March 2025 Money Chapters 10-12 & Final Thoughts

Thoughts/discussions

In chapter 10 Zola creates a lot of intensity!

I finished and I'm glad I'm done! This is my least fav Zola, thus far. Just TOO much Bourse! It seems to me that Hamelin got a raw deal. He was sentenced to 5 years as Saccard, but unless I missed something, he was not in on the scheming? But then, I listened to this on audio and perhaps I daydreamed, took a phone call, etc. I felt that Caroline was for the most part the voice of moderation and reason throughout the book, except of course, for her affair with Saccard. I felt that the story of Victor, Saccard's heretofore unknown son, the product of a rape, was not fleshed out. Perhaps that's in another novel? Here's hoping that the next novel, La Reve (The Dream) will be more enjoyable for me.

I think it is fair warning to say that Le Rêve is even more boring. Far too much embroidery for priestly vestments.

>4 MissWatson:

I very much enjoyed Le Reve and thought it was a delightful breath of fresh air after L'argent which didn't really draw me in until the second half because as was mentioned before, it's a lot of money talk.

I can't say I am looking forward to Money but I will tackle it this month.

Am about halfway through ch 11, so end is in sight in more ways than one. Saccard himself is such a cold, empty character that it is hard to be engaged in his fate. Mme Caroline is a rather contradictory character. I can see why Zola included the Beauvilliers and other minor characters whose lives are devastated by Universelle’s collapse, to give the swindle some human implications.
PS Ch 12 squeezing every last drop of pathos from the fate of these victims. Zola throws in another sexual assault, for good measure.

Finished L’Argent. Zola struggled to give abstract financial issues a human face but was not entirely successful, IMHO. Looking forward to embroidery, after a break.

Finished Money today, I was determined to finish it by the end of the month, though including skimming over extensive dull passages on company financing. The leading character is once again Aristide Saccard, brother of minister Eugene Rougon. He resurrects his financial career by seizing on a plan by idealistic and naive engineer Georges Hamelin to set up a joint stock company to build massive infrastructure in the Middle East, as a way supposedly to overthrow the Ottoman empire and restore Christianity by enthroning the Pope in Jerusalem. Saccard sees money as the way of transforming the region, where "life will return as it returns to a sick body, when we stimulate the system by injecting new blood into the exhausted veins". The company is initially very successful but eventually comes crashing down, bringing down in the process many small investors who has bought a few shares, persuaded by Saccard's wiles. If Saccard was not bad enough for this, he is also very anti-Semitic, motivated by a desire to destroy the supreme power he ascribes to Jewish financiers.

Overall, disappointing despite its important and contemporary themes.

>10 john257hopper: Personally I don’t think Saccard had any interest in improving Middle Eastern infrastructure or enthroning the Pope in Jerusalem. He was interested in making money, full stop. Hamelin’s idealistic vision, like the lesser hopes and dreams of the small investors, was just leverage.

I've attached my review. Lots of memorable moments in this one, but also lots of boring money sections!

>11 booksaplenty1949: I think you're right.

>12 japaul22: I had no explicit sex scenes in my edition, sadly.

>14 john257hopper: Yes, I looked at the Vizetelly translation on Project Gutenberg, which I believe was the only one available until Valerie Minogue’s in 2014 for Oxford World’s Classics. At some points it was hard to recognise that it was the same book I was reading in French.

>15 booksaplenty1949: Yes that was mine, from the Delphi Classics collection.

I think you mean Mme Caroline, not Catherine. Interesting that while Zola certainly wants to portray her as someone trying “to live her life with some decency,” she becomes Saccard’s mistress. In an English novel contemporary with L’Argent that would make her a moral outcast whose only possible hope for redemption would be suicide.

>17 booksaplenty1949: yeesh, thanks for pointing out the wrong name!
Certainly true that she is not perfect, but she at least seems to have regrets and a conscience, at least comparatively.

>18 japaul22: I agree, but Victorian novels set a “higher” standard when it comes to sexual conduct.

>14 john257hopper: None in mine, either!

Phew, glad to be done with this one, although I continue to enjoy Zola's writing. Thanks to those who responded to my comments on this one, despite how far behind I am!

>21 labfs39: Despite being #4 in Zola’s “recommended reading order” Money was #18 in publication order, written twenty years after the first book in the series. Perhaps Zola’s first priority in the novel was to fill in a gap in his analysis of French society.

>22 booksaplenty1949: Good point. And it was interesting, just not 370 pages of interest for me personally.

>23 labfs39: Excellent review, nonetheless.

>21 labfs39: My least favorite thus far, also.