I’m
not going to lie: I was on the verge of giving up when I reached Chapter Three.
The revolting description of the putrid smells of the Central Markets (present-day
Les Halles), while evincing Zola’s extraordinary keen observation of details
and his skills with words, was a major turn-off. I think I will avoid eating cheese
for a long time to come.
Notwithstanding,
I did slog along to reach Chapter Five, whence the action started to pick up
steam, and by the time I finished the novel, tears filled my eyes. In the final
analysis, I have to admit that I still liked Zola’s use of symbolism that is heavily
laced with satire, especially in his tongue-in-cheek depiction of the hypocrisy
of the haves (“the fat”) towards the have-nots (“the thin”) (like Beautiful Lisa’s
initial superficial warmth towards Scraggy Florent, which then turns to bitter
alienation when her self interest is threatened), of the envious tendencies of
the wannabe haves (like the jealous malice of the gossipy and greedy
Mademoiselle Saget, Madame Lecoeur, La Sarriet and Madame Mehudin), and of the invincible
driving force of materialism in a bourgeois society in general (like the
markets being symbolized as the “glutted,
digesting beast of Paris, wallowing in its fat and silently upholding the
Empire”) .
It
seems to me that somewhere beneath all the stomach-turning descriptive lexicon,
Zola wants to express just one thought in this novel, which is what the painter
Claude says in exclamation at the very end: “What blackguards respectable people are!”
In
a less serious note, the novel does offer some interesting tidbits about Paris
in the early days of the Second Empire. One of these was a practice where bijoutiers peddled leftover food scraps
from the large restaurants, the royal households and state ministries to the
underprivileged class for a few sous per portion. Another was that the
fattening of pigeons was done by specially trained laborers called gaveurs, whose job was to force-feed the
pigeons.
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