The Ladies' Paradise Read online

  She could never do anything herself, or watch a task being carried out, without being obsessed with the need to put method into it, to improve the system … She would plead the cause of the cogs in this great machine, not for sentimental reasons, but with arguments based on the employers’ own interests, (p. 355)

  The domestication of Mouret and his machine is identified, moreover, with an idealization of the bourgeois family, the final figuration of the store. As Michelle Perrot has written: ‘The founders of the large department stores raised the “happy household” to the pinnacle of honor.’14 At the beginning, the store is seen as a threat to the family, that is, to the small family business represented by the Baudus (victims of the economic Darwinism of the new system); but in the end the family is restored, so to speak, in a form better adapted to the new capitalism—in the form of Octave and Denise, the capitalist and worker united as man and wife, watching paternally over their huge, happy family of employees.

  The bourgeois family is thus the social family, indeed the corporate family/society, and the dream-machine assumes ideological significance if we identify its ‘dream state’ with the insidious blurring of social difference, the suppression of oppositional relations within the system, the suppression of the political. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in Language and Symbolic Power,15 the suppression of signs of social conflict is a tactic of dominant forces in liberal societies. The department store played a leading role in the marketing of life-styles that simultaneously demarcated and blurred class distinctions, encouraging everyone to aspire to a middle-class way of life. Whereas, for the working class, the displays of luxury were signs of their own misery, of the fact that the new social wealth which their own labour was producing had become the source of their impoverishment, there was a danger that the glamour of the scene would blind them to the reality of their self-alienation, that this new worship of commodities and the spectacle of their display would function, like the old religion, as an opiate of the masses. As we have seen, commodities possess a fetish character, they cast a spell; they are dream-symbols of a world of material abundance. Thus, the false harmony of this society is closely related to the formidable structures of manipulation that define modern consumer culture. The department store, in Zola’s depiction of it, is an ambiguous symbol of progress. It helped women to establish themselves historically in the public sphere, and it may appear to have increased the customer’s power and autonomy; but, as Zola shows, the new codes of social behaviour and social discourses which it entailed for the shopper simultaneously organized a powerful network of constraints, providing a mere illusion of freedom and fulfilment. The department store, in its embodiment of consumer culture, was—and is—a giant, precision-made dream-machine.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  THE text on which the translation is based is that included in vol. iii of Henri Mitterand’s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition of Les Rougon-Macquart (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), although a number of other editions were consulted.

  The main challenge facing any translator of Zola is how to capture the rhythm, balance, and colour of the many descriptive passages, with their proliferating detail. I hope I have succeeded in capturing the spirit of these passages without sacrificing precision. I hope also that I have written dialogue that is unstilted. My task was greatly facilitated by the help of Jocelyne Mohamudally and Marie-Rose Auguste, to whom I am most grateful. My thanks too, for different reasons, to Ilona Chessid, Joanne Finkelstein, Françoise Gaillard, Pamela Genova, and Rosemary Lloyd.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) was first published in book form by the Librairie Charpentier in Paris in 1883 (having been serialized in Le Gil Blas between 17 December 1882 and 1 March 1883). It is included in volume iii 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, 1971); Folio (ed. Henri Mitterand, Paris, 1980); Livre de Poche (ed. Bernadette and Auguste Dezalay, Paris, 1984); Presses Pocket (ed. Robert Sctrick and Claude Aziza, Paris, 1990). The University of California Press reissued in 1992 the old nineteenth-century (1886) translation of the novel, with an introduction by Kristin Ross.

  General studies of Zola and Naturalism in English include:

  Baguley, David (ed.), Critical Essays on Émile Zola (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986).

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

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

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

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

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

  Wilson, Angus, Émile Zola: An Introductory Study of his Novels (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1952; rev. 1964).

  Articles and chapters of books in English on The Ladies’ Paradise include:

  Bell, David, ‘The Play of Fashion: Au Bonheur des Dames’, in Models of Power: Politics and Economics in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’ (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 96–124.

  Bowlby, Rachel, ‘“Traffic in her Desires”: Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames’, in Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), 66–82.

  Brooks, Peter, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 149–54.

  Felski, Rita, ‘Imagined Pleasures: The Erotics and Aesthetics of Consumption’, in The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming 1995).

  Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, ii: The Tender Passion (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1986), 312–19.

  Kamm, Lewis, The Object in Zola’s ‘Rougon-Macquart’ (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1978), 8–25.

