The Belly of Paris (2 page)

Throughout the Rougon-Macquart novels the harshest social criticism is leveled at the bourgeois class, Zola's class. In
The Belly of Paris
Lisa and Quenu are the great examples of the petite bourgeoisie,
but there are similar couples in other novels, always fat, complacent, and obsessed with order. Curiously, they always have one child, a daughter, which provided the cycle of novels with an ample supply of bourgeois women. Women who read Zola may be inclined to stop dieting, for these bourgeois women, such as Lisa, drive men wild with their plumpness. Even while Lisa abuses Quenu and Florent with her small-mindedness, the sight of her ample round flesh excites the boy Marjolin to the brink of madness as he sneaks glimpses of her and her ample waist through the window.

The Belly of Paris
was a hit when it first came out in 1873. Flaubert praised it, though the young Anatole France wrote that it was “vain, empty, detestable virtuosity,” and another critic called it “obscene.” There was a bit of both shock and fascination about this young writer who wrote about voluptuous women and the delights of food. The book expanded the young writer's readership and reputation. The first edition sold out in a month. Though it is good enough for a lesser writer to have built an enduring reputation on, it was eclipsed by the writer's later work. Zola himself considered it one of his best works, a better novel, he said, than
L'Assommoir
, which is generally considered one of his masterpieces. Most writers have a book that they regard as one of their best even though it never got its due. For Zola it was
Le Ventre de Paris
.

Le Ventre de Paris
was one of five novels he adapted for the theater. It ran three and a half months at the Théâtre de Paris, not a spectacular success. The play has never been published. He coauthored it with William Busnach, with whom he had done his other adaptations. Letters from Busnach to Zola indicate that the stage adaptation had been thrown together hastily. Reviewers seemed to feel that the production relied more on spectacular settings—Les Halles at daybreak was singled out—than on true dramatic moments. But even Zola's most successful play the stage adaptation of
Thérèse Raquin
, comes off as a melodrama. Although Zola never achieved the triumph as a playwright that he did as a novelist, his novels are conspicuously theatrical. He develops characters and
sets scenes and always gives rich visual backdrops. Almost every novel he wrote could easily be adapted to film.

To fully comprehend this novel, it must be understood that at the time Zola was writing it, France, and Paris in particular, had experienced more than eighty years of regular violent street uprisings. These events were considerably bloodier than the demonstrations brutally crushed by the police during the Algerian war or the skirmishes of May 1968. These were pitched battles on the streets between well-armed and -trained, war-hardened troops and armed rebels in which hundreds died. Though the would-be revolutionaries of
Le Ventre de Paris
make reference to the uprisings of 1848 and 1852 and even the violence of the 1830s and the late-eighteenth-century Revolution, in which 19,000 people were killed in the year-and-a-half-long “terror” of 1793–94, no doubt what Zola and his readers thought about was the recent events. In 1871, the uprising following the Franco-Prussian War claimed more lives than any battle of the war. While 900 of the 130,000 Versailles troops sent to crush the uprising were killed and another 6,500 were wounded, it is not even known how many Parisians they slaughtered on the streets during the six-day siege known as
la semaine sanglante
, the bloody week. A widely accepted estimate is between 25,000 and 30,000 dead. Many of them were executed by firing squads. Bodies were piled up around Paris. Gutters literally ran red with blood, and in places so did the Seine. Zola witnessed this, writing unsigned letters for a Parisian newspaper,
La Cloche
, and for
Le Sémaphore de Marseille
, a newspaper for which he wrote about 1,500 articles in the 1870s. Surveying the piles of corpses, he wrote, “Never will I forget the heartache I experienced at the sight of that frightful mound of bleeding human flesh thrown haphazardly on the two paths, heads and limbs mingled in horrible dislocation.”

