The Dream (Oxford World's Classics), page 4
Two film versions of the novel were made in the early twentieth century, both directed by Jacques de Baroncelli. The first, a silent film produced by Le Film d’Art, in which Andrée Brabant played the role of Angélique, was released in 1921, and the second, a talking film produced by Pathé-Natan, with Simone Genevois in the principal role, was released in 1931.
1 Adolphe Brisson, Les Annales politiques et littéraires (21 October 1888), cited by Henri Mitterand in ‘Le Rêve: Étude’, in Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, ed. Henri Mitterand, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–7), iv. 1651; see also 1653.
2 Charles Bigot, La République française (22 October 1888), cited in Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, iv. 1654.
3 Jules Lemaître, La Revue bleue (27 October 1888), cited in Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart, iv. 1656.
4 Anatole France, Le Temps (21 October 1888), [2], adapting a barb Voltaire had used against Rousseau (letter, 30 August 1755, D6451, in Voltaire, Œuvres complètes (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968– ), c.259).
5 Preparatory notes for The Dream, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 10323, f. 222.
6 Paul Bonnetain, J.-H. Rosny, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte, and Gustave Guiches, ‘La Terre: À Émile Zola’, Le Figaro (18 August 1887), 1.
7 Anatole France, ‘La Terre’, Le Temps (28 August 1887), [3].
8 See Ferdinand Brunetière, ‘La Banqueroute du naturalisme’, Revue des deux mondes (1 September 1887), 218–19, 224.
9 Jules Huret, interview with Zola, in Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (Paris: Librairie Charpentier, 1891), 173–5.
10 Émile Zola, ‘Préface de la deuxième édition’, Thérèse Raquin, 2nd edn (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868), pp. iii, viii.
11 See Émile Zola, ‘Preface’, The Fortune of the Rougons, trans. Brian Nelson, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3, 4.
12 Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. MS 10323, ff. 217–18.
13 Letter to Jacques van Santen Kolff, 22 January 1888, in Émile Zola, Correspondance, ed. B. H. Bakker, 10 vols (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978–95), vi. 245.
14 See Paul Alexis, Émile Zola, notes d’un ami; avec des vers inédits d’Émile Zola (Paris: Librairie Charpentier, 1882), 125–6.
15 Letter to van Santen Kolff, 14 November 1887, in Zola, Correspondance, vi. 207.
16 Letter to van Santen Kolff, 16 November 1888, in ibid., vi. 350.
17 Letter to van Santen Kolff, 6 March 1889, in ibid., vi. 376.
18 See Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Madame Zola (Paris: Grasset, 1997), 11–19.
19 Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. MS 10323, f. 221–2.
20 Ibid., f. 19.
21 Undated letter to an unidentified addressee, cited in Mitterand, ‘Le Rêve: Étude’, Les Rougon-Macquart, iv. 1621.
22 See F. W. J. Hemmings, Émile Zola, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 56–9.
23 See, for example, Prosper Lucas, Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle dans les états de santé et de maladie du système nerveux, 2 vols (Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1847–50), ii. 203.
24 Charles Letourneau, La Physiologie des passions (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1868), 8, 26, 77; Zola’s notes on Letourneau, Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. MS 10345, ff. 42, 47.
25 Émile Zola, The Kill, trans. Brian Nelson, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 54.
26 Émile Zola, ‘Arbre généalogique des Rougon-Macquart (état de 1893)’, fold-out in Les Rougon-Macquart, v; see ‘Family Tree of the Rougon-Macquart’, p. xl.
27 Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. MS 10323, f. 8.
28 See Elizabeth Emery, ‘ “À l’ombre d’une vieille cathédrale romane”: The Medievalism of Gautier and Zola’, French Review 73 (1999), 299; and Emery, ‘Bricobracomania: Zola’s Romantic Instinct’, Excavatio 12 (1999), 107–15.
29 See Henri Mitterand, Zola, l’histoire et la fiction (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 160.
30 See Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2001), 59.
31 See letter to Jean-Baptistin Baille, c.10 February 1861, in Zola, Correspondance, i. 266.
32 Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. MS 10323, ff. 226–7.
