Pot Luck Read online

  However, just as Octave’s initial impressions of the grandeur of the building are shown to be false, so the reader, with Octave as guide, shares in his discoveries that the bourgeois tenants are not what they seem. Admittance into the closed circle of bourgeois society reveals behaviour every bit as promiscuous and immoral as that of the filthy, despised working class: indeed it is worse, because it is hypocritical. No institution held to be sacred by bourgeois society is left unscathed by the actions of the bourgeoisie themselves. Money, manners, and power are what really separate them from their servants, a privileged social encoding that forms the thin veneer of respectability that gives them a specious air of legitimacy and protects them from the gaze of the outside world. Marriage, the cornerstone of bourgeois society, is revealed to be a sham, concealing a multitude of adulteries and betrayals by both husband and wife. The true rationale of marriage is seen to be a contract for the attainment of wealth and social standing, and nothing whatever to do with love and affection. Traditional family virtues—order, comfort, security, generosity, happiness, harmony—are all negated: mothers are go-betweens in the endless quest for husbands, fathers are grotesquely ineffectual. The bourgeois family is corrupted by a conflict of interests in its function as mediator between the individual and society. Its duty to shelter its members from a competitive and brutalizing world is subordinated to its role as defender of the rigid, impersonal laws which the bourgeoisie had constructed to maintain its position in the social order. The family, as the vehicle of a corrupt system, is of little comfort to the individual, frequently rendering him neurotic, depraved, and dissolute. The disorder of family life is reflected in the dirt and untidiness of the kitchens, which provide the analogue, at the level of the individual family, of the central sewer image. Even religion, the provider of moral guidance, is only concerned with external appearances. Father Mauduit is presented more as a worldly than a spiritual man, happy to turn a blind eye to the double standards of his bourgeois parishioners.

  The working class and the body, the popular and the natural, are closely identified in Zola. Each functions as a metaphor of the other. The social repression of the servants becomes the reverse side of bourgeois sexual repression, sexual exploitation the counterpart of social exploitation. Adèle, exploited by all, takes on the figure of scapegoat. The agony of her confinement, described with Naturalist intimacy of physical detail, is an image of bourgeois indifference: ‘So it wasn’t enough to be starved to death, and the dirty drudge whom everyone bullied: her masters had to get her pregnant as well!’ (p. 361). Jean Borie describes thus the vicious circle of Zola’s social vision:

  If the workers are identified with the body, it is because they are condemned by the bourgeoisie to remain separate, to remain workers … We may thus formulate the following contradiction: the malady both emanates from the workers and is imposed upon them. Zola, in his ‘generosity’, gives them absolution, but his social vision remains at an impasse, and it will necessarily remain so as long as the body is constrained to be a kind of infernal prisoner.7

  Thus Zola systematically reduces the difference separating the bourgeois and the servants, exposing the hypocrisy of the dominant class. They are no more able to control their natural instincts than the working class, but are simply more dissimulating. The satirical implication is that morality, though not in itself bourgeois, is appropriated by Zola’s bourgeoisie, since they alone are in a position to abide by its standards, in the sense that they are not put to the test of gross material deprivation. Class difference is a matter of money and power, and has a tenuous hold on the raging forces of sexuality and corruption that lie beneath the surface. What we are left with is precisely a melting-pot, a stew, an undifferentiated world where no clear boundaries remain.

  This idea is symbolized by the image of the sewer, which encapsulates Zola’s attitude to social relations, and in particular to the blurred boundaries between the classes. As its degenerate moral and sexual behaviour is progressively exposed, the bourgeoisie is seen to become contaminated with the filth of the sewer, tainted with the stench of corruption. Berthe’s underwear is of doubtful cleanliness beneath her exterior finery; Trublot, searching for his possessions in the cook Julie’s room, creates a cloud of dust and dirt as he shakes out her clothes; the filthy and despised Adèle has sexual liaisons with both Trublot and Duveyrier. The texture of the novel is characterized by impressions of staleness and sourness. Images of ordure are linked to images of mud, evoking a sense of sexual revulsion. The implication is that sexual indulgence is circumscribed by nauseous connotations and destructive consequences. The atmosphere of anxiety and recriminations, of desultory sexual anticipation and dissatisfaction, culminates in the description of Octave and Berthe, in the servant-girl Rachel’s room, suddenly overhearing the foul-mouthed talk of the servants, at first describing their various filching triumphs and then reaching a crescendo of sexual gossip which includes cutting comments on both of them: ‘Their liaison, so carefully concealed, was now being trailed through all the garbage and slops of the kitchen’ (p. 263). The fetid inner courtyard is marked out from the beginning as the workers’ physical space; and the association of the bourgeois characters with the image of the sewer implies, as Janet Beizer has suggested, that the bourgeoisie has become infected with working-class failings, thus revealing a class bias implicit in Zola’s text on a symbolic level, even though he exposes bourgeois hypocrisy—as equivalent to popular degradation—on another, overt level.

