Other branch
Count Muffat de Beuville
Court chamberlain
The central male figure of Nana and Zola's most detailed portrait of an establishment destroyed by its own suppressed desires. Count Muffat de Beuville is a rigidly devout Catholic, a court chamberlain under Napoleon III, a man of impeccable moral reputation — whose encounter with Nana at the Théâtre des Variétés undoes him completely. Zola renders his fall with clinical precision and without scorn: Muffat is not a hypocrite who secretly wants what he publicly condemns; he genuinely believes in everything he has built his life on, and the desire he feels for Nana is to him not a temptation but a catastrophe. He becomes her most devoted patron, most thorough ruin, and most pitiable victim — enduring humiliations that would drive a man of less rigid principle to leave immediately, because the alternative (giving up Nana) is more intolerable than any humiliation. His wife, the Countess Muffat, is simultaneously involved with other men — the sexual disorder radiates through the Empire's governing class. His destruction is Zola's political allegory made flesh: the Second Empire hollow at its moral centre.
Figure masculine centrale de Nana. Chambellan impérial rigidement catholique et moralement irréprochable — dont la rencontre avec Nana le détruit entièrement. Zola rend sa chute avec une précision clinique et sans mépris : Muffat ne désire pas secrètement ce qu'il condamne ; le désir lui arrive comme une catastrophe. Sa destruction est l'allégorie politique du cycle : la classe dirigeante impériale creuse à son centre moral.
Stiff, formal, with the precisely maintained bearing of a man for whom self-control has been the primary discipline of a lifetime — and the increasingly ravaged look, as the novel progresses, of someone losing that control irreversibly.
Stiff, formal, with the precisely maintained bearing of a man for whom self-control has been the primary discipline of a lifetime — and the increasingly ravaged look, as the novel progresses, of someone losing that control irreversibly.