33 Ibid., f. 294.
34 Letter to van Santen Kolff, 25 May 1888, in Zola, Correspondance, vi. 289.
35 See Mitterand, Zola, l’histoire et la fiction, 157.
36 See Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. MS 10324, ff. 193–4.
37 See Christophe Duboile, ‘Les jeux spéculaires dans Le Rêve’, Cahiers naturalistes 76 (2002), 97–103.
38 Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. MS 10323, f. 191.
39 Zola, ‘Arbre généalogique’ (1893), fold-out in Les Rougon-Macquart, v.
40 Paris, BNF, nouv. acq. fr. MS 10323, f. 187.
41 Ibid., f. 188.
Translator’s Note
The Dream was extremely popular during Zola’s lifetime, but it seemed to fall out of favour over the course of the twentieth century. By 1903, the year after Zola’s death, it featured in the top third of his novels by total sales, having sold some 116,000 copies—several thousand more than Germinal. The first English translation of the novel, produced by Eliza E. Chase, appeared in 1893 (London: Chatto and Windus), and by 1911 had sold 132,000 copies. Adaptations of the novel for opera and film were a further testament to its appeal. For all this early popularity, the novel’s reputation ebbed during the second half of the twentieth century, in part, no doubt, because its mystical mood seemed so far removed from the stark realism of Zola’s best-known works. In the past couple of decades, however, interest in the novel seems to have revived: scholars have begun to examine it more closely, and in 2005 two new English translations appeared: by Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus Press) and Michael Glencross (London and Chester Springs: Peter Owen Publishers).
The present translation, which forms part of the complete set of the twenty Rougon-Macquart novels in Oxford World’s Classics, is based on the text of the novel in volume iv (1966) of Henri Mitterand’s five-volume edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–7) of Les Rougon-Macquart in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Zola heightens the anachronistic mood of his novel by offering short passages in archaic French, adapted from the 1549 French translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century Latin compilation of the lives of the saints, Legenda aurea (‘The Golden Legend’). I have borrowed from a 1527 English translation of The Golden Legend in an attempt to replicate this effect.
I would like to record my thanks to the staff and sponsors of the Centre International des Traducteurs Littéraires in Arles, where I completed part of this translation, the University of Western Australia, which granted me study leave to work on it, and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, which supported my research into Zola and the passions. I am grateful to staff at Oxford University Press, Judith Luna, Luciana O’Flaherty, and Kizzy Taylor-Richelieu, for all their efforts, and I appreciated the comments offered by the anonymous readers. I would also like to thank the following for various forms of help and advice: Aurélie Julia, Brian Nelson, Margot Nguyen Béraud, Gillian Pink, and Mona de Pracontal.
Select Bibliography
The Dream (Le Rêve) first appeared in serial form in La Revue illustrée, a periodical published twice monthly, in fourteen issues between 1 April 1888 and 15 October 1888 (issues 56–69). It was released in book form by Librairie Charpentier on 13 October 1888, two days before the final instalment of the serialization appeared. It is included in volume iv of Henri Mitterand’s scholarly edition of Les Rougon-Macquart in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 5 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1960–7), and in volume xiii of the Nouveau Monde edition of Zola’s Œuvres complètes, 21 vols (Paris, 2002–10). Paperback editions exist in the following popular collections: Classiques de Poche, ed. Roger Ripoll (Paris, 2003); Presses-Pocket, ed. Gérard Gengembre (Paris, 1992); Folio, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1986); GF-Flammarion, introduction by Colette Becker (Paris, 1975).
Biographies of Zola in English
Brown, Frederick, Zola: A Life (London: Macmillan, 1996).
Grant, Elliott M., Émile Zola (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966).
Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Émile Zola (London: Elek, 1977).
Schom, Alan, Émile Zola: A Bourgeois Rebel (London: Queen Anne Press, 1987).
Walker, Philip, Zola (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).
Studies of Zola and Naturalism in English
Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Baguley, David (ed.), Critical Essays on Émile Zola (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986).
Bell, David F., Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’ (Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).
Bloom, Harold (ed.), Émile Zola (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004).
