A Love Story

Hélène Grandjean was widowed shortly after arriving in Paris with her husband and young daughter, a high-strung and sickly child of eleven. Knowing no one, she relies on Abbe Jouve and his brother for advice. Once set up in an apartment, she rarely leaves, with only her daughter and the brothers for companionship. But one night, Jeanne begins convulsing, and when she can't reach her regular doctor, Hélène frantically knocks on Dr. Deberle's door. Dr. Deberle is young, attentive, and skilled. Through the long hours of nursing Jeanne, the two fall in love. Unfortunately, Dr. Deberle is not only married, but his wife becomes good friends with Hélène. In addition, Jeanne comes to sense her mother's attraction to the doctor and is show more determined to thwart their relationship and keep her mother to herself.

A Love Story is one of Zola's most straightforward novels with a small cast of characters and a domestic focus. In some ways it reminded me of The Dream. It looks at love in it's many permutations: a mother's love, platonic love, friendship, sexual love. There are several couples in the novel, and only the maid's relationship with her peasant boyfriend seems to be particularly healthy. The choice for Hélène seems stark: either a passionate, adulterous affair or a respectable, boring marriage of convenience. And her relationship with her daughter is particularly toxic. Jeanne is a spoiled, unlikeable child who domineers her mother's attentions with a violence and jealousy that borders on mental illness, which is of course, Zola's point, for Jeanne is Aunt Dide's granddaughter. Altogether this makes for rather unpleasant, though compulsive, reading: like watching a train wreck in slow motion. show less

After giving us the epic survival struggle of the Paris proletariat in L'assommoir, Zola obviously wanted to prove to his readers that he could still do a claustrophobic bourgeois novel on the regulation two inches of ivory (well, OK, a little bit of ink might have slopped over the edges here and there...). But, even though it involves a physician, this isn't Zola's Madame Bovary. And it's not even a love-story in the conventional sense at all.

Hélène, who is from the Marseille branch of the diseased Rougon-Macquart family tree, has been living in Paris with her 11-year-old daughter Jeanne since the death of her husband. She has a small legacy to live on, and her friend the Abbé Jouve has found them an apartment in Passy and a country show more girl to be their servant. When the sickly Jeanne needs urgent medical attention late one night, it's their neighbour, the dishy doctor Deberle, who is called in. Significant Glances are exchanged. But, unfortunately, Deberle turns out to be married...

Zola subverts the adultery plot we're trained to expect from almost every conceivable angle: he pushes Hélène into intimacy with Mme Deberle and her friends, he prevents Hélène and the doctor from stealing more than the occasional moment together, he deploys an unpleasant old crone to foreground the disagreeable nature of what their instincts are pushing them towards, and above all he encourages Jeanne's selfish possessiveness of her mother. Jeanne is superficially the angelic, vulnerable Victorian child, but we soon realise that she is a little monster, an emotional blackmailer every bit as ruthless as the professional beggar Mère Fétu.

Of course you can't keep Zola locked up in 60 square metres in Passy, even if that's what he's doing to his human characters, so the biggest character in this story, commenting on events with magnificently ironic detachment, is the ever-changing view of the city of Paris as seen out of Hélène's windows. In Technicolor and wide-screen, and don't spare the adjectives.

Zola seems to want us to bear in mind what we've been reading in L'assommoir and use it to put the tribulations of bourgeois life into some kind of perspective: the biggest set-piece scene of this book is Mme Deberle's Children's Ball, a supremely extravagant and wasteful entertainment that clearly has everything to do with the pleasure the mothers get from competing to put their children in the most adorable costumes, and little or nothing to do with the kids themselves having any fun. Positively heartbreaking when we put it alongside the parties in L'assommoir, where the participants are constantly aware how much this is costing them and what sacrifices they have committed themselves to by blowing their savings on this essential bit of relaxation. And Zola clearly now has the same kind of trouble taking seriously the erotic difficulties imagined for themselves by middle-class ladies.

(This is the book where Zola first published his famous drawing of the family tree - he'd intended to keep it for the last book in the sequence, he tells us, but he's including it now after multiple requests from readers and to prove to us that he has a plan and isn't just making it up as he goes along.) show less

Despite its title, A Love Story is actually several different versions of love: the love of a mother for a child, passionate adulterous love, de rigueur society affairs, and the quiet love of close family friends are just a few. Love inspires many other emotions though, and in this novel rage and jealousy feature strongly.

