Chablis: a small town in Burgundy famous for its dry white wine.
Port-aux-Vins: the Port-aux-Vins, where the boats that transported wines and spirits to Paris docked, was situated on the Quai Saint-Bernard between the Rue des Fossés-Saint-Bernard and the Rue Cuvier.
Auvergne: a region of south central France.
Constantine: a town captured by the French on 13 Oct. 1837 during the conquest of Algeria.
crinolines: a hooped skirt which became fashionable in France after 1855.
Rue de Rivoli and the Rue d’Alger: a well-to-do area in the first arrondissement.
Baron Hartmann, director of the Crédit Immobilier: the historical reference here is to the great modernizer of Paris, Baron Haussmann (1809–91), Napoleon Ill’s Prefect of the Seine (1853–70). In seventeen years he was responsible for a vast transformation of the city. By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation, and the acreage of the city had been doubled by annexation. At the height of the reconstruction, one in five Parisian workers was employed in the building trade. In the name of slum clearance, some 350,000 people (on Haussmann’s own estimation) were displaced from the quartiers of old Paris to make way for the new boulevards, parks, and ‘pleasure grounds’. Zola’s reference to Haussmann is conflated with the operations of the Société des Immeubles Rivoli, founded by the Péreire brothers (and soon renamed the Compagnie Immobilière), which in 1855 built many of the buildings along the Rue de Rivoli. The ‘Haussmanization’ of Paris, and the speculative frenzy it provoked, are described in Zola’s novel La Curée (‘The Kill’, 1872).
Luc: probably Luc-sur-Mer, in the département of Calvados in Normandy.
Lycée Bonaparte: now the Lycée Condorcet, situated in the Opéra district.
imperial: a small beard.
Plassans: Zola’s fictional name for Aix-en-Provence, his own birthplace and the origin of the Rougon-Macquart family (see La Fortune des Rougon and La Conquête de Plassans).
baccalauréat: the important examination taken at the end of high school.
the four rules: adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing.
doing wrong: the character of Vallagnosc represents the disciples of the German pessimist writer Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), whose influence in France was widespread in the 1880s. This type of character is portrayed more fully in Lazare Chanteau, the protagonist of Zola’s novel La Joie de vivre (1884), and the aristocratic fin de siècle figures of whom Des Esseintes, the protagonist of J.-K. Huysmans’s novel A rebours (‘Against Nature’, 1884), is the supreme embodiment.
the new street: the Rue du Dix-Décembre (later renamed the Rue du 4 Septembre) was in fact declared available for public purposes on 24 Aug. 1864, and officially expropriated in two stages, in Sept. 1867 and Mar. 1868; construction work began at the end of 1868 and it was opened at the end of 1869. Thus there are some slight anachronisms in Zola’s account.
Grand Hotel: a sumptuous new hotel near the Opéra, the largest and grandest in Paris.
guinguettes: open-air cafés with dancing.
phalanstery: a reference to the utopian social theories of Charles Fourier (1772–1837), who wanted a perfect community set apart from the rest of society. He introduced the idea of the self-sufficient, co-operative community (the ‘phalanstery’), free from the constraints and trials of urban industrial civilization. This community was to be based on agriculture and craftsmanship rather than on industrialization, and all members would share equally in the communal life. Rather than have the individual adjust to society, Fourier wished to create a community which responded to individual needs. A number of co-operative communities were formed in Europe and the United States on the principles outlined by Fourier; all were ultimately unsuccessful.
Cotentin: peninsular region of Normandy.
the Madeleine district: the Madeleine church, standing at the west end of the grands boulevards, is the grandest and smartest of modern Paris churches.
Hôtel Duvillard: the word ‘Hôtel’ is used here in the sense of private mansion.
the Gard… the Isère: départements in the south of France.
the new Opéra: Garnier’s grandiose Opera House (the one we know today) was built between 1862 and 1874.
