#Zoladdiction 2020: The Sin of Abbe Mouret

It's April, and that means it's another edition of Fanda's Zoladdiction! Hosted by Fandaclassiclit, this is a month-long celebration of the life and work of Emile Zola, my favorite French writer. I've been reading Zola's novels for ten years, and I'm more than halfway through with his Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels. This year I selected The Sin of Abbe Mouret, first published in 1875.

This is the fifth book in the series, and at just under 300 pages, it's also one of the shortest -- which is honestly why I chose it from the five Zola novels on my TBR list. I'm still recovering from Les Miserables and just could not face the 600 pages of La Debacle, another war novel. As such a short novel, there are few characters and the plot line is fairly simple. Abbe Serge Mouret, age 25, is the priest of a small parish of Les Artaud, a village in southern France, where he lives with his younger sister, Desiree, and an elderly housekeeper, La Teuse. Serge and Desiree are the two younger children of the Mouret family introduced in The Conquest of Plassans, the previous volume of the series (their older brother Octave moves off to Paris and reappears in books ten and eleven, Pot-Bouille and The Ladies' Paradise).

One spring day Abbe Mouret is out on an errand -- he must persuade a pregnant village girl to marry the baby's father. The girl's father is unwilling to give up unpaid labor, and most of the villagers seem nonplussed about the situation. On his way back to the parish, he runs into his uncle, Doctor Pascal (last seen in the first volume, The Fortunes of the Rougons.) The Doctor is on his way to check on a patient, Jeanbernat, the elderly caretaker of a vast abandoned estate known as Le Paradou (the Paradise). Jeanbernat lives in this isolated, ramshackle ruin with his niece Albine, who has become rather wild. 

It turns out Jeanbernat is just fine and not on death's door. but Abbe Mouret catches a glimpse of this idyllic garden paradise and the wild Albine. A few weeks later, Abbe Mouret falls ill from a terrible fever, and is sent to convalesce in the secluded estate. When he is recovering, he has no memory of his life as a priest, and soon he falls in love with Albine and with the gardens of Le Paradou -- basically, it's a 19th century Adam and Eve story, except that Adam is a priest. When Mouret remembers his life as priest, he wrestles with his conscience -- can he overcome his sin and return to his spritual ways as a priest? Or will he succumb to his earthly desires and run away with Albine? Zola isn't known for happy endings, so the outlook is not favorable.

Overall I liked this book, though it isn't my favorite in the series. Obviously, there's a lot of religion in this book, and the struggle between man's spirituality and man's human desires. Sex and religion are hot topics at any time, and the combination of the two is just somewhere I'm going to avoid. 

I will say that there are a lot of wonderful descriptions of the gardens of the Paradou, though if you are a gardener, you will realize that miraculously, many of these plants don't normally bloom at the same time, so suspend your disbelief. Or maybe it's a magical microclimate? It is meant to be an Eden, so I'll let it pass. 

Forest Interior by Paul Cezanne, 1898-1899. Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco. The cover image above is a detail from this painting. Ironically, Cezanne and Zola were close friends until Zola used him as inspiration for his novel The Masterpiece. They never spoke again after that.

Mostly what I didn't like about this book was the way women were depicted, and the misogyny of one character in particular. There is another priest, Brother Archangias (an archangel?) who has such an overwhelming hatred of women he literally says they should all be strangled at birth. To him, all women are temptresses and sluts -- the only women he seems to tolerate is the housekeeper La Teuse -- and there are several scenes in which they are playing the card game War. Zola is pretty heavy-handed with the symbolism in this book, if you hadn't noticed already. I can't decide if Zola really feels this way about women or if he's satirizing the sexism of the church. 

The only female character that Zola depicts favorably is Serge's sister Desiree, but she's supposed to be simple-minded -- not stupid, but I wonder if she would now be classified as on the autism spectrum. She loves nothing more than her animals and treats them like her own children, though she doesn't seem to mind pigs being slaughtered. I'm not quite sure what to make of her. 

Desiree and the uncle, Doctor Pascal, are basically the only good characters in the novel. As in The Conquest of Plassans, Zola uses Doctor Pascal to give us his naturalist theories about the family: 

You, of course, you're a priest, you've done the right thing, it's a very happy state being a priest. It's completely taken you over, hasn't it, so you've really turned towards the good. You'd never have been happy doing anything else. Your relatives, who started out like you, have committed their villainies without finding any consequent satisfaction. . . . There's a logic to it, my boy. A priest completes the family. It was inevitable anyway. Our blood was bound to go that way in the end. . . . So much the better for you, you've been the luckiest. (p. 33)

Doctor Pascal is the subject of the final novel in the series, and I've just recently discovered that a new translation is scheduled to be published by Oxford World's Classics this fall. Of course it could delayed by current events, but I'm hopeful. Finally, the series will be complete in new translations! 

I'm counting this as my Classic with a Proper Name for the Back to the Classics Challenge and also for the Victorian Challenge.