Appetite and indigestion in Le Ventre de Paris

The greet paradox at the heart of Zola's Le Ventre de Paris is that between the hero. F;orient, who lives in a state of disgust and the crushing superabundance of food surrounding him. Florent. who arrives in the book and in Paris, fainting from starvation, ends up being welcomed into the Cloud-Cuckoo Land of the Quénu charcuterie, where the greasy taste, feel, and smell of fat has seeped into everything. As Zola puts it, "tout un monde noyé dans la graiss" (an entire world drowning in fat.).

And in spite of being well fed by his brother and sister, Florent remains hungry throughout the novel, refusing to fit in with the plump, gourmand company that surrounds him:

Non, la faim ne l’avait plus quitté. Il fouillait ses souvenirs, ne se rappelait pas une heure de plénitude. Il était devenu sec, l’estomac rétréci, la peau collée aux os. Et il retrouvait Paris, gras, superbe, débordant de nourriture, au fond des ténèbres

No, hunger had not left him . He searched his memory, could not remember one hour of fullness. He had become dry, with a shrunken stomach, his skin stuck to the bone. And he found Paris, fat, proud, overflowing with food, to be un the depths of darkness.

When he is given a seafood inspector's job in the market, his disgust gets even stronger.:

Florent souffrit alors de cet entassement de nourriture, au milieu duquel il vivait. Les dégoûts de la charcuterie lui revinrent, plus intolérables. Il avait supporté des puanteurs aussi terribles; mais elles ne venaient pas du ventre. Son estomac étroit d'homme maigre se révoltait, en passant devant ces étalages de poissons mouillés à grande eau, qu'un coup de chaleur gâtait. Ils le nourrissaient de leurs senteurs fortes, le suffoquaient, comme s'il avait eu une indigestion d'odeurs.

Florent suffered then from this pile of food, amid which he lived. The disgusts from the charcuterie came back, more intolerable. He had endured stenches as terrible, but these did not come from the belly. His narrow, skinny man 's stomach rebelled, as he passed the wet fish stalls, drenched in water, spoiling from a bout of hot weather. They fed him their strong scents suffocated him, as if an attack of indigestion hiy him from just smelling

This attitude is met with incredulity among those whose life is the preparation and sale of food, essentially everyone in the novel and especially his brother and sister-in-law, who exude the fat of their trade. His very thinness becomes a point of disgust among the other inhabitants of the Halles and, by implication, that of Second Empire Paris.

His alientation from most of those around him and his attitude toward food eventually enters into his politics – where his disgust at the material world fits in well with his unhinged, utopian socialism.

The only person who can at all sympathize with Fkorent's indigestion is the painter Ckuade Lantier, who loves the market for its rich colors of its contents, subjects for his still-life, nut who also has little appetite.

Puis, je déjeune ici, par les yeux au moins, et cela vaut encore mieux que de ne rien prendre. Quelquefois, quand j’oublie de dîner, la veille, je me donne une indigestion, le lendemain, à regarder arriver toutes sortes de bonnes choses. Ces matins-là, j’ai encore plus de tendresses pour mes légumes… Non, tenez, ce qui est exaspérant, ce qui n’est pas juste, c’est que ces gredins de bourgeois mangent tout ça !

Then I break my fast here –– at least through the eyes, and that is been better than eating anything. Sometimes when I forget to dine the night before, I give myself indigestion the next day by watching all sorts of good things arriving. Those mornings, I have even more affection for my vegetables ... No, look, this is frustrating, what is unjustness

that these bourgeois scoundrels eat it all!"

But what Claude converts into art, Florent converts into anger and desire for a political purge of the excess.

Anatomy of the Belly

Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873), the third novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is a mix of two distinct genres of prose fiction. First. there is a pretty straightforward novel, where the protagonist (Florent), escapes from imprisonment in Devil's England, gets a job through family connections in the Les Halles, and after getting caught up in a socialist conspiracy, is arrested and sent off again.

The second stream in the book is what Northrop Frye in His Anatomy of Criticism (1957) termed "anatomy". Among other things, literary anatomies take delight in cataloguing and describing the features of the world around it. If novels are aimed at describing the social world, anatomies dwell on the objects that make up the material world.

Le Ventre de Paris is an in-depth portrait of the newly upgraded central food market, literally from top (the glass and cast iron roofing) to bottom (the sub-basements),. a prose poem delighting in vivid descriptions and long lists of the goods on sale. The tour ranges from a loving look at the contents of the Quénu charcuterie to the sights and and smells of the market for fresh-and salt-water fishes. It includes in-depth visits to the vegetable sellers, the fruiterers, the florists, the cheese sellers, the butchers, the bakers, and so on.

Part of this description is painterly. We see in part through the eyes of Claude Lantier, an avant-garde (Cézanne-like) painter who will figure as the hero of his own book later in the series (L'Oeuvre). We are meant to see vividly the colors, the shimmering of the goods, even in the darkness of pre-dawn and the shimmering of gas-light.

