For a Night of Love Read Free

is left, in a real sense, fasting: hungry for something more real than the twilit boudoir of the church. And, though the text necessarily cannot say this, history is soon to impose its own fasting on a societyindifferent to the unchosen ascesis, the hungers of every kind sapping the strength of the Second Empire. The story was published in early 1870: some of its first readers would before long be part of the starving population of a Paris besieged by the Prussian army and torn apart by civil war and revolution, lucky to dine, not off salmon pâté, but dogs and rats.
     
    – Andrew Brown, 2002
     
     
    Note on Publication Dates:
‘Fasting’ (‘Le Jeûne’), was published in March 1870. In June of that year, the first volume ( La Fortune des Rougon ) of Zola’s massive sequence of novels on life under the Second Empire, Les Rougon-Macquart, started serialisation. ‘For a Night of Love’ (‘Pour une nuit d’amour’) was written for the Russian review, Le Messager de l’Europe , where it was published in 1876. It was also published in the French review L’Echo universel in 1877. ‘Nantas’ too was published in Le Messager de l’Europe, in October 1878 – this being contemporary with the composition of the first chapters of Nana , Zola’s study of the Parisian demi-monde under the Second Empire (eventually published in 1880): but its storyline has more in common with another instalment of the Rougon-Macquart series, La Curée ( The Kill ), published in 1871.

For a Night of Love
    For a Night of Love *
     

1
    The small town of P*** is built on a hill. At the foot of the ancient ramparts flows a very deep stream with steep banks, the Chanteclair, doubtless so called because of the crystal-clear song of its limpid water. Arriving along the road from Versailles, the traveller first crosses the Chanteclair over the single span of the stone bridge to the south gate of the town: the bridge’s broad parapets, low and rounded, are used as benches by all the old men of the district. Opposite, the rue Beau-Soleil leads up to a silent square, the Place des Quatre-Femmes , paved with rough slabs of stone, and overrun with thick grass, which makes it look as green as a meadow. The houses sleep. Every half hour, the footsteps of some passer-by dawdling along set a dog barking behind a stable door; and the one bit of excitement in this isolated spot is still the officers heading off, twice a day at their regular time, for a meal at their guest house in the rue Beau-Soleil.
    It was in a gardener’s house, on the left, that Julien Michon lived. The gardener had rented out to him a big first-floor room; and, as the gardener himself lived on the other side of the house, looking out onto the rue Catherine where his garden was, Julien lived there in peace and quiet, with his own staircase and door, already content, at the age of twenty-five, to follow the set routines of a reclusive petit bourgeois.
    The young man had lost his mother and father very early on in life. The Michons had, in days gone by, been saddlers at Les Alluets, near Mantes. On their death, an uncle had sent the child off to boarding school. Then the uncle himself had passed away, and for five years Julien had had a little job as a copying clerk in the P*** post office. He earned fifteen hundred francs, without a hope of ever earning more. In any case, he saved his money, and couldn’t imagine a morecomfortable or a happier condition than his own.
    Tall, strong, and bony, Julien had big hands that got in his way. He felt he was ugly, with a square head that looked as if it had been left unfinished after some rough handling by a sculptor all fingers and thumbs; and this made him shy, especially in the presence of young ladies. When a laundress had told him with a laugh that he wasn’t so bad looking, it had left him feeling deeply disturbed. When he ventured out, his arms dangling, his shoulders hunched, his head hanging low, he would take long loping strides