"Our fortune was a long time in the making!"

A peculiar, sometimes sleepy epilogue to my favourite series of novels, Doctor Pascal feels rather like the neglected stepchild one might find in a Zola story. Written in 1893, it is the conclusion to his 20-volume Rougon-Macquart, which details five generations of a single family under the Second Empire reign of Napoleon III (1851 - 1871). Pascal takes place between 1872 and 1874. The war is done; the carnage is being mopped up in Paris; and here we are back in Plassans, the town where the family began, to mingle with some of the survivors for a while as they contemplate their past and, indeed, their future.

The series has given us yarns about [b:mass uprisings at a coal mine|3128376|Germinal (Les Rougon-Macquart, #13)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388798469l/3128376._SY75_.jpg|941651], [b:incest and murder among peasants|27310205|Earth (Les Rougon-Macquart, #15)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451244935l/27310205._SY75_.jpg|1810722], the drama of [b:France's biggest stock market bubble|18552501|Money (Les Rougon-Macquart #18)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385350960l/18552501._SY75_.jpg|417025], [b:lust and cruelty among the aristocracy|3888856|The Kill|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1475574769l/3888856._SY75_.jpg|839934], not to mention the series' actual climax during the series of missteps [b:now known as the Franco-Prussian War|35017227|La Débâcle (Les Rougon-Macquart #19)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499945182l/35017227._SY75_.jpg|3522286], that it's discombobulating to discover that the final volume in the series takes place almost entirely in a single house, with a handful of characters. At the same time, two of the best novels in the collection - the vastly underrated [b:A Love Story|34927484|A Love Story (Les Rougon-Macquart, #8)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1497282194l/34927484._SY75_.jpg|1776975] and philosophical masterwork [b:The Bright Side of Life|38819295|The Bright Side of Life (Les Rougon-Macquart, #12)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1521230267l/38819295._SY75_.jpg|941672] - used this format, so why not? (It reminds me, actually, of the current trend in "prestige dramas" on TV, to devote your penultimate episode to the season's narrative climax, while giving over the actual finale to contemplative, award-nominated performances from your lead cast.)

Pascal Rougon is a member of the third generation of the family, a scientist and natural observer in life, who appeared occasionally during early volumes of the series. On the verge of 60, Pascal has now largely retired from seeing patients to focus on his grand plan, writing a masterwork on heredity, using his own extended family as evidence, as part of aims to cure mankind of illnesses and much more. On Pascal's side is his niece and acolyte, Clotilde; in the opposing corner is that bastion of cruelty, Félicité Rougon, who made such an impact back in [b:the series' opening volume|14827593|The Fortune of the Rougons (Les Rougon-Macquart, #1)|Émile Zola|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347457035l/14827593._SY75_.jpg|303087] that I've been eagerly awaiting her return.

At heart, the novel is little more than a chance for Zola to expound upon his theories of humanity - theories which had evolved substantially from the misguided scientific beliefs he held when he set out on the series 23 years earlier. Perhaps one might say that Zola uses this novel to stick his fingers up at his many critics, who had denounced him as a pornographer or, perhaps worse, a believer in the essential malignancy of humankind. Instead, although the novel charts the horrors and woe - both personal and national - that the extended Rougon-Macquart clan have inflected on their fellow man, it also bustles with optimism for the potential within humanity. As always, Zola is superb at his moments of symbolism, the baby-like teenager Charles, for example, who reminds everyone of those end-of-the-line princes who never even take the throne due to extreme weakness, or the death of another long-lost character in one of fiction's many spontaneous combustion sequences. And the master's understanding of character - although it takes a while to arrive - is profoundly felt as we navigate the complex relationship between master, mistress, and servant, gradually revealed in conflicting points-of-view. There are weaknesses to be found, for sure. The novel is perhaps overly soppy. Some of the science v. religion debates - although they resonated with me in the increasingly Luddite, recalcitrant 21st century - don't feel entirely earned. On top of this, the "tell, don't show" mentality that had begun to infect Zola's writing in the last few novels of the series is often on show here. I think of the sequence - late in the novel - where the impoverished Clotilde describes an experience on the street, accidentally knocking down a child and being turned on by a mob, which would have made for a quintessential Zola scene in his heyday. It is for these reasons, I think, that the novel has been without an English translation for more than 70 years, a problem rectified this year (2020) with the release of Julie Rose's stellar translation, capping off Oxford University Press' monumental complete translation of the series. But it is not the case that the sedge is withered from the lake, quite yet. This relatively short novel is worth it for the sequence in chapter five, in which Pascal expounds his Rougon-Macquart theory to Clotilde, giving us in 10 pages what it had taken Zola two-and-a-half decades to write. Pascal even spares a moment to note the complexity and individuality of animals, reminding us of the many horses, dogs, and cats, who populate the narrative. (I should say here, if you're contemplating reading Doctor Pascal without having read the rest of the series: don't! The other 19 novels can be read independently without losing much; this, however, is very much a finale, devoting extensive space to conclusions, often for characters who don't even appear physically in this volume.)

