Customer Reviews

The Dream

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In 880 A.D. or thereabouts an anonymous French monk took 29 lines to relate the virtuous life of Saint Eulalia. A thousand years later Zola took some 250 pages to update the story and add a wealth of naturalist and spiritual detail, which still makes it only half the usual length of his offerings. "The Dream/Le Rêve" is a fairy story written in response to outraged criticism of the "bestiality" of "The Earth/La Terre". So, it is the one Zola book that it is safe to read to children at bedtime, especially if they have trouble going to sleep. As an introduction to the legends of the saints and a guidebook to the stone carvings on church doors it is first class. Pure in heart, morally uplifting and barely a whiff of hereditary vice, the book concocts for itself only the most tenuous of links with the Rougon-Macquart family, whose doings dominate this 20-novel saga, and then promptly buries the connection for the tale's duration. If nothing else, "The Dream" proves that Zola is a versatile writer. Try reading it after "The Earth" and before tackling "The Beast In Man/La Bête Humaine" and then think about Shakespeare's famous remark about what a many-splendoured work is man (meaning human beings in general).

Written as a "passport to the Academy," this novel stands alone among the Rougon-Macquart series for its pure, idyllic grace. Angelique, a daughter of Sidonie Rougon (La Curee), had been deserted by her mother, and was adopted by a maker of ecclesiastical embroideries, who with his wife lived and worked under the shadow of an ancient cathedral. In this atmosphere the child grew to womanhood, and as she fashioned the rich embroideries of the sacred vestments she had a vision of love and happiness which was ultimately realized, though the realization proved too much for her frail strength...
The vast cathedral with its solemn ritual dominates the book and colours the lives of its characters. (J. G. Patterson)

Within Zola's body of work, this odd little book sticks out like a sore thumb. A stylistic departure from Zola's characteristic Naturalism, it reads almost like a fairy tale. Angelique, the illegitimate daughter of Sidonie Rougon, is adopted by a married couple in the town of Beaumont. Angelique learns the family trade, embroidering tapestries and vestments for the town's cathedral. She grows up in the shadow of this thirteenth-century cathedral, leading the cloistered life of an artisan. Reading becomes her favorite recreation, and romantic tales of saints and ancient royalty fascinate her. Within the centuries-old walls of the family home and the adjacent garden, Angelique leads a peaceful, content existent which imbues her with innocence and naiveté. Her passage from childhood to womanhood is irrelevant to her and goes largely unnoticed, until a young man enters her life and inspires in her dreams of a future life beyond the garden walls.
Angelique is such a likeable character that the reader really roots for her to succeed in achieving those dreams. One almost forgets how totally unbelievable the plot is. The book is a pleasant enough read, but utterly inconsequential. Upon finishing the book, one asks what's the point? It adds little to the Rougon-Macquart series as a whole. Zola's knack for descriptive thoroughness hits and misses in this book. His vivid depictions of the artisans' home, their lifestyle, their trade and craft captivate the reader. His long lists of saints and kings, on the other hand, inspire fatigue. Anyone who is reading the entire Rougon-Macquart series obviously should and will read this book. Casual fans of Zola's writing would probably do better to skip it.

Yes, The Dream does diverge a bit from the others in Les Rougon-Macquart series, but because of that, I really liked it. Less grit, more sweetness. I found it quite engaging.

"Le Reve/the Dream" is the shortest novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle; in fact, the second shortest is about 100 pages longer. In the sequence of novels it is preceded by "la Terre/the Earth" and followed by "la Bete Humain/the Beast in Man" - two very significant novels in the cycle. Therefore, one may think of "le Reve/the Dream" as some sort of respite. It is a story of tragic love of Angelique Rougon and the local bishop's son. The novel is well written, but is too imbued with religious theme and too one-dimensional to be ranked as high as other Zola's novels. It is important to point out that contacts between relatives, even though somewhat present in early Rougon-Macquart novels, are completely absent in later ones and "le Reve/the Dream" is a striking example of that. Early in the novel Angelique is adopted by a couple of church embroiderers. The husband in the family decides to find out something about Angelique's mother prior to taking care of official formalities related to adoption, but after learning that she (Sidonie Rougon from "la Cur(e')e/the Kill") does shady and precarious things to earn her living, he tells Angelique that her mother is dead. Therefore, Angelique never learned the truth about her family, which makes "le Reve/the Dream" one of the several novels in the cycle, which is only outwardly tied with the genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart family.

