La faute de l'Abbe Mouret;Abbe Mouret's Transgression
Zola, Émile, 1840-1902
English
We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address
Below is a summary of La faute de l'Abbe Mouret;Abbe Mouret's Transgression
ABBE MOURET'S TRANSGRESSION
BY
EMILE ZOLA
Edited with an Introduction by
Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
INTRODUCTION
'LA FAUTE DE L'ABBE MOURET' was, with respect to the date of
publication, the fourth volume of M. Zola's 'Rougon-Macquart' series;
but in the amended and final scheme of that great literary undertaking,
it occupies the ninth place. It proceeds from the sixth volume of the
series, 'The Conquest of Plassans;' which is followed by the two works
that deal with the career of Octave Mouret, Abbe Serge Mouret's elder
brother. In 'The Conquest of Plassans,' Serge and his half-witted
sister, Desiree, are seen in childhood at their home in Plassans, which
is wrecked by the doings of a certain Abbe Faujas and his relatives.
Serge Mouret grows up, is called by an instinctive vocation to the
priesthood, and becomes parish priest of Les Artaud, a well-nigh pagan
hamlet in one of those bare, burning stretches of country with which
Provence abounds. And here it is that 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' opens
in the old ruinous church, perched upon a hillock in full view of the
squalid village, the arid fields, and the great belts of rock which shut
in the landscape all around.
There are two elements in this remarkable story, which, from the
standpoint of literary style, has never been excelled by anything that
M. Zola has since written; and one may glance at it therefore from two
points of view. Taking it under its sociological and religious aspect,
it will be found to be an indirect indictment of the celibacy of the
priesthood; that celibacy, contrary to Nature's fundamental law, which
assuredly has largely influenced the destinies of the Roman Catholic
Church. To that celibacy, and to all the evils that have sprang from it,
may be ascribed much of the irreligion current in France to-day. The
periodical reports on criminality issued by the French Ministers of
Justice since the foundation of the Republic in 1871, supply materials
for a most formidable indictment of that vow of perpetual chastity which
Rome exacts from her clergy. Nowadays it is undoubtedly too late for
Rome to go back upon that vow and thereby transform the whole of her
sacerdotal organisation; but, perhaps, had she done so in past times,
before the spirit of inquiry and free examination came into being, she
might have assured herself many more centuries of supremacy than have
fallen to her lot. But she has ever sought to dissociate the law of the
Divinity from the law of Nature, as though indeed the latter were but
the invention of the Fiend.
Abbe Mouret, M. Zola's hero, finds himself placed between the law of the
Divinity and the law of Nature: and the struggle waged within him by
those two forces is a terrible one. That which training has implanted in
his mind proves the stronger, and, so far as the canons of the Church
can warrant it, he saves his soul. But the problem is not quite frankly
put by M. Zola; for if Abbe Mouret transgresses he does so unwittingly,
at a time when he is unconscious of his priesthood and has no memory of
any vow. When the truth flashes upon him he is horrified with himself,
and forthwith returns to the Church. A further struggle between the
contending forces then certainly ensues, and ends in the final victory
of the Church. But it must at least be said that in the lapses which
occur in real life among the Roman priesthood, the circumstances are
altogether different from those which M. Zola has selected for his
story.
The truth is that in 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret,' betwixt lifelike
glimpses of French rural life, the author transports us to a realm of
poesy and imagination. This is, indeed, so true that he has introduced
into his work all the ideas on which he had based an early unfinished
poem called 'Genesis.' He carries us to an enchanted garden, the
Paradou--a name which one need hardly say is Provencal for Paradise*
--and there Serge Mouret, on recovering from brain fever, becomes, as it
were, a new Adam by the side of a new Eve, the fair and winsome Albine.
All this part of the book, then, is poetry in prose. The author has
remembered the ties which link Rousseau to the realistic school of
fiction, and, as in the pages of Jean-Jacques, trees, springs,
mountains, rocks, and flowers become animated beings and claim their
place in the world's mechanism. One may indeed go back far beyond
Rousseau, even to Lucretius himself; for more than once we are
irresistibly reminded of Lucretian scenes, above which through M. Zola's
pages there seems to hover the pronouncement of Sophocles:
No ordinance of man shall override
The settled laws of Nature and of God;
Not written these in pages of a book,
Nor were they framed to-day, nor yesterday;
We know not whence they are; but this we know,
That they from all eternity have been,
And shall to all eternity endure.
* There is a village called Paradou in Provence, between
Back