July 2025 The Conquest of Plassans Chapters 19-23 (end)

Final thoughts/comments/discussions

That’s the last one I have read, and I enjoyed it enormously. The small-town politics are depicted so well.

In this particular version I'm reading, chapter 19 is the final chapter (older Vizetelly) In other versions, there are 23 chapters! Per the book: Some English editions—specifically older ones translated and edited by Ernest A. Vizetelly around the late 19th and early 20th centuries—compress or omit several chapters, resulting in only 19 chapters instead of the full 23

Vizetelly’s versions were bowdlerized: he edited, retranslated, and sometimes removed content deemed too controversial, which likely led to rearranging the chapter structure (end notes) Wonder what I missed? May go ahead and purchase the Oxford edition and find out!

But chapter 19 in this version is definitely the end. There are, of course, no winners.

I felt the first half of the book was pretty slow and laborious. However, about chapter 13, things begin to pick up and crescendo all the way to the end.

I was pretty impressed by this one, the sixth volume in the cycle. I quite liked this story basically focused around one household, albeit with the town politics as the backdrop. M. Mouret and his wife Marthe live with (in modern parlance) their two late teenage sons and a daughter with learning difficulties. They invite into their home a priest Abbe Faujas and his mother who are looking for rented accommodation. Before long, the newcomers have also invited in Faujas's sister Olympe and her feckless husband. And they proceed to take over the household in subtle ways, pitting family members against each other and causing the Mouret parents to turn against each other, and against their children. The story really takes off in dramatically violent and destructive ways in the last third with a shocking denouement. For me this lifted the novel up and it is probably my favourite of the series so far for the shocking and tragic portrayal of family conflict it depicts.

>4 john257hopper: I agree with you, John. I liked this book the best thus far followed by His Excellency Eugene Rougon.

I appreciated Zola’s craftsmanship in this novel but I cannot say I enjoyed it. François and Marthe Mouret were not an attractive couple, but their fates seemed disproportionately catastrophic. Likewise I did not find Abbé Faujas entirely a villain. Only Olympe and her husband seemed to have no redeeming features. So the ending left a bad taste.
Apparently there have been only three translations of this novel into English. Wikipedia credits Vizetelly’s translation of this novel as one of his better efforts in the Zola canon. The chapters I consulted on Project Gutenberg seemed to bear out this assessment. The 19 chapter version must represent a further editing of Vizetelly’s (?) work, because the 1907 version on Project Gutenberg is complete. Wikipedia is less positive about the 1957 translation titled A Priest in the House by Brian Rhys which is now out of print. Third translation is the recent one for Oxford.

I finished this and really liked it. I thought the town politics were interesting, loved the badminton set piece, and thought the book had a great cast of characters. Like most Zola, not many redeeming ones, for sure. I wish we found out how Desiree was doing. I know Octave features in an upcoming book. I thought Marthe's character was way over the top, but the rest I thought had just enough realism to make it work.

I've read the next two books recently, but I'll follow discussion and start reading again with you all in 2026.

>7 japaul22: Apparently Desirée goes to live with her brother the curé and is happy in a half-witted way, as we see in two later novels.

I found this installment rather middle of the pack of the Zola books I've read so far. The middle section dragged a bit for me. I am going to postpone reading the next two books, and go straight to The Sin of Abbe Mouret so that I can rejoin the group. It seems a good time to do so as SoAM was published directly after CoP.