If you can stand these public domain rip-offs, you'll love this book. It was Zola's weakest book by far, but putting a fancy cover on it and using a victorian british translation doesn't help matters. See the new versions put out by The Emile Zola Society if you want to appreciate Zola for the great writer he is and you cannot read French.

Most readers in France and other Catholic-majority nations in the 19th C would have been acquainted with the Legenda Aurea, the "Golden Legend", the compendium of the lives of saints that had been universally popular since the Middle Ages. The Legends are rich in fantasy, like all fairy tales replete with both the gruesome and the delightful. La Reve (The Dream) is intentionally such a tale of implausible enchantment, a 'fairy tale' novella inserted into the often didactic naturalism of Emile Zola's 20-volume Rougon-Macquart chronicle of society during the Second Empire. The central character, Angelique, springs straight from the pages of the Golden Legend, which in fact she reads avidly and upon which she models the fantasies that control her behavior. Much of the imagery in La Reve, and even some of the odd archaic syntax, comes from hagiography. Zola always excels at description, at scene setting, and in this book he gives his descriptive powers free rein to visualize the cathedral and the cathedral community of Beaumont: the Gothic sculpture, the picturesque old houses and gardens, the heirloom furniture, the embroidered liturgical garments and the workshop where the adopted waif Angelique practices the delicate artisanry of embroidering the chasubles and stolls of her religion of spiritual splendor. Zola is completely in control of his style here, completely restrained from any urge to interpret or extrapolate; this is indeed a 'golden' dream of romance. And yet, somewhere toward the middle of this tale of enchanting innocence, one's heart begins to palpitate, one starts to perceive a looming tragedy, a bittersweet denouement, as if too much happiness cannot be other than a dream even in the enchanted precincts of a cathedral garden.

Angelique is an abandoned child, a runaway from an abusive foster home. She is found nearly frozen to death on the porch of the cathedral by the Huberts, a childless couple who take her in and eventually adopt her. The Huberts are the heirs of generations of artisanry in the making of liturgical garments and banners, which they teach the girl. Nothing could more vividly symbolize the antique simplicity and stability of pre-modern traditional culture than such an anonymous art. The girl grows from a wildly erratic, temperamental waif into a beautiful maiden, gifted at her art but completely sheltered from 'contemporary' reality. She lives in the Hubert's ancient dwelling, nestled between the buttresses of the cathedral, isolated even from the bustling commercial lower town of Beaumont. She dreams of a prince charming -- naturally, in the way of fairy tales, one WILL appear -- and of her own transcendence of her shameful birth as a princess of bliss. She also dreams of sainthood, of martyrdom, of the renunciation of worldly happiness achieved by her idolized Saint Agnes. Two such dreams must inevitably clash.

There's almost nothing explicit in this novel of Zola's comprehensive theories of heredity and its import in human character. If one happened to read La Reve alone, without any exposure to the rest of Zola's writings, without the context of the whole Rougon-Macquart saga, one might take it to be a quaint, melodramatic, almost operatic love story. But Angelique carries with her a secret that she herself doesn't know. At the time of her adoption, father Hubert goes to Paris to uncover the identity of her birth mother. What he learns is the only linkage of this novella with the other Rougon-Macquart books, and he never reveals his discovery to Angelique or even to his wife. The girl is the illegitimate daughter, given up at birth, of Sidonie Rougon, the daughter of the opportunistic scoundrel Pierre Rougon who founded the wealth of the Rougons. In other words, Angelique could have been a child of prosperity, in Paris, the niece of a powerful cabinet minister, rather than a humble village maiden. There is a huge irony implicit in this 'charming' love story, which only readers of the whole saga will perceive. The question of Angelique's hereditary nature isn't asked in so many words, but her capacity for emotional 'excess' MUST be, for Zola, part of her Rougon inheritance. Zola's subtle irony extends to his portrayal of the provincial values of the cathedral town of Beaumont, a fast-vanishing enclave of the 'ancien regime' of religious certainty. Those values are so pure, so sublime ... and for the lovers in this tale, so cruel and sterile. The generous integrity of traditional France, even if it survives in rural pockets, is "the dream" in the title of this book.

I read this short novel in French, and I'm not entirely sure that its beauties will be apparent in English translation, especially for sober anglophones who have never looked into the Legenda Aurea or the fables of Perrault. Several of the translations available are quite old and musty with Victorian/Edwardian conventions. Even if you read French, however, or if you find a plausible translation, I'd strongly suggest reading "The Fortune of the Rougons", the initial story of the Rougon-Macquart clan, before "The Dream", lest you be misled about its significance.