Renée Saccard

The main female character of La Curée and one of Zola's great tragic characters in my view. Is she a victim or was she just wicked? She was the daughter of M. Béraud du Châtel, a retired magistrate. Her mother died when she was eight and she was sent to boarding school. At the end of her time there she was raped on a friends estate by an older man and became pregnant. To save a scandal she was married off to Aristide Saccard and enjoyed huge success in the society circle of the second empire where she was considered exceedingly beautiful. However, she was bored and was constantly looking for new distractions, which led to her having an incestuous affair with Maxime. Unlike Maxime, she does have some moral regrets about this and some of the mad things she gets involved in leave you questioning whether it is thrill-seeking or hiding from the guilt she feels. She was never close to her husband and when she dies from meningitis it is her father who pays her debts which, in the last sentence of the novel, we are informed included a bill from Worms the tailor for FF257,000.