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  Translation, Bibliography, Notes © Brian Nelson 1995

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  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1995

  Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1998 Reissued 2008

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  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Zola, Émile, 1840–1902.

  [Au bonheur des dames. English]

  The ladies’ paradise/Émile Zola; translated with an introduction and notes by Brian Nelson.

  p. cm.—(Oxford world’s classics)

  Eleventh book in the author’s Rougon-Macquart cycle.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  I. Nelson, Brian, 1946- . II. Title. III. Series.

  PQ2497.A8E5 1995 843′.8—dc20 94–43695

  ISBN 978-0-19-953690-0

  6

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives Plc

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  ÉMILE ZOLA

  The Ladies’ Paradise

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  BRIAN NELSON

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  THE LADIES’ PARADISE

  ÉMILE ZOLA was born in Paris in 1840, the son of a Venetian engineer and his French wife. He grew up in Aix-en-Provence where he made friends with Paul Cézanne. After an undistinguished school career and a brief period of dire poverty in Paris, Zola joined the newly founded publishing firm of Hachette which he left in 1866 to live by his pen. He had already published a novel and his first collection of short stories. Other novels and stories followed until in 1871 Zola published the first volume of his Rougon-Macquart series with the sub-title Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, in which he sets out to illustrate the influence of heredity and environment on a wide range of characters and milieux. However, it was not until 1877 that his novel L’Assommoir, a study of alcoholism in the working classes, brought him wealth and fame. The last of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared in 1893 and his subsequent writing was far less successful, although he achieved fame of a different sort in his vigorous and influential intervention in the Dreyfus case. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless but his extremely happy liaison in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, gave him a son and a daughter. He died in 1902.

  BRIAN NELSON is Professor of French and Head of the Department of Romance Languages at Monash University, Melbourne. His publications include Zola and the Bourgeoisie and, as editor, Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives and Forms of Commitment: Intellectuals in Contemporary France, as well as a translation of Zola’s Pot Luck (Pot Bouille) for Oxford World’s Classics. He is engaged at present on a book on Huysmans and the Decadent Imagination.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Emile Zola

  Map

  THE LADIES’ PARADISE

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  ÉMILE ZOLA was born in Paris on 2 April 1840 of a French mother and an Italian father. At the time of Émile’s birth his father, a civil engineer, was trying to secure government approval for the construction of a canal to bring a water supply to Aix-en-Provence. His attempts were successful, and as a result Émile spent his childhood at Aix (the ‘Plassans’ of his novels), where one of his close school-friends was Paul Cézanne, the painter. When he was 6 his father died suddenly, leaving Madame Zola in a precarious financial situation. In 1858 she moved with her son to Paris, hoping to gain the support of her husband’s friends; but this came to nothing and, for a few months in 1860, Zola lived in desperate poverty. At the beginning of 1862 he took a job with the publisher Hachette, rising quickly to the position of advertising manager. After four years with the firm he decided to become a full-time writer. He had already published his first novel, the semi-autobiographical La Confession de Claude, in 1865. This book gave him a certain notoriety, which was greatly increased by his vigorous defence of Édouard Manet’s paintings in a newspaper review of the Salon of 1866. Zola became the main champion of the Impressionist movement. His literary reputation was further enhanced with the publication in 1867 of Thérèse Raquin, a tale of adultery and murder which displayed the powerful atmospheric effects that characterize his later work.

