Zola's Au Bonheur des Dames, the department store novel - the flashy, sunny way of the new Paris

For some dumb reason I thought this summer, in the middle of moving across the country, was a good time to pick a nearly 500-page Émile Zola novel, about as difficult as any French I’ve read, as my text for the daily study of French, “daily” often meaning “weekly.”  This has not been a high-concentration period.  Or maybe I was wiser, or luckier, than I realized, since Au Bonheur des Dame (1883, For the Pleasure of the Ladies) is perfectly structured to leave the book alone for long stretches.  Between chapters, time passes.  I know the feeling.

Anyway, three months later, I’ve finished it.

My wink wink nudge nudge smutty English title, although pretty literal, is obviously a disaster.  Brian Nelson, in his recent Oxford World’s Classics translation, uses The Ladies’ Paradise.  The title is the name of a Paris department store.  This is the founding text of the small but real genre of department store fiction.  Real Paris department stores, contemporaries of Zola’s, are called Printemps (Spring, pictured above, image borrowed from here) and Galeries Lafayette and Le Bon Marché (The Good Deal) and Louvre (across the street from the museum).  The Ladies’ Paradise is plausible, especially for the more visionary version of the department store Zola creates.  

The fictional Au Bonheur des Dames is about halfway between Louvre and Printemps, near the Palais Garnier, utterly plausible, although so specifically placed – the first real street name is in the first paragraph - that I wondered what contemporary Parisian readers thought.  “There’s no department store there!”  But what if there were?

Denise is a virtuous orphan girl whose only adult relative runs a doomed umbrella shop across the street from the new department store.  Mouret is the entrepreneur who creates the department store out of his deceased wife’s shop and fortune.  The character’s paths inevitably cross, which creates a story, although not much of a story.  Mouret’s earlier history can be found in Zola’s 1882 novel Pot-Bouille, unread by me.  That novel is about the little shopkeepers; this one is about the big time, three thousand employees and daily receipts of a million francs.

Au Bonheur des Dames is as authentically Darwinian a Zola novel as I’ve read.  There are two strands, first, the department store gradually crushing all the little shops around it, and second, the tournament-style labor market within the department store, where it is either up or out and the only way up is to outsell the employee next to you.  Denise gets a happy ending, since she wins the tournament, in a surprising way or perhaps in just the way you expected.  Her uncle and all the other little guys, their ending is not so good.  Many of the Zola novels I have read end in catastrophe, the deaths of the main characters and even the destruction of the setting, but here the glorious modern department store is bigger than ever, while on the last little store:

… was spread, like a flag planted in a conquered empire, an immense yellow poster, brand new, announcing in two-foot-high letter the great sale at the Ladies’ Paradise.  One might say that the colossus, after its successive growth spurts, taken by shame and repugnance towards the black neighborhood, where it had been born so modestly and which it later swallowed, turned its back, leaving the mud of the narrow streets behind it, presenting its upstart face to the flashy, sunny way of the new Paris.  (Ch. 14, tr. mine)

If only the whole novel were written like this, but my impression, which I hope is not just an artifact of reading it in French, is that Au Bonheur des Dames is less metaphorically inventive than some of the other Zola novels I have read, besides the fact that the main characters are less interesting and the story is minimal.  Yet the reputation of Au Bonheur des Dames has grown ever since it was published, inside France, at least.  Tomorrow I will poke at why.  Perhaps the reason is obvious.