Hélène Grandjean was a young widow living in Passy, just outside Paris proper. Her apartment had a magnificent view of the the city in the distance. Although she did not venture there, she spent many happy hours at her window, contemplating the city in its many moods. Hélène lived with her eleven year old daughter Jeanne, a sickly child, given to wild mood swings which seemed to induce illness if she encountered show more any opposition. Here the reader is in familiar Zola territory: the study of family and environment. Hélène was the daughter of Ursule Mouret, part of the first illegitimate generation of Macquarts, the unstable line in Zola's multigenerational family history. Hélène herself seemed free of any taint, but Jeanne clearly was a throwback.

When Jeanne started seizuring one night, Hélène was forced to search for a doctor, securing by chance her neighbour Doctor Deberle. The families got to know one another. Hélène and Deberle developed a strong mutual attraction. Hélène learned from listening and observing at Mme Deberle's that the bourgeois society in which she found herself thought nothing of adulterous affairs. She started wondering, then rationalizing.

Jeanne, however, had sensed the deepening connection between her doctor and her mother. Unsure what it meant, her child's psyche tried to defeat the doctor, paradoxically by becoming more ill. A Love Story followed the publication of L'Assommoir, and there are suggestions that Zola tamed it down following the critical reception of the depravity the public found in the latter. While that is true to a certain extent, Zola has directed his energy elsewhere, and in Jeanne, has created perhaps the most diabolical child in literature, one who would stop at nothing to punish those whom she felt had crossed her.

One afternoon when Hélène had rushed out of the flat, She had a vague feeling that her mother was somewhere where children were not allowed to go. She had not taken her, they were holding something from her. At these thoughts her heart tightened in inexpressible sadness and pain,
...
... she was suspicious and her face grew deathly pale with jealous rage. Suddenly the thought that her mother must love the people she had rushed to see more than her... caused her to clutch her chest with both hands. Now she knew. Her mother was betraying her.

Sitting at the window where her mother had spent so much time, Jeanne too surveyed the skyline. Jeanne at the window coughed violently. But she felt that by being cold she was getting her revenge, she wanted to be ill. Her hands held against her chest, she felt her discomfort increase. She was suffering and her body was delivering itself up to it.

This novel is divided into five parts. Each of the first four ends at this window, allowing Zola to show Paris in its infinite variety of moods and colours. In the end, A Love Story]is not only a story of mere mortals, it is Zola's declaration of love to his city. All else may fall away, but Paris will never fail to arouse the emotions. show less

"Hélène cast her eyes slowly round the drawing room. In this worthy company, amongst this bourgeoisie which seemed so respectable, were there then only guilty women?"

After the sensational success of his grimy 1877 novel L'Assommoir, Zola threw his audience for a loop with the eighth in his Rougon-Macquart cycle. From the broken streets of Paris, we find ourselves in Passy, at the time an independent commune overlooking the capital, in the life of Hélène Grandjean, distant cousin to L'Assommoir's tortured Gervaise. And what a difference a gene makes. Hélène is a quietly independent widow, living with her daughter Jeanne in a house overlooking the city of Paris. Hers is a quiet life, interrupted only by her maid's modest love affair show more and a regular Tuesday dinner with her priest and his brother. (Hélène's life is so insular, we don't even leave her street until halfway through the novel!)

What unravels Hélène's existence is falling in love with the rather handsome, and rather married, doctor next door. It's a flirtation that may never be consummated, and exists almost entirely in knowing looks and outwardly polite conversations. Building over many months, the platonic affair between Hélène and Henri comes to an emotional climax when two fuses are lit: one, the temptations of Henri's socialite wife, and the other, the poor health of young Jeanne.

A Love Story (perhaps more accurately A Page of Love) was one of Zola's favourite titles, both for its irony (can darting looks across a picnic be considered "love"?) and for its many applications in the story. There is young love, unrequited love, maternal love, and so on. And it feels in many ways out of sync with the previous books in its series. They have for the most part been fierce, angry studies of class and society. The closest analogue has been The Sin of Abbe Mouret which was a similarly focused psychological study, although that one lent itself to fantasy, whereas A Love Story is constantly naturalistic - except in its key setpieces, as below. Although this book has been translated and adapted, it feels like one of the least known in the series, and I think that's understandable. Very little happens here. The author is almost testing himself, to see if he can create a study centering entirely around one person's mind, and the complexities of a relationship that barely even warrants a kiss until the novel's climax. And, in this sense, it feels out of step in a series that is ostensibly telling "the history of the French Second Empire" - until we recall that Zola also (perhaps primarily) wanted to tell the story of a single family, and the way that their genes and emotions (largely pseudoscience now) were passed on, and transmuted between generations.

