This page intentionally left blank The Family in Crisis in Late Nineteenth-Century French Fiction focusses on a key moment in the construction of the modern view of the family in France. Nicholas White’s analysis of novels by Zola, Maupassant, Huysmans, Hennique, Bourget and Armand Charpentier is fashioned by perspectives on a wide cultural field, including legal,popular and academic discourses on the family and its discontents.His account encourages a close rereading of canon- ical as well as hitherto overlooked texts from fin-de-siècle France. What emerges between the death of Flaubert in and the pub- lication of Bourget’s Un divorcein is a series of Naturalist and post-Naturalist representations of transgressive behaviour in which tales of adultery, illegitimacy, consanguinity, incest and divorce serve to exemplify and to offer a range of nuances on the Third Republic’s crisis in what might now be termed ‘family values’. Nicholas White is Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway,University of London.He is editor (with Naomi Segal) of ScarletLetters:Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the s, and he has also edited Zola’s L’Assommoirand Huysmans’s Against Nature.      THE FAMILY IN CRISIS IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH FICTION     General editor:  (Royal Holloway,London) Editorial board:.   (Columbia University),  (All Souls College,Oxford),  (St John’s College,Oxford),   (University of Michigan),  (ColumbiaUniversity),  (University of Edinburgh),  (Harvard University),  (Duke University),  (Harvard University) Recent titles in this series include   Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art:Sites of Imaginary Space  . ,  .  and  .  Sade and the Narrative of Transgression   Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature   Genealogies of the Text:Literature,Psychoanalysis,and Politics in ModernFrance  .  Fairy Tales,Sexuality and Gender in France –:Nostalgic Utopias   Surrealist Collage in Text and Image:Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse A complete list of books in the series is given at the end of the volume. THE FAMILY IN CRISIS IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH FICTION NICHOLAS WHITE           The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org ©Nicholas White 2004 First published in printed format 1999 ISBN 0-511-03829-1 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-56274-0 hardback In memory of Jack Morris teacher,scholar, raconteur