The Belly of Paris by Émile Zola [second read]

The third novel of the The Rougon-Macquart cycle introduced us to another field in the modernization of Paris brought by the Second Empire: the newly built great central market of Les Halles.

The leading character is Florent Quenu. He is the brother in law of Lisa Macquart (the eldest child of Antoine Macquart). Lisa's husband is Florent's younger brother: Quenu. The couple married and run a charcuterie business. Florent is an escaped convict from Cayenne (Devil's Island), as he was found by the gendarmes in a "suspicious manner" during the December 1851 coup d'état. Though he's innocent, he's deported nevertheless to Cayenne. Now he returned to Paris, thin and haggard, found for the first time by Madame François, a gardener who sells her vegetables on the pavement outside Les Halles.

The Quenus received Florent in their house, concealing his origin as Madame Quenu's cousin. Florent soon got a job as Inspector of the fish market. He began to feel overwhelmed by the vastness of Les Halles, and felt entrapped and drown by its abundance of food. He, the Thin man, felt lost and disgusted amidst the excessive food provided for the Fat (the bourgeoise), particularly at the Quenu's charcuterie. Zola portrayed the vastness of Les Halles as that of a cathedral, a town, and even a forest:

"Then they turned into another covered avenue, which was almost deserted, and where their footsteps echoed as though in the vault of an empty church."

"As they turned into the broad central avenue, he imagined himself in some foreign town, with its various districts, suburbs, villages, walks and streets, squares and intersections..."

"And high above this phantom town, stretching far away into the darkness, there appeared to be a mass of luxuriant vegetation, a monstrous jungle of metal, with spindle-shaped stems and knotted branches, covering the vast expanse as with the delicate foliage of some ancient forest."

Florent then succumbed to his old republican ideas, after mingling with Gavard and his "political friends". They were designing a resurrection in Paris. Florent, who were already disliked by the fishwives (the stall holders in the fish market), now brought a threat to the Quenus household by his political views. And that's why he must be get rid of. Who's gonna win in the end - the Fat or the Thin? Of course you already know the answer to this.

Les Halles, which is called the belly of Paris, symbolizes the excess of food (luxury) to fulfill the bourgeoise insatiable appetite during the Second Empire. Claude Lantier, a painter, Lisa's nephew (later appeared in The Masterpiece) voiced Zola's views on this subject. He loved to capture the beauty of fresh produce displayed at the market, but on the other hand, he hated the idea that the abundance of food would be swallowed by "those bourgeois bastards", as Claude called it. 

He further invented the irony of the Fat and the Thin. The Fat represents the middle class or bourgeoisie with their passion of luxury, while the Thin is the poor working class. But Claude made an exception for Madame François, who lived modestly and happily in the village, who, according to Claude, doesn't belong to either category. So, I guess, the moniker Fat and Thin works only for the middle class with insatiable desire for luxury, and the working class who dream to get rich, or those with hate, bitterness, envy towards the bourgeois. Florent, Gavard, and Claude are definitely the Thins, but not Madame François. On the other hand, the fishwives with their ambitions are the Fats. 

But the Quenus should have been excluded, because they live contentedly from their own business (which they worked on diligently), never doing harm to others. Their treatment towards Florent in the end is justified, because he is plotting to cause chaos in the neighborhood. The Quenus has received him in their house, even offering him half of Gradelle's money. But Florent, the ungrateful dreamer, had the audacity to plan the revolution from inside the house! He never even thought about what trouble he would bring to his brother. See.. the Thin is equally dangerous for France as is the Fat! If I were in Lisa's position, I would do exactly what she had done.

To sum up, Zola's "treatment" towards Lisa is the only negative point I granted this book. I had enjoyed the reading immensely, and loved every minute of it, especially the daily activities of the fish market and the charcuterie - the fishwives' intrigues, the competition of La Belle Lisa and La Belle Normande. Lisa Quenu has become one of my favorite characters of the Rougon-Macquart, because of her sensibility and intelligence.

Rating: 4,5 / 5

Classic Character: Lisa Quenu of The Belly of Paris

Lisa Quenu is perhaps my most favorite character from the 20 novels of Rougon-Macquart cycle. I always think the Rougons are boring, while the Macquart are mostly full of "colors", and thus, much more interesting. However, from the Macquarts' offsprings (Lisa, Gervaise, Jean), I think Lisa is the least "flawed".

In the opening novel: The Fortune of the Rougons, Zola wrote that Lisa "was big, good-looking child, very healthy and sanguine, and looked very much like her mother. But she had not inherited her mother's animal-like capacity for hard work. Macquart had implanted in her a firm desire for ease and comfort." I think Lisa is the perfect balance of her mother and father, in term of character flaws. She loves ease and comfort, but unlike Macquart, she earns it with working diligently. But unlike her mother, she chooses a profession that requires her brain, more than physical labor, so that she can put her work and comfort in a perfect balance. That's what I love most from Lisa, because I, too, love balance of work and leisure.

