For the next three or four days, I am writing about Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris (1873), the third of the twenty Rougon-Macquart novels and coincidentally the third Zola novel I have read. There is enough that I am tempted to begin generalizing about Zola, and I am sure that would lead to some entertaining and bizarre errors, but instead I will jump straight to the good stuff, the cheese, the musical cheese:
As they were all rather short of breath by this time, it was the camembert they could smell. This cheese, with its gamy odour, had overpowered the milder smells of the marolles and the limbourg; its power was remarkable. (213)
Actually, that is not the good stuff, just set up – here it comes:
Every now and then, however, a slight whiff, a flute-like note, came from the parmesan, while the bries came into play with their soft, musty smell, the gentle sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine. The livarot launched into an overwhelming reprise, and the géromé kept up the symphony with a sustained high note.
A couple of pages earlier there is a long paragraph that simply lists the cheeses in the market stall, like “some Dutch cheeses suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood and hard as skull” and roqueforts that “had a princely air, their fat faces veined in blue and yellow, like the victims of some shameful disease common to rich people who have eaten too many truffles” (211), and though some of the cheeses add “its own shrill note” none of them are otherwise described as musical. They just stink.
But as the sun and wind change, the cheeses begins to sing:
They all seemed to stink together, in a foul cacophony: from the oppressiveness of the heavy Dutch cheeses and the gruyères to the sharp alkaline note of the olivet. From the cantal, Cheshire, and goat’s milk came the sound of a bassoon, punctuated by the sudden, sharp notes of the neufchâtels, the troyes, and the mont-d’ors. Then the smells went wild and became completely jumbled, the port-salut, limbourg, géromé, marolles, livarot, and pont-l'évèque combining into a great explosion of smells. The stench rose and spread, no longer a collection of individual smells, but a huge, sickening mixture. It seemed for a moment that it was the vile words of Madame Lecoeur and Mademoiselle Saget that had produced this dreadful odour. (215-6)
Readers not distracted by the cheese may have noticed that the last metaphor is actually related to characters and thus potentially to some sort of story. The novel also has those, but I may just devote the rest of the week to descriptions of food.
Sometimes I see people say that food writing makes them hungry, but I am a well-fed fellow, so it just makes me gluttonous. Zola’s scene reminded me of La Maison Jean d’Alos, a cheese shop of genius in Bordeaux (thankfully climate-controlled). You cannot tell, but my copying of those passages was interrupted several times so I could look at cheese.
Maybe tomorrow I should write about the blood pudding. It is less seductive.
I have returned to Zola as part of the Zoladdiction event.