  During 1868 Zola conceived the idea of writing a series of novels about a single family, the Rougon-Macquart, whose fortunes would be followed through several generations. The subtitle of the series, ‘A Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’, suggests Zola’s two interconnected aims: to embody in fiction certain ‘scientific’ notions about the ways in which human behaviour is determined by heredity and environment; and to use the symbolic possibilities of a family whose heredity is warped to represent critically certain aspects of a diseased society—the decadent and corrupt, yet dynamic and vital, France of the Second Empire (1852–70). The Rougon-Macquart family is descended from the three children, one legitimate and two illegitimate, of an insane woman, Tante Dide. There are thus three main branches of the family. The first of these, the Rougons, prospers, its members spreading upwards in society to occupy commanding positions in the worlds of government and finance. His Excellency Eugène Rougon describes the corrupt political system of Napoleon III, while The Kill and M
oney evoke the frenetic contemporary speculation in real estate and stocks. The Macquarts are the working-class members of the family, unbalanced and descended from the alcoholic Antoine Macquart. Members of this branch figure prominently in all of Zola’s most powerful novels: The Belly of Paris, which uses the central food markets, Les Halles, as a gigantic figuration of the appetites and greed of the bourgeoisie; L’Assommoir, a poignant evocation of the lives of the working class in a Paris slum area; Nana, the novel of a celebrated prostitute whose sexual power ferments destruction among the Imperial Court; Germinal, perhaps Zola’s most famous novel, which focuses on a devastating miners’ strike on the coalfields of north-eastern France; The Masterpiece, the story of a half-mad painter of genius; Earth, in which Zola brings an epic sweep to his portrayal of peasant life; The Beast in Man, which opposes the technical progress represented by the railways to the physiological fatalities embodied in the homicidal mania of a train driver, Jacques Lantier; and The Downfall, which describes the Franco-Prussian War and is the first important war novel in French literature. The second illegitimate branch of the family is the Mourets, some of whom are successful bourgeois adventurers. Octave Mouret is an ambitious philanderer in Pot-Bouille, a savagely comic picture of the hypocrisies and adulteries behind the façade of a bourgeois apartment building. Mouret’s determined efforts to build a career set him apart from the failures and frustrations of the bourgeois world Zola portrays with such vehemence. In The Ladies’ Paradise, the effective sequel to Pot-Bouille, he is shown making his fortune from women as he creates one of the first big Parisian department stores.

  The Ladies’ Paradise is an important text, for, whereas Pot-Bouille had concentrated on the private lives of the bourgeoisie, its sequel marks Zola’s desire to broaden his social perspective and embrace the whole of socio-economic reality through his representation of the world of the department store. The model for Mouret’s store is the Bon Marché, Paris’s first department store and the largest single department store in the world before 1914.1 Aristide Boucicaut took over the Bon Marché, a large drapery shop, in 1852 and quickly transformed it into a much larger shop. In 1852 it boasted four departments, twelve employees, and a turnover of 450,000 francs a year. Its turnover rose to 5 million in 1860, 7 million in 1863, 21 million in 1869, 77 million in 1877, more than 80 million in 1882, 123 million in 1888, and over 200 million in 1906. The physical expansion of the store was equally impressive. When Boucicaut stopped building in 1887, it occupied a whole city block. The establishment of the Bon Marché as a grand magasin was followed by that of the Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville in 1854, Les Grands Magasins du Louvre (usually just called Le Louvre) in 1855, Au Coin de la Rue in 1864, Au Printemps in 1865, La Belle Jardinière in 1866–7, La Samaritaine in 1869, and Les Galeries Lafayette in 1895. There were parallel developments of course in the United States and England—Macy’s in New York, Marshall Field in Chicago, Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Selfridge’s in London. In his preparation for the novel Zola visited the Bon Marché and Le Louvre, took notes, and consulted with various authorities, including former employees of department stores and the architect Frantz Jourdain, a pioneer designer of this sort of establishment. ‘What I want to do in The Ladies’ Paradise’, Zola wrote in his notes, ‘is write the poem of modern activity. Hence, a complete shift of philosophy: no more pessimism, first of all. Don’t conclude with the stupidity and sadness of life. Instead, conclude with its continual labour, the power and gaiety that comes from its productivity. In a word, go along with the century, express the century, which is a century of action and conquest, of effort in every direction.’2 Despite the destruction of many of the traditional little family shops, The Ladies’ Paradise is a hymn to modern business, a celebration of the entrepreneurial spirit.

  In spite of his scientific attitude Zola’s writing is highly romantic: the giant symbols he uses to represent modern society—the city, the market, the machine, the prostitute, the theatre, the stock exchange, the department store—are the visions of a romantic imagination. Everywhere he sees allegories and symbols. Thé department store in The Ladies’ Paradise is a symbol of capitalism, the Second Empire, the experience of the city, and the bourgeois family; it is emblematic of commodity culture and new systems of fashion; and it is the site of nineteenth-century sexual attitudes and class relations. The physical space of the store is also social and cultural space. Zola’s representation of the illusions that define consumer culture is as subversive as that offered by the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin in his ‘Arcades Project’, an uncompleted but seminal study of the ‘phantasmagoria’ of urban experience and modern consumerism.3 This project is as striking and poetic in its images as it is sophisticated and challenging in its analyses. Benjamin’s dominant image is the shopping arcade itself, the passages built in Paris during the Restoration (1814–30) and the reign of Louis-Philippe (1830–48). The arcades, with their iron and glass roofs, were places for the display and sale of commodities, which they illuminated and enshrined in visions of abundance and luxury which gave the crowds that strolled by no clue as to the conditions of their production. These elegant centres of bourgeois life were like cities, little worlds, in miniature. They housed cafés, brothels, luxury stores, apartments, displays of food, fashion, and furniture, art galleries, bookstores, dioramas, theatres, baths, news-stands, gambling houses, and private clubs. For Benjamin they represented an extraordinary historical stage, illuminated by gaslight (first used in the arcades), through which paraded the figures of the crowd: financiers, gamblers, bohemians, flâneurs, political conspirators, dandies, prostitutes, criminals, rag-pickers. They were an image of the bourgeois world, a montage of its realities and fantasies, a stage set for an allegorical representation of the origins of modern mass culture.