Duffy, Larry, Le Grand Transit moderne: Mobility, Modernity and French Naturalist Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).
Harrow, Susan, Zola, the Body Modern: Pressures and Prospects of Representation (Oxford: Legenda, 2010).
Hemmings, F. W. J., Émile Zola, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
King, Graham, Garden of Zola: Émile Zola and his Novels for English Readers (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1978).
Lethbridge, Robert, and Keefe, Terry (eds), Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).
Mitterand, Henri, Émile Zola; Fiction and Modernity, trans. and ed. Monica Lebron and David Baguley (London: Émile Zola Society, 2000).
Nelson, Brian, Zola and the Bourgeoisie: A Study of Themes and Techniques in ‘Les Rougon-Macquart’ (London: Macmillan, 1983).
Nelson, Brian (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Nelson, Brian (ed.), Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives (New York and Oxford: Berg, 1992).
Wilson, Angus, Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of his Novels (1952); 2nd edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964).
Studies in English of The Dream
Emery, Elizabeth, ‘ “À l’ombre d’une vieille cathédrale romane”: The Medievalism of Gautier and Zola’, French Review 73 (1999), 290–300.
Emery, Elizabeth, ‘Bricobracomania: Zola’s Romantic Instinct’, Excavatio 12 (1999), 107–15.
Emery, Elizabeth, ‘The Golden Legend in the Fin-de-Siècle: Zola’s Le Rêve and its Reception’, in Medieval Saints in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture, ed. Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewate ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Press, 2004), 83–118.
Grant, Elliott M., ‘The Bishop’s Role in Zola’s Le Rêve’, Romanic Review 53:2 (1962), 105–10.
Huebner, Steven, ‘Naturalism and Supernaturalism in Alfred Bruneau’s Le Rêve’, Cambridge Opera Journal 11 (1999), 77–101.
Kent Bishop, Danielle, ‘The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery as a Destabilising Force in Le Rêve’, Excavatio 18 (2003), 169–78.
Matthews, J. H., ‘Zola’s Le Rêve as an Experimental Novel’, Modern Language Review 52 (1957), 187–94.
Morowitz, Laura, ‘Zola’s Le Rêve: Naturalism, Symbolism and Medievalism in the Fin-de-Siècle’, Excavatio 9 (1997), 92–102.
Stone, Barbara, ‘Family Law in Zola: The Example of the Tutelle’, New Zealand Journal of French Studies 29:1 (2008), 5–16.
White, Claire, ‘Naturalism in extremis: Zola’s Le Rêve’, Romance Studies 33 (2015), 272–84.
Ziegler, Robert, ‘Interpretation as Awakening from Zola’s Le Rêve’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 21 (1992–93), 130–41; repr. in Bloom (ed.), Émile Zola.
Historical Background
Emery, Elizabeth, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2001).
Emery, Elizabeth, and Morowitz, Laura, Consuming the Past: The Medieval Revival in Fin-de-Siècle France (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2003).
Fuchs, Rachel Ginnis, Abandoned Children: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1984).
Saint-Aubin, Charles-Germain de, Art of the Embroiderer, trans. and annotated by Nikki Scheuer, with additional notes and commentaries by Edward Maeder (Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1983).
Other Works by Zola in Oxford World’s Classics
L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon, ed. Robert Lethbridge.
The Belly of Paris, trans. Brian Nelson.
La Bête humaine, trans. Roger Pearson.
The Bright Side of Life, trans. Andrew Rothwell.
The Conquest of Plassans, trans. Helen Constantine, ed. Patrick McGuinness.
La Débâcle, trans. Elinor Dorday, ed. Robert Lethbridge.
Earth, trans. Brian Nelson and Julie Rose.
The Fortune of the Rougons, trans. Brian Nelson.
Germinal, trans. Peter Collier, ed. Robert Lethbridge.
His Excellency Eugène Rougon, trans. Brian Nelson.
The Kill, trans. Brian Nelson.
The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson.
A Love Story, trans. Helen Constantine, introduction by Brian Nelson.
The Masterpiece, trans. Thomas Walton, revised by Roger Pearson.
