Thérèse had joined the family long before her marriage. Residing in this sepulchral milieu are the Raquins: Thérèse her frail husband, Camille and her mother-in-law. Zola predicted that his work would prove to be a succès d’horreur, and horror is indeed what it portends from the opening scene, which ushers the reader into a narrow Parisian street or “passage” overhung by a dirt-encrusted glass canopy admitting little daylight (today, “passages” that survived Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris under Napoleon III are mostly smart commercial arcades).
Now they are available as audiobooks, read by two gifted English actresses: “Madame Bovary” by Juliet Stevenson and “Thérèse Raquin” by Kate Winslet. Both novels have appeared in countless editions since the 19th century.
Zola was not subjected to the same ordeal, but critics treated him as a rogue purveying smut in the name of realism. The state prosecuted Flaubert for gross indecency, despite the terrible punishment he metes out to his wayward heroine. The publication of Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” in 1857 and of Émile Zola’s “Thérèse Raquin” 10 years later roused the French literary establishment against two previously unknown authors who had gone beyond the bounds of all that was held to be morally admissible in fiction with their portraits of adulterous women starved by marriage of sex and romance.
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