October Beginnings: "see thy treacherous guile outreach, And perish in the pit thou mad'st for me" *

 Passage du Pont-Neuf,  illustration by Horace Castelli, 1870

"At the end of the Rue Guenegaud, when you come up from the river, you reach the Passage du Pont-Neuf, a sort of narrow, gloomy corridor running from the Rue Mazarine to the Rue de Seine.  Thirty paces long and no more than two wide, this passageway is paved with yellowish flagstones, loose and worn, constantly oozing an acrid damp: the glazed roof that shields it, peaked at a right-angle, is black with grime.

On fine summer days, with a torpid sun scorching the streets, a  whitish brightness falls from the soiled panes and lingers miserably in the passage,  On nasty winter days, on foggy mornings, the panes of glass cast nothing but darkness on the sticky flagstones - a vile, sullied darkness.

Dug into the left-hand side are some dingy shops, sordid and squat, venting the cold breath of cellars,  Here there are dealers in old books, toy-sellers and pasteboard makers, whose dust-grey displays laid dim and sleepy in the shadows; the windows glazed in small panes cast a strange, shimmery green light over the wares; past the displays, the gloom-laden shops are so many mournful holes restless with fantastical shapes."

Thérèse Raquin   Émile Zola, 1866  © trans. Adam Thorpe

This description of the Passage du Pont-Neuf runs like a dark thread of desperation all through the psychological story of Thérèse Raquin. It is here that she lives above their damp haberdasher's shop with her Aunt, Madame Raquin, and the sickly cousin she has grown up with, now her husband,  Camille.  Into this repressing existence comes Camille's friend, the brutish lazy peasant, Laurant,
who  is painting Camille's portrait. Laurent and Thérèse,  a creature of  "burning blood and tensed nerves", develop a passionate affair, with daily assignations.

Une Olympia moderne - Le Pacha,   Paul Cezanne  1870 (wikimedia commons)

No longer able to meet, their thwarted desires drive them to murder Camille on a boating trip, planning to marry after a suitable time has passed, and to live off Madame Raquin's money. But both the lovers are haunted day and night by the drowned body of Camille, which Laurent had seen rotting in the Paris Morgue, and their physical passion turns to consuming fear and violence.

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"Camille's ghost, thus conjured up, came to sit between the newly-weds…"  (wikimedia image)

Zola traces each tortured mental and physical stage of the depraved lovers' consuming guilt, in grotesque details, until the inevitable violent end is reached, with only the paralysed, silent Madame Raquin as witness.

He vividly presents the lives and mental torments of the characters in a cinematic, or painterly way, with multiple repeated adjectives, (such as brutal, nervous, abyss, yellowish glimmers, burning, foul, speechless, fearful)  but  described his novel as a portrayal of temperament, not character.  It was a forensic study of "the deep-seated disturbances of a sanguine nature brought into contact with a nervous one",  as they struggle to restore their daily equilibrium, and the murderous events which follow must take their course.

"the equilibrium was broken"

Still Life with Black Clock,   Paul Cezanne  1869-70  (wikimedia image)

 Zola  and Cézanne, both from Aix-en-Provence, were friends of long-standing, both looking for a new realism in their work. This still life painting shows Zola's black marble clock and the china inkwell, and Cézanne painted it for his friend, although later they fell out over Zola's critical portrayal of an artist (thought to be based on Cézanne) in The Masterpiece.

*  Christopher Marlowe, A Massacre at Paris,  possibly written 1593
For images of the Passage du Pont-neuf, see thecinetourist.net