But Zola engages all our senses: smells (both pleasing and putrid but mist notable in the so-called "Cheese Symphony"), tastes (blood sausage to carrots), textures (as the various workers get their hands in the products they make prepare and serve), and noises (the early-morning cacophony, the bustle and gossip of the workers).

For the non-native reader, the vocabulary mountain is high, and while one might be tempted to skip over the various fishes or sausages, the fact is that the poetry, and the point, is in the details. This poem – which has no logical beginning pr end, run in parallel with the more traditional narrative of Florent's modest rise and fall.

The tone is Rabelaisian, both in terms of the wide and concrete vocabulary, and the sense of connection to the real, multi-sensory word, both wondrous and nauseating -- after all, the belly is at the center of both Gargantua and Le Ventre de Paris. Zola reintroduces the Rabelaisian into French literature.

The de-Romanticization of Adultery: Emma Bovary and Renée Saccard

Zola’s La Curée was published in 1872, around 15 years after the notorious publication of Madame Bovary. It’s clear, in writing a novel centered on adultery, that Zola was playing off Flaubert’s work. Like Flaubert, Zola had to deal with censorship when the book started being published in a periodical.

There are some obvious differences, of course. Zola is dealing with the swank set in Paris and Flaubert with the humdrum provincial life of rural Normandy. And while Flaubert is documenting simple adultery, Zola compounds the act with quasi-incest (stepmother). After all, in the Paris of La Curée, garden-variety adultery is almost expected. Nevertheless, the stories are remarkably parallel.

The heroine of both books, Emma Bovary and Renée Saccard, were seen as scandalous in their day. Both women, restless and without responsibilities or direction in life, throw themselves into sensuality as an escape from boredom. They are in principle childless – Emma basically abandons hers, Renée loses hers to a miscarriage. At the same time as they are fooling around, as if to punish their unromantic husbands, they become fanatical consumers of luxury, far beyond what the household can afford, driving their husbands into bankruptcy (Bovary) or its brink (Saccard).

Both risk discovery by flaunting their all but public lovemaking. Their adultery should be obvious to their husbands, but one husband (Bovary) is too naïve, the other (Saccard) seems indifferent, deliberately look away for his own purposes. Both women are far more intense in their cravings than their more detached lovers. They eventually grow tired of that unrelenting neediness, in the end abandoning them.

Both novels skirt the edge of melodrama. Both heroines see their would-be tragic destiny foreshadowing in a visit to the theater. For Emma it is the crazed Lucia di Lammermoor that she projects herself onto. For Renée it is the incestuous Phèdre that she obsesses about, performed in the melodramatic style of the age.
When finally abandoned, Emma swallows arsenic. Instead of a swift and Romantic death, she suffers several days of severe and rather repulsive illness before she dies– a fate far from the pathos of the trashy novels Emma is addicted to.

For Renée, the act of self-destruction comes not at the end of the novel, but rather at the end of the first chapter. If Phèdre, who swallows poison to end her guilty life is tragic, Renée is simply bathetic. Her self-poisoning takes place in the sensual overload of the hothouse of the Saccard mansion. Feeling depressed and abandoned, she bites into the poison-milk-oozing “Tanghin de Madagascar”, and faints dead away, apparently dead. We later learn that she was quickly cured and that the dramatic gesture had no real impact. As in this case, when through the novel Renée tempts fate, fate does not seem very moved to do anything. In the end, she dies not of some jealous fury or headlong self-immolation, but rather of meningitis, a death dismissed in one sentence at the end of the book. The main interest is one who would pay off her outstanding debts. In both novels, the romantic passion is undermined by the very real question of who pays.

Money, which has no place in romantic fiction and very little in melodrama, is fatally important, far more than the sex, which would seem to be the main thene. Both ladies are lured into debt by fashion/cloth merchants, who tempt the ladies into extravagant debt that, in the end, has to be discharged by the husbands. Financial manipulators, whether on a provincial petty-bourgeois level or in the most spendthrift layer of Paris society, is the equivalent of the Furies or the Fates in these novels.

Antoine Macquart

I find the master touch in Zola’s Fortune des Rougon is the portrait of Antoine Macquart, the son of a poacher, and the stepbrother of the paterfamilias of the Rougon family, Pierre Rougon. Rougon has managed to take control of their mother’s fortune, while Antoine has been serving in the Napoleonic army (if serving described the far-behind-the-front shirking). Much of the novel’s story springs from the hatred and resentment of the aggrieved Antoine toward his bourgeois brother. I almost wrote that Antoine is working-class, but working is something his character does virtually none of.

Antoine is a truly unique character – a monster of bile, laziness, and narcissism. He has enough charm to marry a workhorse of a woman who is eager to work several jobs to allow him to spend his days lounging in cafés and lolling about time. He harasses the Rougons to force them to buy him off, at least in small measures. He forces his children to hand over their meager earning to support his leisure, while complaining constantly that they are eating him out of house and home.

He latches onto Republicanism as a way to vent his spleen. While his nephew Silvère is attached to Republicanism from sheer and naïve Utopianism, Antoine has dreams of a communist state where everyone works to support his luxuries. In origin, his political fervor is mostly a rhetorical stick to beat his stepbrother and his wife with, as three are among the leaders of the reactionary forces in town– it is clear that he has no real interest in politics, per se. He uses his status as a revolutionary, however, to avoid paying his café tab – the proprietor is too intimidated.