  The gynecological secrets contained within whispered conversations between men in the parlor are loudly and repeatedly exposed by the maids in the kitchen … Rhetorically confluent with streams of dirty dishwater, rotting cooking wastes, and rank female secretions, the servantwomen’s gossip serves as a narrative filtering system that works to purify the very pollution it is designed to convey. The text’s recurrent return to the scene of the filthy inner courtyard, the contaminated kitchens, and the foul tongues and bodies of the maids as signifiers of bourgeois degradation effectively purges the bourgeoisie by deflecting the image of its impurity.8

  Gender relations in the novel are no less warped than class relations. The adulteries of the men in the novel, such as Campardon and Duveyrier, are blamed on the mysterious maladies and hysterical natures of their wives: Mme Campardon has a vague female affliction which prevents her from having sexual relations with her husband, while Mme Duveyrier is depicted as cold, even frigid, and disdainful of her husband, preferring music and the company of her drawing-room. Images of sterility, of a repressed and abnormal sexuality, abound: the taboos of Mme Juzeur, the imperious and calculating ‘chastity’ of the despotic Mme Josserand, the hysteria of Valérie Vabre, the vaginal constriction of Rose Campardon. Rooms and houses in Zola are often symbolic reflections of the bodies of their owners, bearing the firm imprint of their inhabitants. Thus, just as Nana’s gaping, engulfing mansion, like a vast vagina, becomes an organic image of its owner, so the closed doors and introverted apartments of Pot Luck mirror the inviolable bodies of the bourgeois ladies within them. Despite Zola’s intended blanket condemnation of the bourgeoisie in Pot Luck, the text of the masters’ sins is clearly written in the feminine.

  Though deeply marked by the mythology of the bourgeois society Zola endeavours to expose, Pot Luck is remarkable in its anti-bourgeois ferocity. The indignant and abusive reactions the novel provoked in its first bourgeois readers and critics was clear testimony to that. The novel moves immediately beyond the strict perspectives of sociological analysis to attain a heightened satiric fantasy. It is important to note, however, that despite Zola’s stress on bourgeois degeneracy, his portrayal of the bourgeoisie is not wholly black. Compassion is expressed for M. Josserand, who has a clear sense of personal and professional integrity; Mme Hédouin is a model of industry and virtue; and the philandering adventurer Octave Mouret, though utterly opportunistic, is in a sense the least degenerate character in the novel. Octave always retains control over his appetites,
using sex to advance his career, and he wins the respect of his employer Mme Hédouin with his energy and his extraordinary business flair. The Ladies’ Paradise, the novel Zola wrote immediately after Pot Luck, describes his spectacular success as a businessman—as the quintessential Conquering Bourgeois who creates the world’s first great department store, a vast dream-machine, in the heart of Paris.

  1 See Jean Bone, Zola et les mythes, ou de la nausée au salut (Paris: Seuil, 1971).

  2 See Michel Serres, Feux et signaux de brume: Zola (Paris: Grasset, 1975).

  3 Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

  4 Tanner, Adultery in the Novel, 13.

  5 Michelle Perrot (ed.), A History of Private Life, v: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 605.

  6 Janet Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth–Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 195.

  7 Jean Borie, Zola et les mythes, 26–7.

  8 Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies, 188.

  Translator’s Note

  This translation is based on the text of Pot-Bouille edited by Henri Mitterand and published in volume 3 of his Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) and as a separate volume (Gallimard, Folio, 1982).

  The first translations of the novel were those by Henry Vizetelly (Piping Hot!, published by Vizetelly & Co., London, in 1886) and Percy Pinkerton (Pot-Bouille, published by the Lutetian Society, London, in 1895). Vizetelly’s translation was reprinted as Lesson in Love by Pyramid Books, New York (1953), and by World Distributors, London (1958). This version is both grossly abridged (the most glaring omission being the description in the final chapter of the maidservant Adèle’s agony as she gives birth alone in a dark, freezing attic room, afraid even to cry out in case she is discovered and reported to the police) and timidly euphemistic in its translation of physical references. Pinkerton’s translation (reprinted by Boni & Liveright, New York, 1924, and as Restless House by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1953, by Farrar, Straus & Young, New York, 1953, Elek Books, London, 1957, and Grafton Books, London, 1986) is readable, but is rather stiff and prone to antiquated colloquialisms. I have tried in my own translation to capture the directness and robustness of Zola’s language and to give a modern colloquial quality and an appropriate idiomatic pitch to the extensive dialogue between masters, mistresses, concierge, and servants. My choice of title aims to echo the original while evoking some of the confusions and contradictions of bourgeois life, as well as the activities of Octave Mouret as he runs up and down the stairs ‘trying his luck’ with the various bourgeois ladies he encounters.

  I am grateful to the Australia Council for a grant that facilitated the completion of this project, and to Marie-Rose Auguste, Janet Beizer, Barbara Caine, David Davatchi, Judith Luna, Jocelyne Mohamudally, and Jeff New for the help they have given me.

