My taste, if you like, is depraved
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Mon goût, si l'on veut, est dépravé; j'aime les ragoûts littéraires fortemont épicés, les œuvres de décadence où une sorte de sensibilité maladive remplace la santé plantureuse des époques classiques is a dictum by French novelist Zola, first published in a review of Germinie Lacerteux in the January 23 1865 issue of the journal Le Salut public. The text was later republished in Mes Haines.
- "My taste, if you will, is depraved, I like strongly spiced literary stews, works of decadence where a sort of sickly sensibility substitutes for the robust health of the classical era." -tr. JWG
Another translation can be found in the novel The Treloars:
- "I must declare from the start that all my being, my senses, my intelligence lead me to admire the feverish and exaggerated work which I am going to analyze. I find in it the defects and qualities which move me intensely, namely: an indomitable energy; a sovereign contempt for fools and cowards; a large and superb audacity; extreme vigor of color and thought; artistic solicitude, and conscientious effort, rare in these days of hasty and bad workmanship. My taste, if you like, is depraved. I love strongly spiced literary stews the works of decadence in which a sort of sickly sensibility replaces the vigorous health of classic epochs. I am of my age. I like to consider a work of art as an isolated fact; I study it as I would a curious case which has just manifested itself in human intelligence. A work of art is simply a free and high manifestation of a personality, and I have no other task than to affirm that personality. What does the crowd matter? I have here in my hands an individual. I study him for himself, out of scientific curiosity. The perfection I aim at is to give to my readers the rigorously exact anatomy of the subject given to me. It was my task to penetrate an organism, to reconstruct an artistic temperament, to analyze a heart and an intelligence, according to my nature : the readers have a right to admire or blame, according to theirs.
- " I suppose that the real Zola is the muckraker the aspiring, poetic youthful Zola is an unconscious imitator of classic traditions. He had probably been reading George Sand's preface to La Mare au Diable, and reproduced her idea of the mission of art, which is identical with what he has been saying."
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