Rougon branch
Maxime Saccard
Dandy, man of leisure
Son of Aristide Saccard by his first wife Rose. A beautiful, languid, and essentially empty young man who embodies the Second Empire's gilded generation — the children of new money who have grown up with every luxury and developed no capacity for feeling anything deeply. His affair with his stepmother Renée is not passion but boredom: he drifts into it and drifts out again with equal indifference. What makes him chilling is not malice but vacancy — he is not cruel to Renée, he simply cannot conceive that she feels things he does not. He survives everything: La Curée, Nana (where he appears as one of her ruined admirers), L'Argent. By the final novel, he is older and richer, having outlasted his father's first catastrophe. He has his father's talent for self-preservation with none of the energy that makes Aristide almost admirable.
Fils d'Aristide par sa première femme Rose. Beau dandy langoureux et moralement vide, il représente la génération dorée du Second Empire — enfants de la richesse nouvelle incapables de sentiment profond. Sa liaison avec Renée n'est que désœuvrement. Il survit à tout : La Curée, Nana, L'Argent — plus riche et toujours aussi creux.
Exquisitely dressed, languid, with a cold, perfect beauty that conceals complete moral nullity — the face of a man who has never been denied anything and has consequently never wanted anything very much.
Exquisitely dressed, languid, with a cold, perfect beauty that conceals complete moral nullity — the face of a man who has never been denied anything and has consequently never wanted anything very much.
Family & Relationships
- Child Aristide Saccard
- Lover Renée Saccard — Stepson and stepmother — the scandalous affair at the heart of La Curée.