No. 12 · 1884
La Joie de vivre
The Bright Side of Life
La Joie de vivre is the most philosophically explicit of the twenty novels — a sustained confrontation between two worldviews set on the edge of the sea in a Norman fishing village. Pauline Quenu, the daughter of Lisa Quenu the charcutière, arrives at the Chanteau household in Bonneville as an orphan of ten, bringing her inheritance — some 85,000 francs — and an instinctive, unkillable generosity. The Chanteau household needs money and gets it: old Chanteau is immobilised by gout, one of Zola's most carefully rendered depictions of chronic physical suffering; his wife Véronique is avaricious and calculating, steadily finding ways to redirect Pauline's money to family uses. Lazare — the Chanteaus' son, Pauline's age, brilliant and restless — is the novel's great study in Schopenhauerian pessimism. He has read Schopenhauer and adopted the philosopher's worldview with the wholehearted enthusiasm of a young man who has found an intellectual framework for his anxiety: life is suffering, the will is the source of misery, annihilation is the only release. He is genuinely terrified of death — the terror visits him in the night, physical and specific — and his philosophy, rather than providing comfort, provides merely a language for the terror. He conceives grand schemes: a chemical factory to process seaweed into industrial products; a great timber seawall to protect Bonneville from the sea's storms. Each scheme collapses. The money spent on them is largely Pauline's. She watches, understands, and continues to give — not from weakness or illusion but from a clear-eyed choice that this is what she is for. Lazare eventually marries Louise Thibaudier, a conventional, pretty girl with no money: Pauline watches this too, accepts it, and raises Lazare's child when Louise dies in childbirth. The novel ends quietly: the sea still batters the unprotected village, the seawall has long since collapsed, Lazare leaves for Paris with his son, old Chanteau still suffers — and Pauline, stripped of most of what she had, is still there, still choosing life. Zola's answer to Schopenhauer is not argument but example.
Roman le plus philosophiquement explicite du cycle : confrontation entre le pessimisme schopenhauerien de Lazare et la joie de vivre instinctive de Pauline. Bonneville, village normand au bord d'une mer qui bat sans cesse. Pauline, héritière généreuse, soutient les Chanteau alors qu'ils dilapident ses fonds. Lazare construit des projets qui échouent tous, épouse Louise, laisse Pauline élever son enfant. Pauline reste — dépouillée de presque tout, toujours vivante. La réponse de Zola à Schopenhauer n'est pas un argument mais un exemple.
Setting: Normandy coast