The Sin of ABBE Mouret

Serge Mouret, a Roman Catholic priest unable to suppress his carnal desires first develops a spiritual devotion for Virgin Mary, which leaves him unsatisfied. Instead, it is Albine, a niece of an old man, who occupies a once abandoned and then burned down palace, surrounded by survived flourishing gardens and cascades, with whom Serge develops a full-fledged love relationship. Nevertheless, torn between carnal desires and religious prejudices, Serge abandons Albine and the profuse Paradou garden and returns to the church. He ends up being guilty in the death of his beloved. The question is: what is Serge Mouret's fault? Is it in him betraying the postulates of religion or in him abandoning the earthly joys? We see two outlooks on life. The first outlook is renouncing everything earthly in the name the Beyond. The second outlook is the joyous perception of life and admiring the world and the nature in all its diversity. Mouret is torn between the two outlooks and his internal struggle ends with a fault, but not against the religious dogma, rather, against sensuous joys. One must say that there are things in life other than the utopian Paradou. The Artaud village, which it neighbors is populated with savage people. Their brutish instincts contradict the beauty of life. So, which is right? Is it the religion and the Beyond or is it the diverse life, in which brutish and lyrical things coexist? The symbolic end of the novel (Albine's death and Serge Mouret's retarded sister Desiree proclaiming with joy the birth of a calf) convincingly proves the superiority of the material perception of the everyday life over religious superstitions.

This book, number five in the Rougon-Macquart saga and the sequel to "The Conquest Of Plassans", is really quite unique in French literature. In a way, you could say it's a forerunner of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" with the sexes reversed. A young and very devoted priest is nursed back to health after illness and has his sensual passions aroused in a big way by a teenage girl living virtually alone in a huge, century-old abandoned walled garden. Add to this a fire-and-brimstone friar, an intellectually-challenged younger sister, a kindly doctor of an uncle and the earthy animal spirits of southern French country life as a background to it all and you have something special, even if the final outcome of the love affair is unbelievable. Full of poetry, passion, symbolism and Zola's usual intoxicating powers of description, but not the book you'll find serialized in your local church magazine. Well worth reading as it shows that Zola's craft as a writer has fully matured but he has yet to find the subject to hit the big time sales-wise.