Madeleine Férat

Madeleine Férat is an 1868 novel by the French writer Émile Zola. It was Zola's fourth novel, written immediately after Thérèse Raquin, which had been Zola's first commercial and artistic success. It was published in 1868, first under the title La Honte (The Shame/Disgrace) in serial form (in L'Evénement Illustrée, from September 2 to October 20, 1868), then in volume under the title Madeleine Férat by Albert Lacroix, with a dedication to the painter Manet. It is the fictionalised version of a play which had not been accepted.

Madeleine Ferat deals with a beautiful woman in love with her husband William, but hopelessly attracted to her former lover, Jacques. This obsession leads to the destruction of her life, her marriage, and eventually drives her to suicide, while her husband, for his part, goes insane.

Plot Summary
Madeleine Férat's father, after making his fortune, ruins himself in risky speculations. He decides to go to America to rebuild his fortune, but his boat is shipwreck. He left what he had been able to save of his fortune to his daughter before embarking. The guardian to whom he entrusted her plans to marry her. When she refuses, he tries to rape her. Madeleine Férat flees. She will live on the income left to her by her father. Shortly after, she meets Jacques, a surgeon, and they become lovers. But he has to go on a mission to Cochinchina and he abandons him.

She then meets Guillaume de Viargues. He is the son of a Norman nobleman whose life was mainly devoted to the study of chemistry, in the solitude of his castle. Guillaume's mother is the wife of a local notary who fell in love with the Count of Viargues before growing tired of him and returning to her husband. Guillaume grew up in the solitude of the family castle, La Noiraude, and the only company of an old servant, almost a hundred years old, obsessed with religion. He is sent to boarding school and is persecuted by the other children, who call him the bastard, until the day a student arrives in the school who will take him under his protection, who is none other than Jacques, the first lover of Madeleine.

In the beginning of their relationship, Guillaume guesses that Madeleine had a romantic past, but he prefers to know nothing about it. It is Madeleine who discovers that Guillaume's friend, the one whom Guillaume considers his brother, is her former lover. Shortly after this discovery, she learned of Jacques' death in a shipwreck. Guillaume's father dies and leaves his son heir to his fortune. Guillaume learns from the servant of the castle that his father in fact committed suicide with the only products remaining from his work as a chemist: poisons. The servant sees it as punishment for the count's past faults.

Guillaume and Madeleine settle in the castle. Madeleine chooses not to say anything to her husband about Jacques. They have a daughter. But Guillaume learns one day that Jacques did not die in the sinking of his boat. He returns with him to the castle. Madeleine manages to hide from Jacques, then tells her husband that she and Jacques knew each other. Horrified, Guillaume chooses to flee with his wife, under the pretext of an obligation. They go to an inn and try to forget the past, but fate makes them choose a place where Madeleine and Jacques loved each other, which Madeleine discovers in the room. What's more, Jacques himself is at the same inn that night, and manages to speak to Madeleine. He imagines that Madeleine has brought one of her new lovers into the room where she and he loved each other. She does not tell him that she is Guillaume's wife. They try to return to the castle in the hope of finding an understanding around their daughter. But Guillaume discovers a resemblance between his daughter and Jacques which leads him to reject her. The servant continues to persecute them with her sermons. Madeleine and Guillaume then try to flee to Paris, and distract themselves in social life. But they learn that Jacques is trying to see them again and they decide to return to the castle. Shortly before their return, they learn that their daughter has suffered a relapse of smallpox. Madeleine uses the excuse of an oversight to postpone her return. She actually wants to see Jacques again to tell him that she is married to Guillaume and that he must stop trying to see him again.

She naturally falls back into Jacques' arms. When she returns to La Noiraude, it is to learn of the death of her daughter. She then goes to the former laboratory of the Count of Viargues, where the poisons with which he committed suicide remained. Her husband tries to prevent her from committing suicide, but when she reveals to him that she is leaving Jacques' arms, he ends up letting her do it. In a fit of madness, as if delivered, he dances on her corpse, under the eyes of the old servant who sees there the fulfillment of her prophecies: “God has not forgiven!"

Analysis
Zola sets out his vision of heredity which will be developed later in Les Rougon-Macquart.

He introduces as a tragic spring the theory, already contested in his time, of impregnation, put forward by Michelet in Love and Woman and by Doctor Prosper Lucas in the Treatise on Natural Heredity (1847-1850): a woman would keep the indelible imprint of the man who took her virginity: Jacques, “while he matured her virginity, while he made it his for life, he released from the virgin a woman, marked this woman with his footprint."

Madeleine was able to imprint on her first lover in such a way that her daughter resembled him more than her real father. This impregnation inevitably brings her back to her first lover, whatever she does. This fatalism echoes in a disturbing way that which the servant, the old Protestant Cévennes peasant woman, supports with her religious obsessions.

Adaptations
The theme of the novel was first treated in the form of a play in three acts, written in 1865 and bearing the same name. Unable to find a theater director willing to have it performed, he wrote a novel about it. Later, in 1889, he entrusted the 1865 play, without changing anything, to André Antoine who had it performed by his Théâtre-Libre troupe. The play was first published by Maurice Le Blond, writer and son-in-law of Zola, in 1927 in the Complete Works ( Théâtre I, Paris, François Bernouard).

In 1920 it was turned into an Italian silent film, Maddalena Ferat, directed by Roberto Roberti and Febo Mari and starring Francesca Bertini.