The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Volume 4
1894
The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Volume 4
1894
Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
In the final volume of Zola's Three Cities Trilogy, a priest returns to Paris having lost the faith that defined his life. Pierre Froment, modeled on Zola himself, has journeyed through Lourdes and Rome seeking spiritual certainty, only to return empty-handed, his beliefs crumbled to dust. Now he must face the unbearable: a brother whose happy household mocks his emptiness, a city seething with the same questions that destroyed his vocation, and the terrible freedom of a man who has killed God in his own heart. This is not a novel of conversion but of deconversion, gritty, honest, and painfully modern. Zola, writing at the height of his powers, turns his naturalistic lens on the most intimate of crises: what does life mean when the great answer turns out to be silence? Paris burns with the intellectual fever of fin-de-siècle France, and Pierre's private anguish becomes a window into the soul of an age abandoning its faith.
Editions
X-Ray
“In the midst of all his sadness, Pierre felt deep compassion penetrate his heart. He was upset by the thought that mankind should be so wretched, reduced to such a state of woe, so bare, so weak, so utterly forsaken, that it renounced its own reason to place the one sole possibility of happiness in the hallucinatory intoxication of dreams. Tears once more filled his eyes; he wept for himself and for others, for all the poor tortured beings who feel a need of stupefying and numbing their pains in order to escape from the realities of the world.””
— Emile Zola
“How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!””
— Emile Zola
“Ever since the morning, Pierre had beheld many frightful sufferings in that woeful white train. But none had so distressed his soul as did that wretched female skeleton, liquefying in the midst of its lace and its millions.””
— Emile Zola
“He beheld Lourdes, contaminated by Mammon, turned into a spot of abomination and perdition, transformed into a huge bazaar, where everything was sold, masses and souls alike!””
— Emile Zola
“...the water was scarcely inviting; for, through fear lest the output of the source should not suffice, the Fathers of the Grotto only allowed the water of the baths to be changed twice a day. And nearly a hundred patients being dipped in the same water, it can be imagined what a terrible soup the latter at last became. All manner of things were found in it, so that it was like a frightful of all ailments, a field of cultivation for every kind of poisonous germ, a quintessence of the most dreaded contagious diseases; the miraculous feature of it all being that men should emerge alive from their immersion in such filth.””
— Emile Zola
“Miserable humanity was clamouring from the depths of its abyss of suffering, and the clamour swept along, sending a shudder down every spine, for one and all were plunged in agony, refusing to die, longing to compel God to grant them eternal life. Ah ! life, life! That was what all those unfortunates, who had come from so far, amid so many obstacles, wanted - that was the one boon they asked for, in their wild desire to live it over again, to live it always! O Lord, whatever our misery, whatever the torment of our life may be, cure us, grant that we may begin to live again and suffer once more what we have suffered already. However unhappy we may be, to be is what we wish. It is not heaven that we ask Thee for, it is earth; and grant that we may leave it at the latest possible moment , never leave it indeed, if such be Thy good pleasure. And even when we no longer implore a physical cure, but a moral favour, it is still happiness that we ask for; happiness , the thirst for which alone consumes us. Oh Lord, grant that we may be happy and healthy; let us live, ay, let us live forever!””
— Emile Zola
“But his doubts were again coming back to him; when you needed a miracle to gain belief, it means that you are incapable of believing. There is no need for the Almighty to prove His existence.””
— Emile Zola
“There is no arguing with people who say that, since there is nothing but Nature, no process can be other than natural. There is no sign, even from heaven, that could break down the intellectual prejudice of such people. If they saw Jesus Christ Himself in glory, they could always say that "at present science cannot account for the phenomenon of a luminous body apparently seated upon a throne, but no doubt it will do so in the course of time." If they saw a dead and corrupting man rise from the grave, they could always argue that he could not have been dead and corrupting, or he could not have risen from the grave. Nothing but the Last Judgment could convince such persons. Even when the trumpet sounds, I believe that some of them, when they have recovered from their first astonishment, will make remarks about aural phenomena.””
— Emile Zola
