The Belly of Paris - Emile Zola [3]
The beginning of the Rougon-Macquart cycle was delayed by the Franco-Prussian War, the German siege of Paris that forced Zola and many Parisians into exile in the provinces, and finally the overthrow of Napoleon III. To Zola and many French, the Bonapartes had been France's recurring curse, “a strange family that won't die,” he wrote, “that persists through its pale and moribund offspring.”
These events helped Zola's master project. By delaying the actual writing, he had time to plan out the novels, which established an orderly method so that when he did start to write each morning, he would consult the notes he had prepared, which he kept on index cards. His progress was so steady and programmed that he did only one draft, handing it in with only occasional cross-outs.
But the events also closed the book on the Second Empire and allowed Zola to write about a finite period of time. Newer events could not overtake his novel. In 1871, Zola wrote that the novels could now be set “inside a closed circle; it becomes the tableau of a dead reign,” of “a strange era fraught with madness and shame.”
He begins his fictional family, the ancestors of Beautiful Lisa and her nephew Claude Lantier in the The Belly of Paris, before the revolution that would unleash all the political forces of Zola's time, in Provence, just outside Plassans, the fictional name of his native Aix-en-Provence. Adélaïde Fouque is the daughter of landowning peasants outside Plassans. When she is eighteen her father goes mad and dies, and, left alone, she marries an illiterate gardener named Rougon. Three months after their son, Pierre, is born, Rougon dies. Adélaïde takes up with her neighbor, a brutal, alcoholic smuggler named Macquart, who lives apart from her in a windowless shack but nevertheless sires two illegitimate sons with her, the first Rougon-Macquarts.
The family appears in Le Ventre de Paris and winds its way through the cycle of novels. Lisa's sister Gervaise, the mother of Claude Lantier, is a principal character in L'Assommoir La Terre is the story of their brother Jean Macquart. Lisa's daughter, the little girl Pauline in The Belly of Paris, will grow up to be a leading character in La Joie de vivre
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.