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Concept
La Curée
Summary
La Curée (1871–72; English: The Kill) is the 2nd novel in Émile Zola's 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It deals with property speculation and the lives of the extremely wealthy Nouveau riche of the Second French Empire, against the backdrop of Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s.
Vastly different from its predecessor and prequel La Fortune des Rougon, La Curée - the portion of the game thrown to the dogs after a hunt, and thus usually translated as The Kill - is a character study of three personalities: Aristide Rougon (renamed "Saccard")--the youngest son of the ruthless and calculating peasant Pierre Rougon and the bourgeois Félicité (by whom he is much spoiled), both of them Bonapartistes and consumed by a desire for wealth, Aristide's young second wife Renée (his first dying not long after their move from provincial Plassans to Paris) and Maxime, Aristide's foppish son from his first marriage.
The book opens with scenes of astonishing opulence, beginning with Renée and Maxime lazing in a luxurious horse-drawn carriage, very slowly leaving a Parisian park (the Bois de Boulogne) in the 19th century-equivalent of a traffic jam. It is made clear very early on that these are staggeringly wealthy characters not subject to the cares faced by the public; they arrive at their mansion and spend hours being dressed by their servants prior to hosting a banquet attended by some of the richest people in Paris. There seems to be almost no continuity between this scene and the end of the previous novel, until the second chapter begins and Zola reveals that this opulent scene takes place almost fourteen years later. Zola then rewinds time to pick up the story practically minutes after La Fortune des Rougon] ended.
Following Eugene Rougon's rise to political power in Paris in La Fortune, his younger brother Aristide, featured in the first novel as a talentless journalist, a comic character unable to commit himself unequivocally to the imperial cause and thus left out in the cold when the rewards were being handed out, decides to follow Eugene to Paris to help himself to the wealth and power he now believes to be his birthright.
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