  The development during the Second Empire of the department stores (which made use of the same iron and glass construction as the arcades) marked a further development. If commodities had first promised to fulfil human desires, now they created them: dreams themselves became commodities. In the 1850s the Boucicauts developed a new retailing policy. They realized that, whereas they could make a living from supplying a conscious need on the part of their customers, they could make an infinitely better living by supplying a desire the customer did not know she had until she entered the shop. In this way, the Boucicauts pioneered the idea of the department store as a building purposely designed for fashionable public assembly and which, by the use of display techniques, eye-catching design, and other ploys, replaced the commercial principle of supply with that of consumer seduction.

  The mechanisms of seduction, all of which are described in The Ladies’ Paradise, were multiple. They included advertising (a novel practice in the nineteenth century); the policy of ‘free entry’ (the freedom to enter the shop and browse without being obliged to buy, by which shopping came to be seen for the first time as a leisure activity); the establishment of fixed prices, which fostered speed and impersonality of purchase; and the system of ‘returns’—the easy exchangeability of purchases that failed to satisfy, for other objects of fantasy and desire. In addition, there was the manipulation of space—the creation of deliberate disorder, disconnection, in the layout of the different departments within the store. This obliged the shoppers to travel the length and breadth of the shop to find the items they had come to purchase; as they walked through the shop, they were exposed to the display of other items they had not initially thought to acquire. Above all, there was the seduction of pure spectacle, the seduction of the eye through an almost orgiastic display of visual pleasures enticingly encased in their wrappings and sealed by the surrounding womb of warmth and light. The introduction of sheet glass and electric lighting for the ground-floor window displays not only enticed potential customers (mainly women) into the store; it made window-shopping along the boulevards a standard form of Parisian flânerie. To adapt a favourite Benjamin metaphor, based on his awareness that the origin of the arcades
was the Eastern bazaar, department stores offered a kind of Arabian Nights world of limitless gratification in time and space. The term ‘window-shopping’ in French is, of course, suggestively sensual: ‘lèche-vitrines’—literally, licking windows. The department store sold not just commodities, but the very process of consumption, transforming the mundane activity of shopping into a sensuous and enjoyable experience. In Zola’s novel, Octave Mouret is presented as the Great Seducer. The best window-dresser in Paris, it is he who arouses and orchestrates consumer desire: ‘Mouret’s sole passion was the conquest of Woman. He wanted her to be queen in his shop; he had built this temple for her in order to hold her at his mercy. His tactics were to intoxicate her with amorous attentions, to trade on her desires’ (p. 234).

  Mouret’s store is a model of the new capitalism, of an economic system based on the principle of circulation, movement, turnover, the constant and increasingly rapid renewal of capital in the form of commodities. Mouret’s success is due not only to his refined understanding of the capitalist system (the principles of which he clearly expounds himself), but also to his exploitation of another new system, namely, the integrated transportation network which facilitated travel and the rapid circulation of goods both within the city and between Paris and the rest of the world. The two basic elements of the new transportation system were the railway and the new urban network of wide, straight boulevards. Each plays a role in determining both the conception and the operation of Mouret’s department store.

  The railway, with its speed and its far-flung network of track, promoted the economic circulation of goods, feeding Mouret’s store with an endless supply of fabric from the French provinces and elsewhere. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his remarkable study of railway travel in the nineteenth century, has shown how the emergence of new modes of transport, together with the development of commodity culture and the concomitant replacement of use value by exchange value, produced new modes of perception.4 The relationship between subject and object is no longer stable but evanescent and detached. In a railway journey the speed of the train blurs all foreground objects, often to such an extent that the foreground seems to disappear entirely. Near space is lost and the viewing subject on the train has the sensation of being totally detached from the distant space which contains the objects he can see. And even these distant objects are perceived only evanescently and in a dispersed manner, since the train traveller is unable either to fix the objects as he speeds by or to organize them perceptually.