"Ah, youth! He was ravenous for it!"

At the heart of the novel, however, and the reason Zola chose the insular format for his grand finale, is the relationship between Pascal and Clotilde. It is a strange, surprising, often problematic relationship from the perspective of 2020. Clotilde is less than half Pascal's age, has lived with him since she was a child, and ends up giving her body to him as a present because she's so overwhelmed by his genius? Yet, this relationship is blatantly based on Zola's own late-in-life love affair with a much younger woman named Jeanne, who would bear him two children (out of wedlock, as he was already married), and no doubt captures something of their relationship. In that sense, what seems like an old man's fantasy to us is in fact an old man's reality. (The fact that Clotilde is Pascal's niece, and that no-one seems to mind this, is perhaps best chalked up to cultural differences!) And Pascal is Zola in other ways too. The man always right, even in the face of great opposition; the man rejected by society but still desperately needed by them; a man ultimately apotheosised by all who know and love him. And yet, again, is this not true of Zola also? He could not have known - writing this novel nine years before his death - that his final years would be spent as a lightning rod for the debate about anti-Semitism and corruption in the establishment, a debate in which he would choose the correct side and be hated by millions for it, before being remembered by history (at least in the 20th century) more for his social activism than for his novels.

All in all, I can't say that Doctor Pascal is a great novel, or even completely worthy of a 4-star rating. But I can attest that the experience of reading these 20 books in chronological order, in modern translation, has been one of the great experiences of my literary life. Perhaps it is best to view the novel from a scientific standpoint. This is the conclusion to the paper. One shouldn't come here expecting hypotheses, innovative research, thrilling experiments, or the Sturm und Drang of trial and error. These all lie behind us; ahead is only a neat summation and a memory, a slideshow perhaps, of the many roads we have thus far travailed.

It is a journey I will no doubt take again... one day. ( )

In a typical Zola gesture, the Rougon-Macquart series comes with a decorative pair of bookends to hold it in place on the shelf: La fortune des Rougon at the start and Le Docteur Pascal at the end. The first book, set against the background of the coup d'état of 1851, introduced us to all the characters and their complicated genealogy; in this last book, set in 1872-4, after the fall of the Second Empire, we get a handy summary of what's happened to everyone, together with an exposition of how all this fits in with Zola's slightly eccentric theories of heredity.

The plot — such as it is — fits into all this rather oddly. It starts out as a conflict between blinkered superstition and scientific objectivity, but we soon realise that Pascal is not so much a rational scientist as a self-deluding crank, who piles up the results of his unscientific "research" in a cupboard without a thought of publishing anything. As well as being an expert on heredity who is determined to make a baby with his own niece... Zola has either lost his own faith in science somewhere along the line, or he's let a good story of sex and obsession take over from dry theoretical models. Probably the latter.

Not one of the unmissable books in the series, but it was nice to get the "where are they now" stuff. ( )

There could be a sense of anti-climax when reading Doctor Pascal, the last of Émile Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels. Having followed five generations of the descendants of Adelaïde Fouque (Tante Dide) over the course of the Second Empire in France, the reader has come across occasional allusions to Doctor Pascal but there has been no hint that he is a person of much interest. He’s a bachelor, he lives in Plassans, and he’s spent his life recording the lives of his extended family in order to confirm his theories about heredity.

(This was Zola’s own pet theory too: he believed that heredity determined physical and mental health, and the bloodlines of the Rougon-Macquart family were a fictional demonstration that the descendants of the mad matriarch Adelaïde would turn out well or badly depending on whether they were of legitimate descent through her respectable marriage to Pierre Rougon, or from her more dubious relationship with the smuggler Macquart. However, Zola believed that it was possible to transcend inheritance, as we shall see).

Zola, genius that he was, created a fitting finale for his series. Doctor Pascal involves the conflict between religion and science; a May-September relationship; a fall from fortune; duty versus love; and at the end, a slightly ambiguous conclusion where – despite the image of a Madonna and babe – we are left wondering how the next generation will fare.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/06/13/doctor-pascal-by-emile-zola-translated-by-ma... ( )