It is against the background of this history and experience that Florent, Gavard, and the others in the Les Halles of his novel almost casually conspire to launch armed revolution. There would have been nothing difficult to believe about this to contemporary readers. On the other hand, the fear with which Lisa and others in
the neighborhood reject such plans and disdain such plotters is also understandable. In fact, the 1871 Commune finished off the French appetite for violent revolution. It was the last one. But a different kind of violent cycle had taken its place. To avenge their defeat by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, which had set off the Commune uprising, the French leaped into World War I, defeated Germany, and imposed the punitive Versailles Treaty, an injustice, the denunciation of which brought Adolf Hitler to power. Germany got France, France got Germany, Germany got France, and then France was again liberated—two world wars and seventy-five years of bloody European history.

As might be expected from a late-nineteenth-century writer in the vanguard of the political thinking of his age, Zola was very interested in the status of women. To call him a feminist would be overstating it. In his own marriage, his wife, Alexandrine, like many of his women characters, came from a poor background and clung to the better life she had made by organizing and running everything, leaving Zola free for intellectual pursuits. It also gave him time for other pursuits, including a mistress with whom he had a second family. They all knew one another and, pleasantly for Emile, painfully for Alexandrine, they all spent time together.

The Belly of Paris
has several examples of a smart, practical woman paired off with a good-natured, dreamy simpleton dependent on his woman's savvy, such as Lisa and Quenu and Cadine and Marjolin.

Few nineteenth-century novels portray women of the strength and complexity of Zola's women. Unlike those of Flaubert or Leo Tolstoy, Zola's are not so much the victims of an unfair society as women determined to be players. In
The Belly of Paris
Lisa scolds her husband for political activities, telling him, “If only you had asked my advice, if we had talked about it together. It's wrong to think that women don't understand politics … Do you want to know what I think? What my politics are?”

In both major and minor characters Zola shows an interest in the
aspirations of women. When Clémence, herself a very minor character in
The Belly of Paris
, loses her job, she supports herself by giving French instruction to a young woman who is secretly trying to improve her education. We never learn anything more about this unnamed character, who is just a touch of set decoration in the picture he offers of society. Clémence herself holds her own in café political debates and is said to be manly.

Zola lived in a time when conservative politics and the Church supported the suppression of women while a new crop of progressives was denouncing the old ways. The subject fascinated young Zola, who continually wrote about it in letters to his friends. He seemed particularly influenced by the writings of Jules Michelet, a leading progressive who became a cultural hero of leftist youth after he was removed from his chair at the Collège de France because he refused to swear allegiance to the emperor in 1851. His books on women,
L'Amour
and
La Femme
, published in 1858 and 1859, when Zola was an impressionable teenager, called for a new role for women in society. To understand women, Michelet maintained, society had to free itself from the teachings of the Church and embrace science. Embracing science was the new religion of the time. Once women freed themselves of the slavery prescribed by the Church, they would become champions of progressive government, quite the opposite of Beautiful Lisa in
The Belly of Paris
, who proclaims, “I support a government that's good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don't want to know.” But the freedom that the future held for women, according to Michelet, could be achieved only by a good marriage. Only through the progressive thinking of the husband could the wife be completed.

Despite the seeming simplicity of such theories, the women, the marriages, the relationships between men and women in Zola's novels are complicated. There is a great deal of fiction and a great deal of love. Zola prided himself on realism. As a young man Zola's letters were full of reflections on relations between the sexes. In 1860, shortly after the two Michelet books were published, Zola wrote to Cézanne, “A husband has been given a major project, to reeducate his wife. It takes more than sleeping together to be married,
they must also think in tandem.” And that same year to a different friend:

Marriage in Zola's novels, as in life, is a complicated relationship full of pettiness but also love, stifling at times but at others comforting. In
The Belly of Paris
the marriage of the weak and simple Quenu to the forceful Lisa, in the hands of a lesser writer would have been a tale of an Amazonian tyranny, but in Zola's gifted hands it is a relationship of love, spite, jealousy tenderness, support—a marriage that is both difficult and solid. Even a character such as Lisa, who symbolizes all that was wrong with the petite bourgeoisie—fat, selfish, complacent, indifferent to the suffering of others, and a maddening hypocrite, who, despite a complete absence of religious belief, has a priest at the ready to rubber-stamp what she knows are misdeeds—is still a complete woman, so fully drawn, so human and real, that we cannot quite hate her, though she infuriates us.

