Word: zachanassian
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Dates: during 1958-1958
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Highhanded, aging, fabulously rich Claire Zachanassian returns to Gullen, the impoverished European town of her birth, to pour money into its lap-on one condition. Town and townspeople can divide a billion marks if they will kill Anton Schill, the man who in Claire's youth denied that her child was his and made her an outcast and a prostitute. When the town rejects such an offer at the expense of a much esteemed citizen, Claire does not argue; she can afford, she announces, to wait...
Something comparably cynical in tone, and in spots even similar in treatment, went into Mark Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. But Düurrenmatt's tale of the woman who corrupted Gullen is more eerily sinister. In Madame Zachanassian, with her entourage-pet panther, youthful eighth husband, blinded perjurers. American gangsters-are the all-too-obvious symbols of a ruthless, degenerate world. Moreover, it was Claire herself who carefully reduced Gullen to poverty as a prelude to tempting it; and her revenge seems directed almost as much on the town that witnessed her shame...