The Conquest of Plassans (Les Rougon-Macquart Book 4) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Second Empire France, and had written three short stories on the subject for the Republican newspaper
La Cloche
in the early 1870s, at roughly the same time as he was writing
The Conquest of Plassans.
    5 Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
(1859) had appeared in French in 1865.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
    La Conquête de Plassans
, from the Rougon-Macquart family saga, is not one of Zola’s best-known novels. This is because, although its narrative force is almost unsurpassed, it has only twice been translated into English. The first translation,
The Conquest of Plassans or The Priest in the House
, was by the remarkable Ernest Vizetelly, who, with others, translated Zola’s novels during the 1880s. In his preface (1887) he refers mysteriously to ‘late disclosures’ in London about ‘the priest in the house’, implying that the novel and his translation are very topical. The second translation was by Brian Rhys (Elek Books, 1957) who called it simply
A Priest in the House
. The novel is in many ways a sequel to the first of the Rougon-Macquart series,
La Fortune des Rougon
, translated by Brian Nelson for Oxford World’s Classics, which has filled a large gap in the Englishing of Zola. I hope this book will do the same for Zola’s many fans among English readers.
    I started my translation at the Centre for Literary Translation in Arles, where the staff were, as usual, unfailingly kind and helpful. I am grateful to them, as well as to the Institut Français in London and the director of the Centre National du Livre who gave me a generous grant to finish translating the book in Paris. I should also like to thank my friend Béatrice Roudet-Marçu, who clarified some of the trickier idiomatic expressions for me and encouraged me along the way. And I am most of all grateful to my husband, David Constantine, who has read it all with immense patience and, as ever, offered his invaluable suggestions and comments.
    The text I have used is the Classiques de Poche edition of 1999 with an introduction and notes by Colette Becker. Included in that edition are four stories and three critical articles by Zola which have some bearing on the novel.
    H. C.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
    The Conquest of Plassans
was first published in 1874 and, like
The Fortune of the Rougons
, serialized in the Republican newspaper
Le Siècle
between February and April 1874 before being published by Charpentier the same year. It is the fourth volume of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, and is included in the first volume of A. Lanoux and H. Mitterand’s Pléiade edition of
Les Rougon-Macquart
(Paris: Gallimard, 1960–7). There exist also the following notable paperback editions:
La Conquête de Plassans
, ed. E. Carassus (Garnier-Flammarion);
La Conquête de Plassans
, ed. M. B. de Launay and H. Mitterand (Gallimard Folio); and
La Conquête de Plassans
, ed. Colette Becker (Livre de Poche). The first English translation, by Ernest Vizetelly, appeared in 1887 (London: Vizetelly and Co.).
    Biographies of Zola in English
    Brown, Frederick,
Zola: A Life
(London: Macmillan, 1996).
    Hemmings, F. W. J.,
The Life and Times of Emile Zola
(London: Elek, 1977).
    Schom, Alan,
Emile Zola: A Bourgeois Rebel
(New York: Holt, 1986).
    Studies of Zola in English
    Baguley, David,
Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision
(Cambridge: CUP, 1990).
    —— (ed.),
Critical Essays on Emile Zola
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).
    Bloom, Harold (ed.),
Emile Zola
(Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004).
    Hemmings, F. W. J.,
Émile Zola
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
    Lethbridge, R., and Keefe, T. (eds.),
Zola and the Craft of Fiction
(Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).
    Lukács, György,
Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and Others
, trans. Edith Bonee; foreword by Roy Pascal (London: Hillway Publishing, 1950).
    Mitterand, Henri,
Zola, Fiction and Modernity
, trans. and ed. Monica Lebron and David Baguley (London: The Émile