Zola sets us up. Just when we are ready to hate a character, he shows us a human side that melts us. The horrid old gossip Mademoiselle Saget takes such pleasure in damaging everyone else with her gossip, but then we see her buying table scraps to eat, trying to cheer herself with the idea that she is eating scraps from the aristocracy but hoping no one sees her buying them. And we feel sorry for her.

Curiously, Zola's strong women have strong smells, and he devotes
substantial space to describing them. Though the fleshy Beautiful Norman is described as an extremely attractive woman, lengthy descriptions are given of the odors she gives off and finally it is concluded that she is too “strong-smelling” for Florent's tastes. But Zola was obsessed in all his writing with descriptions of tastes and smells. He loved good food and detested bad eating.
The Belly of Paris
, a novel of food, of tastes and smells, has often been described, especially by English-speaking admirers, as “strange” or “bizarre.” Zola's friend the writer Edmond de Goncourt was one who noted Zola's curious olfactory obsession. In his
Journal
he wrote, “The nose of Zola is a very articular nose, a nose that interrogates, that approves, that condemns, a nose that is gay, a nose that is sad, a nose that punctuates the physiognomy of its master; the nose of a true hunting dog.”

Today, in an age when gastronomic fiction has become fashionable, this book seems ahead of its time. But despite Zola's being a bourgeois who loved food and looked it, the social criticism in
The Belly of Paris
revolves around the graphically illustrated conceit that the bourgeoisie not only eats too much but has an unhealthy obsession with food.

Zola's father, an Italian immigrant, was an adventurer who had done everything from joining the French Foreign Legion when it was first formed to becoming an engineer and building a major dam in Provence. Emile Zola was born in 1840 during a brief stay in Paris not far from the Les Halles neighborhood that would be the setting for
The Belly of Paris
. But his family soon returned to Aix-en-Provence, where Emile grew up. Like the central characters in
The Belly of Paris
, Florent and Quenu, Zola grew up in Aix and went to Paris as a penniless student. Many of Zola's characters have their roots in Aix, a town always referred to in his fiction by the pseudonym Plassans.

In Paris people who had little money found small apartments on the upper floors, and Zola for a time lived in an eighth-floor apartment with a view of the rooftops of Paris. As an aging and respected
writer he looked back and recalled this view and the vow it inspired: “It was then, from my twentieth year on, that I dreamed of writing a novel of which Paris, with its ocean of roofs, would be a principal character, something like the chorus of antique Greek tragedies.” Twelve years before publication, he was already laying the groundwork for
Le Ventre de Paris
.

He lived meagerly in those years; he had little to eat, often surviving on bread dipped in olive oil from Provence that friends and family sent him. Later in life, when he had money, he would make up for the lost meals.

The Paris Zola came to in 1858 was considerably different from the one he had been born in. The emperor Napoleon III wanted to leave his mark on France by remaking the capital, an act of publicly financed arrogance that would often be imitated. Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand, and other French leaders have sought to leave their mark by changing Paris, but the most thorough remake was by Napoleon III. To accomplish this he brought in an architect, Georges Haussmann.

The wide boulevards and squares with resplendent monuments designed by Haussmann are much admired today, but at the time were regarded by many as the destruction of Paris. Haussmann himself was nicknamed “the great destroyer.” Paris had been a medieval city of narrow, winding streets, a teeming maze. Within these crowded and nearly unnavigable neighborhoods lived the Parisian masses that had risen up against Napoleon III's despotic rule on several bloody occasions.