Abbe Mouret's Transgression
1875
What if the Garden of Eden returned, and the serpent was the body itself? Zola's 1875 novel detonates beneath the foundations of religious certainty, asking whether holiness might be a kind of death. Young Father Serge Mouret has surrendered everything to God: his desires, his flesh, his will. Then illness strikes, followed by amnesia, and he awakens knowing nothing of his vows. He meets Albine, his nurse, and together they flee into the luxuriant wilderness called the Paradou, a hidden Eden where they live as the first humans must have lived before shame existed. Zola writes their awakening to each other and to the body with startling tenderness, his prose lush with the perfume of ripeness and the hum of insects. But memory is a tide that cannot be held back forever. When it returns, what is sin? What is innocence? This is Zola at his most lyrical and most dangerous: a novel that celebrates the flesh without apology while asking whether we can ever truly escape what we were born to be. For readers who crave the sensual alongside the intellectual, who wonder what paradise might cost.
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“There Albine lay, panting, exhausted by love, her hands clutched closer and closer to her heart, breathing her last. She parted her lips, seeking the kiss which should obliterate her, and then the hyacinths and tuberoses exhaled their incense, wrapping her in a final sigh, so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses, and in this culminating gasp of blossom, Albine was dead.””
— Emile Zola
“These people came into the world and left it bound to their soil, proliferating on their own dung-hills with slow deliberation like the uncomplicated soul of trees which scatter their seed about their feet, with little conception of any larger world beyond the dun rocks among which they vegetated.””
— Emile Zola
“He was possessed now with that obsession for the cross in which so many lips have worn themselves away on crucifixes.””
— Emile Zola
“For a few moments, raising his arms desperately, the Reverend Mouret implored Heaven. His shoulder-blades cracked, with such fantastic force did he pray. But soon enough his arms fell to his sides, his hopes abashed. From heaven came one of those silences utterly void of hope known to the devout.””
— Emile Zola
“Albine now yielded to him, and Serge possessed her.And the whole garden was engulfed together with the couple in one last cry of love's passion. The tree-trunks bent as under a powerful wind. The blades of grass emitted sobs of intoxication. The flowers, fainting, lips half-open, breathed out their souls. The sky itself, aflame with the setting of the great star, held its clouds motionless, faint with love, whence superhuman rapture fell. And it was the victory of all the wild creatures, all plants and all things natural, which willed the entry of these two children into the eternity of life.””
— Emile Zola
“Raising her arms, she defied Heaven. 'So,' she cried, 'you prefer your God to me? You think he is stronger than I am. You think he will love you better than I would? Ah, what a child you are! Do stop talking such twaddle. What we are going to do is go back to the garden together, and love each other, be happy and free, for that is life.””
— Emile Zola
“He mused on this village of his, which had sprung up in this place, amid the stones, like the gnarled undergrowth of the valley. All Artaud's inhabitants were inter-related, all bearing the same surname to such an extent that they used double-barrelled names from the cradle up, to distinguish one from another. At some antecedent date an ancestral Artaud had come like an outcast, to establish himself in this waste land. His family had grown with the savage vitality of the vegetation, drawing nourishment from this stone till it had become a tribe, then the tribe turned to a community, till they could not sort out their cousinage, going back for generations. They inter-married with unblushing promiscuity.””
— Emile Zola
“Ne doutez pas de moi, laissez-moi la force de me vaincre.””
— Emile Zola
“La nuit tombait, le jardin n'était plus qu'un grand cercueil d'ombre.””
— Emile Zola
