The Kill

This is a pre-ISBN book. The translation, by A. Teixeira de Mattos was originally published in 1895 by the Lutetian Society.

This novel plunges deep into what Angus Wilson has called "the feverish, complicated world of the adventure-speculators who formed the cafe-society of the Second Empire". It is the rapacious world of the gamblers who flocked to Paris for their share of the spoils to be carved out of Baron Haussman's rebuilding of Paris.

This was the motive that drew Aristide Saccard to Paris; and here the theme of financial gain becomes intertwined with that of physical desire. As his second wife, Saccard married Renée, a wealthy and attractive woman. His son by his first marriage, Maxime, comes home from school and his stepmother, already bored with her money-obsessed husband, introduces him to the shallow, frivolous society life which is her sole occupation.

Little by little, as Maxime grows up, seduces the servant girl, takes mistresses, has affairs with his stepmother's friends, Renée herself falls in love with her stepson - and so comes about the half-incestuous theme of the book which Zola called "a study in money and the flesh".

It is also the powerful portrait of a degenerate world, enmeshed in the lust for gain and pleasure.