Money is the fourth book in the Rougon Maquart cycle and we return to Paris to follow Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard.

He is a failed property speculator and in this book once more is scheming and manipulating, this time to create a bank. He wants power, money and to grind his rival Gundermann into the ground. As share prices rocket upwards, there can only be one outcome and that is a crash with disastrous consequences for most of the characters in the book. Madame Caroline, his mistress, is the moral compass of the novel and through her eyes we see how money corrupts and how love can be sordid but gives us strength.

This has been the least enjoyable of the books so far for me. Saccard is not a nice man, he is what the phrase ‘a jumped up little Napoleon’ is for; a small man he constantly strives to be bigger, better and above everyone else. His greed and all consuming desire for money and to win overrules everything else. Plus he is anti- Semitic and the language around this is awful, not disguised in any way, it does reflect opinions at the time. Reading the introduction, this is what Zola wanted to achieve with the awfulness of it showing his abject stupidity. 

I do also feel that there wasn’t a huge depth to the characters, they seem to flit in and out of the narrative, like actors on a play with no real back story or grounding and again my understanding is that for Zola his overarching plan was an emphasis on science and Naturalism, tracing the influence of heredity on one family and that comes at a cost to plot and characterisation. It makes for a thinner book for me, I was less engaged and felt less attachment to the characters than I have previously.

‘She thought of the terrible filth with which love too has been soiled. Why then blame money for the dirt and crimes it causes? Is love any less sullied, love, the creator of life?’