No. 2 · 1871
La Curée
The Kill
The title comes from the hunting term for the entrails thrown to the hounds after the kill — Zola's image for the speculative frenzy of Haussmann's Paris. Aristide Saccard, born Aristide Rougon, arrives in Paris after the coup and within a few years has transformed himself into one of the city's great property speculators, making a fortune by buying up land in the path of Haussmann's new boulevards before the expropriations are announced. The novel is set in the heart of this world: a lavish hôtel particulier with a tropical hothouse, carriages, jewels, and dinners whose cost would keep a working family for a year. Against this backdrop of artificial excess, Aristide's second wife Renée — a bored, beautiful woman of good family whom he married to cover a scandal — drifts into an affair with his own son Maxime. The incest at the novel's heart is less a moral failure than a symptom: Renée has nothing real to live for, Maxime is incapable of genuine feeling, and Aristide treats both of them — his wife and his son — as assets to be managed. When Renée realises this, it is too late. Zola's Paris in La Curée is pure spectacle, a city that has been demolished and rebuilt as a stage-set for the making and losing of fortunes, and the human lives within it are as disposable as the old houses Saccard buys and tears down.
Le titre renvoie aux entrailles jetées aux chiens après la chasse — image de la spéculation effrénée du Paris haussmannien. Aristide Saccard s'y enrichit en achetant des terrains avant les expropriations. Sa femme Renée, belle et désœuvrée, glisse dans une liaison avec Maxime, le fils d'Aristide. La curée : hommes et femmes traités comme des actifs à gérer, dans un Paris démoli et reconstruit comme décor de fortune.
Setting: Paris