No. 5 · 1875
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
Abbé Mouret's Sin
La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret is the most lyrical and mythologically ambitious of the twenty novels — a full-scale reimagining of the Fall, Edenic innocence, and the war between flesh and spirit. The novel opens in a state of religious transport: Serge Mouret, the young priest of a sun-baked Provençal village, is conducting mass in an ecstasy of Marian devotion. His faith has the character of an erotic fixation — he is in love with the Virgin with an intensity that Zola explicitly diagnoses as the redirection of suppressed sexual energy. Two characters flank him: Désirée, his simple-minded younger sister, who raises farm animals with pure, unselfconscious delight and represents the body's untroubled relationship with nature; and Frère Archangias, a brutal lay brother of the Brotherhood of the Holy Spirit, who loathes women and sexuality with a violence that is the dark mirror of Serge's sublimation. Serge collapses in a brain fever — caused, in Zola's terms, by the extreme repression of the flesh — and Dr Pascal Rougon is called from Plassans to treat him. Pascal sends him to recover at the home of the old recluse Jeanbernat, who lives at the edge of the vast, overgrown garden called Le Paradou. The Paradou is the novel's great imaginative creation — a seventeenth-century formal garden run entirely wild over a hundred years, so dense with vegetation that it has become a private world. Here Serge recovers without memory of his name, his vows, or his God. Albine — Jeanbernat's niece, who has grown up alone in the Paradou like a creature of the garden itself — nurses him back to health, and the two fall into an Edenic love, living outside of time, gradually discovering the garden's spaces and each other. Zola renders this idyll with extraordinary tenderness and sensory richness: it is, he suggests, what human beings were before the Church made them ashamed of their bodies. The idyll is disrupted when Archangias tracks them down; Serge's memory returns; he is retrieved by his ecclesiastical superior and restored to his parish. What follows is agonising: Serge, now fully restored to his vows, has re-consecrated himself to the Virgin, whom he now treats quite consciously as a substitute for the woman he has renounced. Albine comes to him at the rectory and he turns her away — one of the novel's most painful scenes. She returns to the Paradou and dies there, lying in a sealed room choked with the flowers she has gathered, willing her own death in a manner Zola renders as both mythological and devastatingly human. The final scene reprises the opening exactly: Serge conducting mass in religious transport, the circle closed — at the cost of Albine's life, and at no cost at all to the Church.
Roman lyrique et mythologique du cycle — réécriture de la Chute et de l'Eden. Serge Mouret, prêtre en transport mystique, s'effondre d'une fièvre cérébrale diagnostiquée par le docteur Pascal comme la conséquence du refoulement charnel. Envoyé en convalescence au Paradou — immense jardin sauvage — il se rétablit sans mémoire de ses vœux et tombe amoureux d'Albine, sauvage et lumineuse. Leur idylle edénique est brisée par Frère Archangias ; Serge retrouve la mémoire et renonce à Albine. Elle revient le voir ; il la renvoie. Elle retourne au Paradou et se tue parmi ses fleurs. La dernière scène reprend la première exactement : Serge en transport mystique disant la messe, le cercle refermé.
Setting: Provence