeared in America, where Zola’s novels were translated piecemeal from serial episodes in the newspapers, before the novels appeared in volume form. Most of these have sunk without trace. Vizetelly mentions one as being ‘of merit’—
Money
by Émile Zola, translated from the French by Benj. R. Tucker (Boston, Mass.: Benj. R Tucker Publishers, 1891). Benjamin R. Tucker was the editor and publisher of
Liberty
, a fortnightly organ of ‘Anarchistic Socialism, the Pioneer of Anarchy in America’.
    Vizetelly’s version is extensively expurgated, with whole episodes omitted, and new passages invented to fill consequent gaps in the narrative. Tucker also suffers from censorship, and comments angrily on an omission he had to make:
    In consequence of a disgraceful law… I am forced to omit from this picture a short but vigorous stroke of the word-painter’s brush, hoping that the time is not far distant when a saner spirit, and healthier morality… will inspire Americans with a resolve to submit no longer to the enforced emasculation of the greatest works of