Germinal, Emile Zola’s immense success in romance, was also a play that made an oven and was forgotten. The manuscript is found at auction and the opportunity is unique to acquire an unpublished one.
Sotheby’s Paris opens online sales on Tuesday and until December 8 for these 454 leaves signed by the hand of the famous naturalist novelist, between 1885 and 1887.
Only a few specialists have been able to read them and see how Zola transcribed for the stage one of the peaks of his work, on the revolt of coal miners in northern France in the 1860s.
This adaptation project was dear to the author of the saga of Rougon Macquart. He took care of it alone, instead of delegating the task, as for L’Assommoir Where Nana», To playwright William Busnach.
The public of Parisian theaters, at that time, “is popular and it is the one he wants to touch”, explains to AFP Diana Cooper-Richet, researcher at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin, near Paris , who studied the failure of this piece.
For her, a publication of the text could “bring something new to the knowledge of Zola’s work”. It would give a more precise idea “of his troubles with censorship, of the concessions he was prepared to make to see the show”.
A confidential critical edition was released in 1989, thanks to Canadian scholar James Bernard Sanders in Quebec. Of 200 pages, it contains only “a few extracts” and omits “the multiple variants revealed by the manuscript”, underlines Sophie Dufresne, of Sotheby’s.
Interest in Germinal was awakened by the broadcast by France 2 of a serial adaptation. With its six 52-minute episodes, this television production, a great audience success, lasts about as long as the play, a five-hour marathon.
Too risky
According to Sotheby’s, it is “the last major manuscript of Émile Zola still in private hands”. Most of the writer’s manuscripts, including that of the novel, which can be consulted online, in fact belong to the National Library of France (BnF) and the rest to other institutions.
Asked by AFP on its intentions, the BnF refused to comment before the sale.
This Germinal is estimated between 100,000 and 150,000 euros. The name of the seller is not revealed: Sotheby’s speaks of a “European” collector who “wishes to remain anonymous” and does not say “more about the itinerary of the manuscript”.
“Germinal” is a cursed play, mutilated to satisfy censors who found it subversive, and exhausted by criticism.
When Zola, crowned with the success of the novel, submits it in 1885 to the “Examination Commission” which deals with censorship, a bad surprise: unfavorable opinion. Describing the anger of workers against their employers, violently repressed, in a book of 600 pages, still passes; to represent them on stage, no, too risky. The government follows and bans the work in this form.
The novelist will insist, mitigate the violence of the subject, and obtain the green light for a watered-down version, on display in 1888. It displeases the press.
Zola defends it vigorously, for example by obtaining from the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris a free performance which attracts 20,000 curious people, for only 3,500 seats. Lost sentence: he will never be recognized as a playwright.