Rue Monsigny: the Bon Marché, the Louvre, and the Printemps were all substantially extended in stages: the Bon Marché between 1869 and 1872, the Louvre in 1869, the Printemps in 1880.
the Halles: the great central food market of Paris, designed by the architect Victor Baltard (1805–74) and built in iron between 1851 and 1857. The Halles form the focus of Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (‘The Belly of Paris’, 1873). They were demolished in 1971.
Bois de Vincennes: wooded area to the east of Paris.
metal naves: Frantz Jourdain, Zola’s friend and the future designer of La Samaritaine, who had provided Zola with an imaginary layout for his fictional store, shared the general enthusiasm for iron and glass in the second half of the nineteenth century. The triumph of these new architectural materials permitted new forms that met the need of large-scale commerce for more space, light, and ventilation. The man Boucicaut chose as his engineer in the expansion of his shop was Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923), renowned as the builder of the Eiffel Tower—the world’s most famous symbol of the nineteenth century’s enthusiasm for industrial and technological progress.
exhibitions: Boucicaut opened a picture and sculpture gallery at the Bon Marché in March 1875.
Blots, Libourne, and Tarbes: provincial towns.
the Batignolles…: a district in the north-west of Paris.
the big shops: while the expansion of commerce was greeted by many as a mark of progress benefiting the consumer and contributing to the economic health of the nation, it was also perceived to possess a darker side in its encouragement of pleasure-seeking and narcissistic self-gratification, a temptation to which women were particularly prone. The emergence of kleptomania, a disease that was seen as both feminine and modern, was a particularly striking instance of the sexual disorder that was seen to lie at the very heart of consumer culture. See Elaine S. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Le Roi Dagobert: a very popular comic song; King Dagobert was the last Frankish king of the Merovingian dynasty, and ruled all France from AD 628 to 638.
Poitou: a region in the south-west of France.
the Gros-Caillou: an area near the École Militaire and the Invalides on the right bank of the Seine.
Bullier: a very well-known dance-hall in the Latin Quarter, at the end of the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
King of Prussia: Wilhelm I (1798–1888) visited Paris for the World Fair (l’Exposition Universelle) of 1867.
twelve times: annual turnover at the Bon Marché in 1869 was 22 million; in 1877 (the year of Boucicaut’s death) it was 67 million; it reached 100 million (with figures of over one million for the busiest sales days) in 1881–2.
trowel: Marguerite Boucicaut laid the first stone of the new sections of the Bon Marché on 9 Sept. 1869. Work on the extension continued until 1872; on completion it occupied a whole city block.
firemen: the documentation Zola collected in the spring of 1882 included statistical details of the Bon Marché and the Louvre: the former, for example, had 11 directors, 36 department heads, and 2,500 employees, including 152 salesgirls and 30 shopwalkers.
clothing: Denise’s humanitarian social initiatives recall those inspired by Marguerite Boucicaut. During the 1870s Boucicaut established a library for his employees, provided evening classes in foreign languages, music, and fencing, and instituted a pension fund financed entirely from store revenues. By the early years of the twentieth century, paternalist concern for the ‘great family’ had produced paid sick leave and free health care, paid maternity leave, gifts at the birth of each child and family allowances for employees with three children or more, relief for widows and orphans, and even paid annual
holidays.
acroterium: in classical architecture, any of the pedestals, usually without a base, placed at the two extremes or in the middle of pediments or frontispieces, serving to support statues, etc.
zouave: member of a body of French infantry, originally composed of Algerians, characterized by a colourful uniform of gaiters, baggy trousers, short and open-fronted jacket, and tasselled cap or turban.
advertisement: the Printemps was destroyed by a fire (caused by an accident with a gas-lamp) on 9 Mar. 1881, and was largely rebuilt by the beginning of 1882. The incident was widely reported in the newspapers, which stressed the ‘heroism’ of Jules Jaluzot, the owner of the shop, who had gone to wake up his salesgirls in their attic rooms.
