In September 1891, Émile Zola was in the Pyrenees. For some time now, he has admitted to the series of Rougon-Macquart. He only have two volumes to write: The debacle (1892) and Doctor Pascal (1893). Seeking to escape the system of naturalism, which he invented but who bridles him, he dreams of a “Painting of the wider and more complex truth” and which is anchored in contemporary reality, unlike Rougon-Macquartwho confined it to the tense time of the Second Empire. However, he will soon know a kind of revelation born from his trip.
The renewal of inspiration
He indeed makes a stop at Lourdes and it is a shock from which the renewal of inspiration he was waiting for. Immediately, he wrote the plan of a novel on the pilgrimage and the city of miracles. The spectacle of this crowd, in which the need for supernatural and physical misery are joined, continues to haunt him, while he lays the last stone of Rougon-Macquart.
In the remarkable introduction of its edition of Three cities Within the Pléiade library, published on March 20, 2025, Jacques Noiray describes this context of finishing naturalism, described as “CLOPortism” by Joris-Karl Huysmans, in 1891, in the first chapter of Over therewhere Emile Zola’s former friend does not hide his repugnance for “A crawling and flat art”.
In the “investigation into literary evolution” carried out the same year by Jules Huret, to the question “Is naturalism sick?”, Anatole France answers: “It seems to me obviously that he died.” Émile Zola, for his part, sketches in the same investigation which, according to him, to qualify new literature: “The future will belong to that or to those who have seized the soul of modern society, which, emerging from too rigorous theories, will consent to more logical acceptance, more tender of life.”
Fresh wheat, fertile romantic priest and character
In September 1892, Émile Zola had the idea of Three citiesromantic trilogy of which the hero is a priest, stone wheat, in search of a new religion. He tries in vain to find the lost faith in Lourdes and at the same time must face the end of the chaste idyll that he maintains with Marie de Guersaint, paralyzed following a fall of horse – the “miraculous” healing of the young girl making this love impossible. Peter, locked in his state as a priest, returns from heavy desperate.
Heavypublished in 1894, is the painting of a modern miracle court and will be put in the index. Émile Zola describes Pierre’s pilgrimage as “A framework in which (he has) brought Lourdes entirely, with his life, his mores, his history, his practices, his ceremonies, finally an extremely complete monograph”. In this very rich edition, Jacques Noiray includes, after the novel itself, the transcription of “My trip to Lourdes”, a newspaper run by Émile Zola during his trip from August 20 to 1er September 1892, a real report in which all its observation qualities illustrated.
Rome (1896) is the ideological counterpart of Lourdes, staging the question of the renewal of Catholicism and the debate between rationalism and the spirit of faith, very lively at the end of XIXe century. Vatican intrigues intertwine with the story of a sublime and devouring passion, that of Benedetta, the beautiful Roman in love with her cousin Dario but who, married to a man to whom she refuses, will join her lover only in death.
In a very skilful abyme, Pierre Froment is the author of New Romethat he wants to present to Pope Leo XIII, who will disapprove of the book. Émile Zola stayed at Rome for a long time to document his novel, but he did not meet the Pope, the only historical figure of the trilogy. The preparatory file of the novel is 1,600 pages. The naturalist method of the investigation has proven itself and Émile Zola successfully resumes it.
A new vein, between real and symbol
In Paris (1898), finally, Émile Zola intends to portray the social, political, ideological struggles of the time, socialism, anarchic crisis and parliamentary corruption. Which gives the book the aspect, new in his work, of a keys. But he also wants to show helpless charity and the need for a “New religion” intended to replace Cadduc Catholicism, which will be that of science.
On the sidelines of the ideological aspect, Émile Zola gives to read the drama of the rivalry between Pierre and his brother Guillaume, in love with the same woman, Marie: a more lively Marie, more carnal than the too frail Marie de Guersaint de Lourdes. The expansion of utopia in the last two books of Paris opens directly to the series of Four Gospels (Fertility,, Work,, Truth And Justice), written for the first three from 1898 to 1902, while the fourth will remain unfinished because of the death of Émile Zola (September 29, 1902).
We find well in the heart of Three cities Attentive observation of social realities and intervention in ideological combat dear to the writer. But the trilogy testifies to a completely new vein in Zola: it is the triumph of a unbridled imagination, mixing reality and the symbol, and freed from naturalistic constraint.
This edition of La Pléiade gives reading transcriptions of preparatory manuscripts, many of which are unpublished. Thanks to his masterful notices and his exciting work of annotation, Jacques Noiray, who dedicates his edition to the memory of Henri Mitterand (specialist in the work of the French writer, who died in October 2021), provides the reader with a very useful critical device to discover this less known and less studied part of the work of Émile Zola.
