Abbe Mouret's Sin by Zola

Here are my comments on Abbe Mouret's Sin:

The fifth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series features Serge Mouret, son of Francois and Marthe Mouret who were featured in the previous novel. He has become a priest, and is serving his first congregation in a poor village. When he becomes very ill, his uncle, a doctor, takes him to recuperate with the caretaker of an abandoned mansion and surrounding gardens. While there, Serge is tended by Albine, the unconventional young niece of the caretaker. As he recovers, Albine entices him to explore the magical gardens surrounding the mansion, with consequences you can imagine given the title of the book.

This novel was very different from the other Rougon-Macquart novels I have read. Serge's stay with Albine is surreal. The gardens they explore are impossibly beautiful, go on forever, and seemingly contain every variety of flower, bush and tree known to man. (And Zola describes them for page after page.) Once in the gardens, there is no way out, although Serge and Albine can return to the pavillion in which they are staying.

This was a worthwhile read, but as I said it seems to be something of an anomaly. I found it to be such a contrast to the absolute realism of the other Zola novels

Here's my review.



If Zola hadn't written this novel, I would not have finished it. And yet, in a way, I'm glad I did. Straying far from the realism for which he is justly famous, Zola enters the worlds of myth, fantasy, and hallucination. I can't say which I found more tedious: Father Mouret's adoration of first Mary and then the crucified Jesus, and his endless religious meditations, or the lush, absurdly detailed descriptions of every flower and plant imaginable when he is recuperating from some sort of breakdown in what can only be identified as the Garden of Eden.

Briefly, Serge Mouret (who is the brother of Octave Mouret of Pot Luck and The Ladies Paradise, and who, like him, is related to both the Rougons and the Macquarts), after being ordained as a priest, has been assigned to a tiny, remote Provençal village inhabited by a small group of peasants all of whom are related to each other. He lives next to the falling down church with his simple-minded sister Desirée, who is enchanted by her barnyard and its ever-growing population of farm animals, and an aging housekeeper who is always nagging him. The reader sees him performing various rites of the church, trying to convince a comparatively rich peasant to let his pregnant daughter marry the poorer father of her child, and, endlessly, fantasizing in what is almost a sexual way about Mary. His duties are interrupted when his uncle, a local doctor, takes him to the bedside of an atheistic man, who he erroneously believes is dying. The man is the caretaker of the abandoned Paradou, the former home of a rich lord with huge walled grounds and has taken in a young girl, a relative, Albine, who roams the grounds and has lost her former educated ways. Both the old caretaker and the girl are hated by the vicious local friar, Archangias. Later, when Father Mouret falls ill, apparently both physically, and mentally, his uncle takes him secretly to Paradou so Albine can care for him until he recovers. And it is there, in Paradou, riotously overgrown with every plant and animal, that Serge and Albine live an idyllic, natural life, watched over and led on by the trees and the flowers -- until they finally make love, and then know shame. Serge, once again Father Mouret, returns to the village and struggles with the knowledge of his sin -- and needless to say, things do not end well.

So, what on earth is Zola doing with this book? Influenced by the afterword written by the translator of the edition I read, I don't think it is just a criticism of the church, and it is not just a version of the biblical fall of man, although it certainly can be read that way. There is a lot of death in this book (and a lot of life), but it is clear that Zola is making the point that we all die, that it is natural to die, that nature is lush in the spring and summer but dies back in autumn and winter -- and that although we all die, life goes on. Certainly his love of religion perverted Father Mouret's humanity and love of Albine, and certainly Desirée's enjoyment of her animals and her barnyard are always a breath of fresh, if redolent, air, but the character of Albine, who in some ways is the heart of the story, remained mythical and unreal for me, and perhaps was meant to be. The most interesting thing I can say about this novel, which I almost put down many times, is that it made me think.