  Niess, Robert J., ‘Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames: The Making of a Symbol’, in Marcel Tétel (ed.), Symbolism and Modern Literature: Studies in Honor of Wallace Fowlie (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978), 130–50.

  Saisselin, Remy G., ‘Enter Woman: The Department Store as Cultural Space’, in The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 31–49.

  Viti, Robert M., ‘A Woman’s Time, a Lady’s Place: Nana and Au Bonheur des Dames’, Symposium, 44/4 (Winter 1990–1), 291–300.

  On the background of the department store and consumer culture generally, the following are very useful:

  Abelson, Elaine S., When Ladies Go A-thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

  Adburgham, Alison, Shops and Shopkeeping, 1800–1914: Where and in What Manner the Weil-Dressed Englishwoman Bought her Clothes (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981).

  Bowlby, Rachel, Shopping with Freud (London: Routledge, 1993).

  Campbell, Colin, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

  Chaney, David, ‘The Department Store as a Cultural Form’, Theory, Culture and Society, 1/3 (1983), 22–31.

  Featherstone, Mike, Consumer Culture & Postmodernism (London: Sage, 1991).

  Finkelstein, Joanna, The Fashioned Self (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992).

  Friedberg, Anne, Window Shopping: Cinema and Postmodernism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993).

  Lancaster, W., The Department Store: A Social History (London: Pinter Publishers, 1992).

  McCracken, Grant, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1990).

  Miller, Michael, The ‘Bon Marché’: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
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  Morris, Meaghan, ‘Things to Do with Shopping Centres’, in Susan Sheridan (ed.), Grafts: Feminist Cultural Criticism (London: Verso, 1988), 193–225.

  Mukerji, Chandra, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

  Reekie, Gail, Temptations: Sex, Selling and the Department Store (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993).

  Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Vintage, 1974), 141–6.

  Shields, Rob (ed.), Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption (London: Routledge, 1992).

  Williams, Rosalind, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1982).

  Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

  A CHRONOLOGY OF ÉMILE ZOLA

  1840

  (2 April) Born in Paris, the only child of Francesco Zola (b. 1795), an Italian engineer, and Emilie, née Aubert (b. 1819), the daughter of a glazier. The Naturalist novelist was later proud that ‘zolla’ in Italian means ‘clod of earth’

  1843

  Family moves to Aix-en-Provence

  1847

  (27 March) Death of father from pneumonia following a chill caught while supervising work on his scheme to supply Aix-en-Provence with drinking water

  1852–

  Becomes a boarder at the Collège Bourbon at Aix. Friendship with Baptistin Baille and Paul Cézanne. Zola, not Cézanne, wins the school prize for drawing

  1858

  (February) Leaves Aix to settle in Paris with his mother (who had preceded him in December). Offered a place and bursary at the Lycée Saint-Louis. (November) Falls ill with ‘brain fever’ (typhoid) and convalescence is slow

  1859

  Fails his baccalauréat twice

  1860

  (Spring) Is found employment as a copy-clerk but abandons it after two months, preferring to eke out an existence as an impecunious writer in the Latin Quarter of Paris

  1861

  Cézanne follows Zola to Paris, where he meets Camille Pissarro, fails the entrance examination to the École des Beaux-Arts, and returns to Aix in September

  1862

  (February) Taken on by Hachette, the well-known publishing house, at first in the dispatch office and subsequently as head of the publicity department. (31 October) Naturalized as a French citizen. Cézanne returns to Paris and stays with Zola

  1863

  (31 January) First literary article published. (1 May) Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, which Zola visits with Cézanne

  1864

  (October) Tales for Ninon

  1865

  Claude’s Confession. A succès de scandale thanks to its bedroom scenes. Meets future wife Alexandrine-Gabrielle Meley (b. 1839), the illegitimate daughter of teenage parents who soon separated, and whose mother died in September 1849

  1866

  Forced to resign his position at Hachette (salary: 200 francs a month) and becomes a literary critic on the recently launched daily L’Événement (salary: 500 francs a month). Self-styled ‘humble disciple’ of Hippolyte Taine. Writes a series of provocative articles condemning the official Salon Selection Committee, expressing reservations about Courbet, and praising Manet and Monet. Begins to frequent the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles quarter of Paris, the meeting-place of the future Impressionists. Antoine Guillemet takes Zola to meet Manet. Summer months spent with Cézanne at Bennecourt on the Seine. (15 November) L’Événement suppressed by the authorities