Lisa is so fortunate that a middle class woman (the wife of a postmaster) took a fancy on her when she was a child, and hired her as a maid. Later on when the postmaster was dead, the wife moved to Paris, taking Lisa with her while she's only 12 y.o. Maybe that's how Lisa managed to "skip" the worst part of her parents: drunkenness.

I also admire Lisa's patience, discipline, and determination, as was portrayed in The Fortune of the Rougons: "When she was still very small she work for a whole day in return for a cake." Later on she would show these qualities after the owner of a charcuterie named Gradelle, who hired her to attend the counter, died suddenly. Lisa and Quenu - Gradelle's nephew who handled the cookery - found Gradelle's hidden money under the salting tub and decided to move the business to a more respectable place. The couple, combining Lisa's refined taste and great skill at business and marketing, with Quenu's passion of cooking, run the charcuterie together, made it a perfect family business.

So, finally, Lisa's dream of living respectably came true. She combined work and pleasure to achieve peaceful and comfortable life. That's my dream life! In running the successful charcuterie, Lisa shows her sensibility, intelligence, and orderly qualities. Zola mentioned her as of sanguine person, but I don't agree. She's more an introverted person. She minds her own business, dislikes social activity (outside 'business hospitality'), and hates drama. Her life evolves around her family (husband and daughter). She doesn't gossip, and when trouble comes (Florent's growing revolutionary activities), she silently consults the priest, and then acts methodically what she thinks best. She doesn't envy the rich people, and never talks about others' faults. She even takes Florent in her home though she distrusts him, just because Quenu loves his brother. Maybe her only flaw is ever competing with La Belle Normande. It's useless, and she should be above that.

Lisa Quenu (née Macquart) might be a fictional character most relatable with myself. No exaggeration, everything in a moderate, balanced level. That's why we can never be heroine of any story, because others would find our lives dull.

What do you think of Lisa Quenu?

The Belly of Paris Ch. 2-3: Quenu Brothers & the Busy Markets

Chapter 2 introduces us to the Quenu brothers, and the bustling of the fish market and the charcuterie business in 19th century. Believe me, the later is much more exciting than the Quenus! :P

= The Quenu brothers

Florent is the son of his mother and her first husband. After his father died, she remarried a man called Quenu, and got another son: little Quenu, the sous prefecture. The mother put all her hopes in Florent, so she paid his education in law school, that one day he could get a job as solicitor. While Quenu, well, he's a lazy, sturdy lad, who stays at home with mommy.

After the mother died, Florent became private teacher, while keep spoiling Quenu. When Florent is ill, Quenu realized that he must take a profession. From watchmaking, ironsmith, and ten other professions, he finally put his interest in cookery. He works in restaurants, and finally sets up in his uncle Gradelle's charcuterie (Gradelle is Madame Quenu's brother).

In the meantime, Florent became Republican, got arrested by the police during the December 1851 coup d'état, and being sent to Cayenne (Devil's Island). Then Uncle Gradelle died; so Quenu and Lisa Macquart (the girl Gradelle has recruited for the counter) found the money Gradelle's has been keeping, decided to marry and took over the business. The business prospered, and the Quenus set up a comfortable life, combining work and comfort, as middle class (or as Zola put it, petite bourgeois). That is...until Florent returned, having been runaway from Cayenne.

= Fish market

Florent got a job as Inspector for fish market, and we are entertained by Zola's minutest details of the fish market daily activities. From the variety of fish with their colors and shapes, to the hustle bustle of the auction. So the fisher (or the agent?) would bring loads of fish in baskets. A checker will check and sort the fish, set them up neatly for display. Then the auctioneer will start the auction on each item, while the clerks take notes of prices and buyers. The bidders are the fishwives (stall holders who will sell the fish in their stalls), and sometimes gentleme would bid for a basket of fish to be shared, perhaps, with friends. It's kind of fun to read.

= The black pudding

I am most interested in the charcuterie daily bustles. Zola wrote the passages so vividly, that you could imagine how the displays look and smell, but more than that, I'm so interested in the making of the black pudding (seasonal specials of the Quenu-Gradelle charcuterie), that I particularly searched on youtube, and found a video on how to make black pudding. You know, Chinese people call it Lap Cheong, and I have thought that these brown pork sausages (that's what our family call it) are Chinese traditional cuisine. I had no idea the European call it Black Pudding! It's a delicious delicatessen, but I never imagined that it's made of pork blood. What a gross process, but what a delicious food it resulted! Here's the video of how to make the modern black pudding:

That's all I've got from chapter 2 and 3. I know it's all just the beginning. The next three chapters might not this 'sweet' - it's Zola, anyway...