Money, trans. Valerie Minogue.
Nana, trans. Douglas Parmée.
Pot Luck, trans. Brian Nelson.
The Sin of Abbé Mouret, trans. Valerie Minogue.
Thérèse Raquin, trans. Andrew Rothwell.
A Chronology of Émile Zola
1840 (2 April) Born in Paris, the only child of Francesco Zola (b. 1795), an Italian engineer, and Émilie, née Aubert (b. 1819), the daughter of a glazier. The naturalist novelist was later proud that ‘zolla’ in Italian means ‘clod of earth’
1843 Family moves to Aix-en-Provence
1847 (27 March) Death of father from pneumonia following a chill caught while supervising work on his scheme to supply Aix-en-Provence with drinking water
1852–8 Boarder at the Collège Bourbon at Aix. Friendship with Baptistin Baille and Paul Cézanne. Zola, not Cézanne, wins the school prize for drawing
1858 (February) Leaves Aix to settle in Paris with his mother (who had preceded him in December). Offered a place and bursary at the Lycée Saint-Louis. (November) Falls ill with ‘brain fever’ (typhoid) and convalescence is slow
1859 Fails his baccalauréat twice
1860 (Spring) Is found employment as a copy-clerk but abandons it after two months, preferring to eke out an existence as an impecunious writer in the Latin Quarter of Paris
1861 Cézanne follows Zola to Paris, where he meets Camille Pissarro, fails the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts, and returns to Aix in September
1862 (February) Taken on by Hachette, the well-known publishing house, at first in the dispatch office and subsequently as head of the publicity department. (31 October) Naturalized as a French citizen. Cézanne returns to Paris and stays with Zola
1863 (31 January) First literary article published. (1 May) Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, which Zola visits with Cézanne
1864 (October) Tales for Ninon
1865 Claude’s Confession. A succès de scandale thanks to its bedroom scenes. Meets future wife Alexandrine-Gabrielle Meley (b. 1839), the illegitimate daughter of teenage parents who soon separated; Alexandrine’s mother died in September 1849
1866 Resigns his position at Hachette (salary: 200 francs a month) and becomes a literary critic on the recently launched daily L’Événement (salary: 500 francs a month). Self-styled ‘humble disciple’ of Hippolyte Taine. Writes a series of provocative articles condemning the official Salon Selection Committee, expressing reservations about Courbet, and praising Manet and Monet. Begins to frequent the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles quarter of Paris, the meeting-place of the future Impressionists. Antoine Guillemet takes Zola to meet Manet. Summer months spent with Cézanne at Bennecourt on the Seine. (15 November) L’Événement suppressed by the authorities
1867 (November) Thérèse Raquin
1868 (April) Preface to second edition of Thérèse Raquin. (May) Manet’s portrait of Zola exhibited at the Salon. (December) Madeleine Férat. Begins to plan for the Rougon-Macquart series of novels
1868–70 Working as journalist for a number of different newspapers
1870 (31 May) Marries Alexandrine in a registry office. (September) Moves temporarily to Marseilles because of the Franco-Prussian War
1871 Political reporter for La Cloche (in Paris) and Le Sémaphore de Marseille. (March) Returns to Paris. (October) Publishes The Fortune of the Rougons, the first of the twenty novels making up the Rougon-Macquart series
1872 The Kill
1873 (April) The Belly of Paris
1874 (May) The Conquest of Plassans. First independent Impressionist exhibition. (November) Further Tales for Ninon
1875 Begins to contribute articles to the Russian newspaper Vestnik Evropy (European Herald ). (April) The Sin of Abbé Mouret
1876 (February) His Excellency Eugène Rougon. Second Impressionist exhibition
1877 (February) L’Assommoir
1878 Buys a house at Médan on the Seine, 40 kilometres west of Paris. ( June) A Love Story (Une page d’amour)
1880 (March) Nana. (May) Les Soirées de Médan (an anthology of short stories by Zola and some of his naturalist ‘disciples’, including Maupassant). (8 May) Death of Flaubert. (September) First of a series of articles for Le Figaro. (17 October) Death of his mother. (December) The Experimental Novel