In the end, when the Revolution comes to Plassans, albeit temporary, he seizes power. He is unable, however, to get his hands on his stepbrother, who outwits and imprisons him. Finally, in return for a small sum of money, he abets Rougon is setting up his followers into an ambush, a bloodletting, establishing Rougon as the town’s savior.

All this is pretty mean, no doubt; but there’s also a humor in the character portrayal that makes Antoine the one truly fascinating character in the book. “Il lui semblait tout naturel qu’on l’entretînt, comme une fille, à vautrer ses paresses sur les banquettes d’un estaminet.” (It seemed to him only natural that he be kept, like a woman, to wallow in his laziness on the bench of a café.) While his son slaves away at his carpenter’s apprenticeship, he can look across the street to see his father “sugaring his demitasse”, with the wages of the boy.

Antoine’s greatest moment comes when he is imprisoned in the bath chamber of the Mayor’s palace. At first livid, he is seduced by the sampling of bourgeois luxury he finds in his “cell”, the soaps and the scents. “Il lorgnait le lavabo, pris d’une grande envie d’aller se laver les mains avec une certaine poudre de savon contenue dans une boîte de cristal. Macquart, comme tous les fainéants qu’une femme ou leurs enfants nourrissent, avait des goûts de coiffeur." (He examined the washstand, taken by a great desire to wash his hand with a certain soap powder contained in a crystal box. Macquart, like all ne’er-do-wells nourished by wife or children, had the tastes of a hairdresser.”) He talks revolution, but really wants to be a dandy.

Macquart who can “savoure sa fainéantise” (savors his slacking off) , is a piece of Zola’s even-handed condemnation of all political parties. His self-serving love of revolution, is contrasted with a parade of stupidity and self-seeking among the bourgeoisie, including the Rougons. In every case Except for the deluded troop and peasants and workers whose dreams are shattered by a volley from a regular army regiment, politics is a charade, a cover for self-seeking. Macquart’s narcissism is only a more transiently silly version of what is universal.

Diving in

French literature of the nineteenth century grabbed me early and never let go. At 14 or 15, I stumbled upon Dumas père and devoured book after book, from the obvious (The Three Musketeers and Monte-Cristo) to the off-the-beaten track (Agénor de Mauléon and Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge). I even owned and leafed through an abridged paperback translation of his Dictionary of Cooking, mostly for the anecdotes.

I read the plays and novels of Hugo, devoured the few plays of Rostand, and then started reading Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Huysmans, and Zola – all of them in English (which I will get to later). Each author was a revelation, and there were so many titles on the shelf!

In college, an English and drama major, I took courses in French Renaissance and 18th century literature. I wrote an undergraduate thesis about the much-maligned and obscenely prolific 19th century playwright Eugène Scribe, master of the so-called "Well-Made Play". I translated and directed one of his plays: La Cameraderie (translated as The Inner Circle).

As a graduate student, I wrote about sex, money, and objects in comedy, and devoured all kinds of plays, including those of 19th century Frenchmen like Sardou, Labiche, and Feydeau. I've had a career outside academia since I got my Ph.D., but I have continued to read a lot, and certainly have read French literature of all kinds.

Now I had a very good high school French program, and I speak the language not too terribly, I hope, and read it with ease. In high school, I plunged into Molière and Voltaire without too much difficulty, read diverse poems and plays. But in my self-satisfaction after cracking open s 19th century novel in the original was a real slap in the face.

In the first sentence of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, two words immediately sent me to the dictionary – I know then and have remembered evert since — they were "lande" (moor) and "terne" (drab), words that a neoclassicist would choke before putting on paper. That was just a start. I spent more time buried in the dictionary than in the novella, with its loving descriptions of upholstery, grotesque characters and what they were wearing, the naming of dozens of flowers and birds, and the tools of the trade and architectural details — then I gave up I had learned the difference between knowing a language and knowing a language.

So here I am, many years later, and I have decided that now I really want to read this great corpus in the original with comprehension. It's a steep climb, I know well.

This blog will track my reading of this vast corpus of literature.The prose fiction primarily, but also the plays, poetry, and discursive writing (almost every famous author seems to have written at least one travel book or five). The project will be anchored by the two prolific giants in each half of the century of the century – Balzac and Zola, whose great novel cycles are the landmarks.

I know this is a ridiculous task. The number of titles written by Balzac number almost 100. Zola wrote over 30 long novels. Flaubert and Stendhal's works are a little more finite, true, nut then there are the others: endless works by Dumas (père) and his collaborators. Eugène Sue's giant novel cycles, scads of stories from Maupassant, hundreds of plays by Scribe and Sardou and their competitors, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, George Sand, Dumas fils, the Goncourts, Musset, Mérimée, Gautier, and on and on.

However Quixotic, that's my plan — and this blog is my report from the Front. Note also that there is a companion blog, which is dedicated to the problem of getting advanced vocabulary to stick.