While I wouldn't include A Love Story on my top recommendations to a new Zola reader, I think it is a delicately-woven, beautifully told story. It's probably an example of a book that would have worked better originally when it was being serialised, then as a novel to be read in one sitting, but there's a lot to love here. As always, Zola imbues every character with nuance and sharp descriptive insight. He intimately tracks Hélène's psychological journey in ways that make her feel a completely lived personage, even if she is neither as ambitious as Eugène Rougon, driven as Florent Quenu, self-deceiving as Gervaise Macquart, or zealous as Marthe Rougon.

Most famously, of course, are Zola's luminous descriptions of Paris. Each of the novel's five parts closes with a languid description of the city as seen from the Grandjeans' windows, recounting perhaps the Impressionist paintings that Zola's contemporaries, including his boyhood friend and fellow artistic revolutionary Cezanne, were creating during his lifetime. The descriptions are glorious for their historical detail, for the showcasing of Zola's ability to create entire worlds out of one setting, and vary his descriptive powers many times over, like the individual shades and tinges created from a painter's palette. They're also the only moments where the novel flirts with non-naturalism, as it becomes clear that the different views of Paris (during a storm, darkened at night, glistening with the blood-red gold of sunset) draw us into the emotional turmoil of our central character and, later, her daughter.

A sad little lesson. I wonder if we will meet Hélène again on our journey, and what others will make of her. For now, she can return to the familial tapestry the author has created, to be found again at - we hope - some more fortuitous moment in life. show less

I really liked this installment in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series. There is a tight focus on the main character, Helene. She is in the suburbs of Paris, living an isolated life with her young daughter, Jeanne, and her servant, Rosalie. Her husband brought her there from Marseille and promptly died. Jeanne is often sick, at first it seems to manipulate her mother into staying with her always and loving her alone. Helene becomes friends with the neighbor doctor and his wife and she and Jeanne spend many hours in their garden. Of course the doctor falls in love with beautiful Helene.

Things go pretty much as you would expect of a Zola novel, though Helene is a stronger character than many of Zola's and she ends up making some rational show more choices that likely lead to a comfortable and relatively happy life, though not passionate. This was nice to see.

I loved the descriptive passages in the book. There are some beautiful passages about Paris architecture from outsiders looking in. And there's a fantastic passage that describe Helene on a swing.

I really enjoyed this one. show less

In the eighth novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, the central character is Hélène Grandjean, née Mouret. Recently widowed, shortly after having moved to Paris from Marseilles with her now deceased husband and their child, she now lives in a cozy apartment with her daughter Jeanne and a servant. Jeanne has inherited the nervous illnesses of her great-grandmother, and when the novel begins, has just been suffering from seizures. The bulk of the novel describes Hélène's struggle between her need to be a good mother to Jeanne, a very difficult and temperamental child who happens to be maniacally jealous of anyone whom she suspects might take away an ounce of her mother's affections from her, and her growing passion for Dr. Deberle, who show more is her landlord and neighbour and comes to Jeanne's rescue in the first pages of the book. This was my least favourite book in the series so far and honestly a serious disappointment after L'Assomoir, which in all fairness must have been very hard for Zola to follow up indeed. Jeanne is a detestable child, and spends the better part of the novel being sickly and manipulative, and Hélène's affections for her daughter and the good doctor are equally filled with pathos. Most of the novel takes place in the close confines of the one bedroom apartment, making for an unpleasant claustrophobic feeling which is only relieved by Zola's descriptions of the Paris scenery at each closing chapter in the five-part novel. That being said, "bad" Zola is still Zola, albeit not particularly recommended unless have set for yourself the task of reading the whole series, as I have. show less

"Bir Aşk Sayfası", evli bir doktorla, kiracısı olan dul bir kadının yasak aşkını konu edinir.
Her şey dul kadının kızının rahatsızlanmasıyla başlar. Doktor- hasta ilişkisinin içine gönül bağı da girince işlin rengi birden değişiverir. Başlangıçta güzel olarak başlayan tutkulu aşk, zamanla muhataplarına acı sürprizler de hazırlayacaklardır.
"Bir Aşk Sayfası", annelikle kadınlık içgüdüsünün acımasız bir savaşı olarak zihinlerde kalacaktır.
Eserde, bazı güdülerin evrensel olduğu, bilinç altına itilemeyeceği, eninde sonunda kendini göstereceği çok net olarak görülmekte. Yine Paris sosyetesinin dünyası, dönen oyunlar, entrikalar ve yalanlar dolanlar...
Aşkın soluksuzca show more yaşandığı, tutkuların yıkımlara davetiye çıkardığı "Bir Aşk Sayfası"nı kolay kolay unutamayacaksınız... show less