Paris: all aspects of Japanese art were highly fashionable during the second half of the nineteenth century. Zola, Manet, and the Goncourt brothers were all enthusiasts.
berthas: wide round collars covering the shoulders (as for a dress or blouse).
electric lamps: in fact electric lighting was fully introduced into the big stores only after 1880. See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988).
so long: see note to p. 314.
A SELECTION OF OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
APOLLINAIRE, ALFRED JARRY, and MAURICE MAETERLINCK
Three Pre-Surrealist Plays
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Cousin Bette
Eugénie Grandet
Père Goriot
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
The Flowers of Evil
The Prose Poems and Fanfarlo
DENIS DIDEROT
This is Not a Story and Other Stories
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (PÈRE)
The Black Tulip
The Count of Monte Cristo
Louise de la Vallière
The Man in the Iron Mask
La Reine Margot
The Three Musketeers
Twenty Years After
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (FILS)
La Dame aux Camélias
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
A Sentimental Education
Three Tales
VICTOR HUGO
The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Other Prison Writings
Notre-Dame de Paris
J.-K. HUYSMANS
Against Nature
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE
Selected Fables
PIERRE CHODERLOS DE LACLOS
Les Liaisons dangereuses
MME DE LAFAYETTE
The Princesse de Clèves
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
A Day in the Country and Other Stories Mademoiselle Fifi
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
Carmen and Other Stories
BLAISE PASCAL
Pensées and Other Writings
JEAN RACINE
Britannicus, Phaedra, and Athaliah
EDMOND ROSTAND
Cyrano de Bergerac
MARQUIS DE SADE
The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales
GEORGE SAND
Indiana
The Master Pipers
Mauprat
The Miller of Angibault
STENDHAL
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma
JULES VERNE
Around the World in Eighty Days
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas
VOLTAIRE
Candide and Other Stories
Letters concerning the English Nation
ÉMILE ZOLA
L’Assommoir
The Attack on the Mill
La Bête humaine
Germinal
The Ladies’ Paradise
The Masterpiece
Nana
Thérèse Raquin
Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures
Eight German Novellas
GEORG BÜCHNER
Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck
J. W. VON GOETHE
Elective Affinities
Erotic Poems
Faust: Part One and Part Two
E. T. A. HOFFMANN
The Golden Pot and Other Tales
J. C. F. SCHILLER
Don Carlos and Mary Stuart
LUDOVICO ARIOSTO
Orlando Furioso
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
The Decameron
MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO
Orlando Innamorato
LUÍS VAZ DE CAMÕES
The Lusíads
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote de la Mancha
Exemplary Stories
DANTE ALIGHIERI
The Divine Comedy
Vita Nuova
BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS
Nazarín
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Selections from the Notebooks
NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI
Discourses on Livy The Prince
MICHELANGELO
Life, Letters, and Poetry
PETRARCH
Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works
GIORGIO VASARI
The Lives of the Artists
SERGEI AKSAKOV
A Russian Gentleman
ANTON CHEKHOV
Early Stories
Five Plays
The Princess and Other Stories
The Russian Master and Other Stories
The Steppe and Other Stories
Twelve Plays
Ward Number Six and Other Stories
A Woman’s Kingdom and Other Stories
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
An Accidental Family
Crime and Punishment
Devils
A Gentle Creature and Other Stories
The Idiot
The Karamazov Brothers
Memoirs from the House of the Dead
Notes from the Underground and The Gambler
NIKOLAI GOGOL
Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Mirgorod
Plays and Petersburg
ALEXANDER HERZEN
Childhood, Youth, and Exile
MIKHAIL LERMONTOV
A Hero of our Time
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Eugene Onegin
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina
The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
The Raid and Other Stories
Resurrection
War and Peace
IVAN TURGENEV
Fathers and Sons
First Love and Other Stories
A Month in the Country
JANE AUSTEN