  Select Bibliography

  Pot Luck (Pot-Bouille) was serialized in Le Gaulois between 23 January and 14 April 1882 and published in book form by the Librairie Charpentier in 1883. It is included in volume 3 of Henri Mitterand’s superb scholarly edition of Les Rougon-Macquart in the ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Paperback editions exist in the following popular collections: GF-Flammarion, ed. Colette Becker (Paris, 1969); Folio, ed. Henri Mitterand (Paris, 1982); Livre de Poche, ed. Pierre Marotte (Paris, 1984); Presses Pocket, ed. Gérard Gengembre (Paris, 1990).

  Biographies in English

  Brown, Frederick, Zola: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995; London: Macmillan, 1996).

  Hemmings, F. W. J., The Life and Times of Émile Zola (London: Elek,1977).

  Schom, Alan, Émile Zola: A Bourgeois Rebel (New York: Henry Holt, 1987; London: Queen Anne Press, 1987).

  Walker, Philip, Zola (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

  Studies of Zola and Naturalism in English

  Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  ____(ed.), Critical Essays on Émile Zola (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall,1986).

  Hemmings, F. W. J., Émile Zola (2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).

  King, Graham, Garden of Zola (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1978).

  Lethbridge, R. and Keefe, T. (eds.), Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990).

  Nelson, Brian (ed.), Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives (New York/Oxford: Berg, 1992).

  Schor, Naomi, Zola’s Crowds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

  Wilson, Angus, Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of his Novels (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953; rev. edn. 1964).

  Articles and chapters of books in English wholly or partly devoted to Pot Luck

  Alcorn, Clayton R., ‘The Domestic Servant in Zola’s Novels’, L’Esprit créateur, 11 (Winter 1971), 21–35.

  Beizer, Janet L., ‘The Return of the Maids’, in Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 188–200.

  Bryant, David, ‘“Deux Amours” in Pot-Bouille and L’Ami Patience’, French Studies Bulletin, 23 (1987), 14-15.

  Cousins, R. F., ‘Recasting Zola: Gérard Philippe’s Influence on Duvivier’s Adaptation of Pot-Bouille’, Literature-Film Quarterly, 17/3 (1989), 142–8.

  Gantrel, Martine, ‘Homeless Women: Maidservants in Fiction’, in Suzanne Nash (ed.), Home and its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 247–63.

  Grant, Elliott M., ‘The Political Scene in Zola’s Pot-Bouille’, French Studies, 8 (1954), 342–7.

  Nelson, Brian, ‘Pot-Bouille’. Black Comedy’, in Zola and the Bourgeoisie (London: Macmillan; Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1983), 129–57.

  Schor, Naomi, ‘Mother’s Day: Zola’s Women’, Diacritics, 5/4 (1975), 11–17.

  Solomon, Philip, ‘The Space of Bourgeois Hypocrisy in Zola’s Pot- Bouille’, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 32/3 (1985), 255–64.

  Trilling, Lionel, ‘In Defense of Zola’, in A Gathering of Fugitives (London: Secker & Warburg, 1957), 12–19.

  White, Nicholas, ‘Carnal Knowledge in French Naturalist Fiction’, in Nicholas White and Naomi Segal (eds.), Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s (London: Macmillan, 1997), 123–33.

  Yates, Susan, ‘The Maid in the Bourgeois Imagination’ and ‘Pot-Bouille’, in Maid and Mistress: Feminine Solidarity and Class Difference in Five Nineteenth-Century French Texts (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 65–92 and 92–125.

  On adultery and the novel

  Armstrong, Judith, The Novel of Adultery (London: Macmillan, 1976).

  Tanner, Tony, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979).

  White, Nicholas and Segal, Naomi (eds.), Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s (London: Macmillan, 1997).

  On the social history of women, the family and the bourgeoisie

  Branca, Patricia, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (London: Croom Helm, 1975).

  Degler, Carl N., ‘What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century’, American Historical Review, 79 (Dec. 1974), 147–91.

  Fuchs, Rachel G., Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

  Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, ii: The Tender Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

  Goody, Jack, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

  Harrison, Fraser, The Dark Angel: Aspects of Victorian Sexuality (London: Sheldon Press, 1977).

  Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘The Bo
urgeois World’, in The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975; Abacus, 1977), 270–93.

  Hudson, Derek (ed.), Munby: Man of Two Worlds (London: Murray, 1972).

  McLaren, Angus, ‘Some Secular Attitudes Toward Sexual Behaviour in France: 1760–1860’, French Historical Studies, 8/4 (Fall 1974), 604–24.

  McMillan, James F., Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society, 1870–1940 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981).

  Marcus, Stephen, The Other Victorians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).

  Mason, Michael, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  [Anon.], My Secret Life (London, c.1890).

  Newton, Judith L., Ryan, Mary P. and Walkowitz, Judith R. (eds.), Sex and Class in Women’s History (London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985).

  Palamari, Demetra, ‘The Shark Who Swallowed his Epoch: Family, Nature and Society in the Novels of Emile Zola’, in Virginia Tufte and Barbara Myerhoff (eds.), Changing Images of the Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 155–72.

  Pearsall, Ronald, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969).