No. 9 · 1880
Nana
Nana
Nana opens with one of the great theatrical set-pieces in French fiction: Anna Coupeau, eighteen years old and entirely without talent, appears on stage at the Théâtre des Variétés as the Golden Venus in a mythological revue. She cannot act, cannot sing, and the audience knows it — but her body electrifies every man in the house, and Zola makes clear that what is happening in the theatre is a collective experience of desire that bypasses reason entirely. From this beginning, the novel follows Nana through eight years of the Second Empire's demi-monde: the succession of apartments (each grander than the last, until the mansion on the Avenue de Villiers), the succession of men, the succession of fortunes devoured. The novel's great male victim is Count Muffat de Beuville, the rigidly moral court chamberlain and devout Catholic who becomes Nana's most thoroughly destroyed admirer — Zola's central political allegory: the Empire's governing class, outwardly virtuous and inwardly rotten, hollowed out by the very licence it publicly condemns. Nana does not hate Muffat; she is curious about him, bored by him, occasionally cruel without malice. She has no particular philosophy of destruction — she simply takes what is offered, and men offer themselves. The exception to this passivity is Fontan — a rough, unsuccessful actor she falls for and lives with in a tiny apartment in a moment of genuine feeling; he beats her, she stays; the relationship illuminates what desire costs her as opposed to what it costs her patrons. Count de Vandeuvres, another ruin, burns himself alive after a race-track fraud. Georges Hugon, a boy she is genuinely fond of, stabs himself when she refuses him. She barely notices her son Louiset, who dies while she is abroad. In the final pages, Nana returns to Paris to visit the child who is already dead; she contracts smallpox from him; she is locked in a hotel room and dies there — the magnificent face destroyed, the body reduced to something her admirers cannot look at. The last thing heard in the novel is the crowd in the street below chanting 'À Berlin! À Berlin!' — the Second Empire plunging into the war that will end it. The connection is not metaphor; it is Zola's thesis: Nana is what this civilisation grew.
Nana s'ouvre sur un triomphe théâtral paradoxal : Anna Coupeau, sans talent, électrise la salle par son seul corps. Suit sa trajectoire à travers la demi-mondaine du Second Empire : appartements de plus en plus luxueux, hommes de plus en plus ruinés. Le comte Muffat, chambellan moral et rigide, est sa victime centrale — allégorie de la classe dirigeante impériale creusée par le vice qu'elle condamne. Fontan, acteur raté, est l'exception : Nana l'aime et il la bat. Vandeuvres se suicide, Hugon se poignarde. Nana meurt de la variole dans une chambre fermée, le visage détruit, tandis que la foule crie 'À Berlin !' — l'Empire s'effondre avec elle.
Setting: Paris — theatre world