  1867

  (November) Thérèse Raquin

  1868

  (April) Preface to second edition of Thérèse Raquin. (May) Manet’s portrait of Zola exhibited at the Salon. (December) Madeleine Férat. Begins to plan for the Rougon-Macquart series of novels

  1868–70

  Working as journalist for a number of different newspapers

  1870

  (31 May) Marries Alexandrine in a registry office. (September) Moves temporarily to Marseilles because of the Franco-Prussian War

  1871

  Political reporter for La Cloche (in Paris) and Le Sémaphore de Marseille. (March) Returns to Paris. (October) Publishes The Fortune of the Rougons, the first of the twenty novels making up the Rougon-Macquart series

  1872

  The Kill

  1873

  (April) The Belly of Paris

  1874

  (May) The Conquest of Plassans. First independent Impressionist exhibition. (November) Further Tales for Ninon

  1875

  Begins to contribute articles to the Russian newspaper Vestnik Evropy (European Herald). (April) The Sin of the Abbé Mouret

  1876

  (February) His Excellency Eugène Rougon. Second Impressionist exhibition

  1877

  (February) L’Assommoir

  1878

  Buys a house at Médan on the Seine, 40 kilometres west of Paris. (June) A Page of Love

  1880

  (March) Nana. (May) Les Soirées de Médan (an anthology of short stories by Zola and some of his Naturalist ‘disciples’, including Maupassant). (8 May) Death of Flaubert. (September) First of a series of articles for Le Figaro. (17 October) Death of his mother. (December) The Experimental Novel

  1882

  (April) Pot-Bouille. (3 September) Death of Turgenev

  1883

  (13 February) Death of Wagner. (March) The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames). (30 April) Death of Manet

  1884

  (March) La Joie de vivre. Preface to catalogue of Manet exhibition

  1885

  (March) Germinal. (12 May) Begins writing The Masterpiece (L’Œuvre). (22 May) Death of Victor Hugo. (23 December) First instalment of The Masterpiece appears in Le Gil Blas

  1886

  (27 March) Final instalment of The Masterpiece, which is published in book form in April

  1887

  (18 August) Denounced as an onanistic pornographer in the Manifesto of the Five in Le Figaro. (November) Earth

  1888

  (October) The Dream. Jeanne Rozerot becomes his mistress

  1889

  (20 September) Birth of Denise, daughter of Zola and Jeanne

  1890

  (March) The Beast in Man

  1891

  (March) Money. (April) Elected President of the Société des Gens de Lettres. (25 September) Birth of Jacques, son of Zola and Jeanne

  1892

  (June) The Débâcle

  1893

  (July) Doctor Pascal, the last of the Rougon-Macquart novels. Fêted on a visit to London

  1894

  (August) Lourdes, the first novel of the trilogy Three Cities. (22 December) Dreyfus found guilty by a court martial

  1896

  (May) Rome

  1898

  (13 January) ‘J’accuse’, his article in defence of Dreyfus, published in L’Aurore. (21 February) Found guilty of libelling the Minister of War and given the maximum sentence of one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. Appeal for retrial granted on a technicality. (March) Paris. (23 May) Retrial delayed. (18 July) Leaves for England instead of attending court

  1899

  (4 June) Returns to France. (October) Fecundity, the first of his Four Gospels

  1901

  (May) Toil, the second ‘Gospel’

  1902

  (29 September) Dies of fumes from his bedroom fire, the chimney having been capped either by accident or anti-Dreyfusard design. Wife survives. (5 October) Public funeral

  1903

  (March) Truth, the third ‘Gospel’, published posthumously. Justice was to be the fourth

  1908

  (4 June) Remains transferred to the Panthéon

  The Ladies’ Paradise: plan of the area

  The Ladies’ Paradise

  CHAPTER 1

  DENISE had come on foot from the Gare Saint-Lazare. She and he
r two brothers had arrived on a train from Cherbourg and had spent the night on the hard bench of a third-class carriage. She was holding Pépé by the hand, and Jean was walking behind her, all three exhausted from the journey, frightened and lost in the midst of the vast city of Paris. They kept looking up at the houses, and at every intersection they asked the way to the Rue de la Michodière, where their uncle Baudu lived. But on arriving in the Place Gaillon, the young girl suddenly stopped in surprise.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘look at that, Jean!’

  And they stood there, huddled together, all in black, in the mourning clothes bought on their father’s death. Denise, rather skinny for her twenty years, and looking down-at-heel, was carrying a small parcel, while on her other side her little brother of five was clinging to her arm; her other brother, a strapping youth of sixteen, stood looking over her shoulder, his arms dangling.