The Belly of Paris Ch. 1: Les Halles and What It Represents

I am currently reading The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris) as part of my The Rougon-Macquart Project. It's a reread, actually, but I guess I didn't quite captured the book essence on first read, and so is quite astonished to find so many interesting things in only first chapter. So, I might do these chapter posts throughout this book, or maybe it's on this chapter only, who knows? Anyway, here's my random thoughts on chapter one.

= The recurrent themes

The opening line struck me that apparently Zola liked to open his narrative with two themes:

First, the contrast between procession and unmoved inhuman things. As was with The Kill (with congestion of carriages leaving Bois de Boulogne), The Belly of Paris, too, is opened with carts of fruits and vegetables heading to Les Halles (the central food market) in slow procession: "Through the deep silence of the deserted avenue, the carts made their way towards Paris, the rhythmic jolting of the wheels echoing against the fronts of the sleeping houses on both sides of the road, behind the dim shapes of elm." It seems to point out how the corrupt society is dragging the nation towards destruction.

Second, a stranger coming into and then installed onto an existing community (Étienne Lantier to the mine pit in Germinal, Octave Mouret to the department store in The Ladies Paradise, and now Florent to Les Halles).

= Two histories

Les Halles is a symbol of modernism (and the consequences) the Second Empire has brought to Paris in 19th century. Les Halles was a vast structure of twelve pavilions made with iron and glass in the avant-garde architecture, built by Victor Baltard in 1850s. Each pavilion housed different market of foods: fish and poultry, fruit, herbs, and vegetables, flower, meat, butter and cheese, tripe, game, etc. It was located in the district of Le Cimetière des Innocents (Holy Innocents Cemetery), which was decommissioned, and the bones was transferred to the Catacombes, before being replaced by the herbs and vegetables market in 1787.

There were two groups of markets at Les Halles. The stall holders sell their products within the pavilions, while smaller vendors installed their pitches on the pavement around the pavilions, paying lower tax than the stall holders. It was finally demolished in 1971, and nowadays becomes Forum Des Halles, an underground shopping center connected with an underground lines and metro transit.

Following the lead of The Fortune of the Rougons, Florent Quenu, the protagonist, is a Republican who was deported to Cayenne (Devil's Island) after the Louis-Napoleon coup d'état (December 1851). After his escape from Cayenne, he went to Dutch Guiana for several years, before plucking enough courage to return to Paris.

= Cathedral and forest

Brian Nelson, a prominent Zola expert and translator of the Oxford World Classic edition I'm reading, wrote in the explanatory notes, that Zola has suggested that Les Halles are the cathedral of modern life: "He aimed explicitly to play on Victor Hugo's famous novel Notre-Dame de Paris."

What the cathedral represents, then? Is it the hugeness, unreachable, overwhelming (or even oppressive) of the modernization of Paris, that engulfed the working classes? "...the gigantic size of Les Halles, whose heavy breathing - the result of the excesses of the day before."

Zola even made one of the characters (which has not appeared yet on chapter one) as the Quasimodo of Les Halles. Interesting, eh? Nelson also suggested that Zola associated the image of forest with that of a cathedral. "The shadows, in the hollows of the roof, seemed to make the forest of pillars even bigger, and multiply to infinity the delicate ribs, fretted galleries, and transparent shutters. [..] there appeared to be a mass of luxuriant vegetation, a monstrous jungle of metal, with spindle-shaped stems and knotted branches, covering the vast expanse as with the delicate foliage of some ancient forest." That threw new lights on the forest in The Sin of Abbe Mouret... but that's of another book.

= Florent and the excess of food

The character of Florent provided Zola with an unmistakable irony of a thin, haggard, starving man who is entrapped in the midst of overflowing foods in Les Halles. Combining it with his fear that the government will find and catch him, made him the perfect embodiment of the excessive luxury and pleasure of the bourgeoisie, while the working class are struggling with poverty, slum, and injustices.

Claude Lantier made his first appearance in this book, before appearing in as main protagonist in The Masterpiece. He is reflecting Cezanne (physically), and Zola in his enthusiasm and views towards Les Halles. With his painter's eyes, Claude sees Les Halles as a beautiful landscape subject with beautiful colors, however with his heart, he condemns how the nature is abused to serve the uncontrollable appetite of the bourgeoisie: "Those bourgeois bastard eat it all."

That's all I've got from chapter one. I am now in the middle of chapter two, which was picturing the busy, noisy life of Les Halles. Let's see where it would bring us...