The Drinking Den
Emile Zola
THE DRINKING DEN
ÉMILE ZOLA, born in Paris in 1840, was brought up at Aix-en-Provence in an atmosphere of struggling poverty after the death of his father in 1847. He was educated at the Collège Bourbon at Aix and then at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris. After failing the baccalauréat twice and taking menial clerical employment, he joined the newly founded publishing house Hanchette in 1862 and quickly rose to become head of publicity. Having published his first novel in 1865 he left Hanchette the following year to become a full-time journalist and writer. Thérèse Raquin appeared in 1867 and caused a scandal, to which he responded with his famous Preface to the novel’s second edition in 1868 in which he laid claim to being a ‘Naturalist’. That same year he began work on a series of novels intended to trace scientifically the effects of heredity and environment in one family: Les Rougon-Macquart. This great cycle eventually contained twenty novels, which appeared between 1871 and 1893. In 1877 the seventh of these L’Assommoir (The Drinking Den), a study of alcoholism in working-class Paris, brought him abiding wealth and fame. On completion of the Rougon-Macquart series he began a new cycle of novels, Les Trois Villes: Lourdes, Rome, Paris (1894–8), a violent attack on the Church of Rome, which led to another cycle, Les Quatre Évangiles. While his later writing was less successful, he remained a celebrated figure on account of the Dreyfus case, in which his powerful interventions played an important part in redressing a heinous miscarriage of justice. His marriage in 1870 had remained childless, but his happy, public relationship in later life with Jeanne Rozerot, initially one of his domestic servants, brought him a son and a daughter. He died in mysterious circumstances 1902 the victim of an accident or murder.
ROBIN BUSS is a writer and translator who works as a freelance journalist and as television critic for The Times Educational Supplement. He studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree and doctorate in French literature. He is part-author of the article ‘French Literature’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica and has published critical studies of works by Vigny and Cocteau, and three books on European cinema, The French through Their Films (1988), Italian Films (1989) and French Film Noir (1994). He has translated a number of other volumes for Penguin, including Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames.
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Drinking Den
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
ROBIN BUSS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 1876
5
This translation published 2000
Reprinted with corrections and new title 2003
Originally published as L’Assommoir (The Dram Shop)
Translation and editorial matter copyright © Robin Buss, 2000, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
Map by Nigel Andrews
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
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CONTENTS
CHRONOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
FURTHER READING
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION
THE DRINKING DEN
NOTES
CHRONOLOGY
1840
2 April Emile Zola born in Paris, the son of an Italian engineer, Francesco Zola, and of Françoise-Emilie Aubert.
1843
The family moves to Aix-en-Provence, which will become the town of ‘Plassans’ in the Rougon-Macquart novels.
1847
Francesco Zola dies, leaving the family nearly destitute.
1848
The rule of King Louis-Philippe (the July Monarchy, which came to power in 1830) is overthrown and the Second Republic declared. Zola starts school. Karl Marx publishes Manifesto of the Communist Party.
1851
The Republic is dissolved after the coup d’état of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte who in the following year proclaims himself emperor as Napoleon III. Start of the Second Empire, the period that will provide the background for Zola’s novels in the Rougon-Macquart cycle.
1852
Zola is enrolled at the Collège Bourbon, in Aix, where he starts a close friendship with the painter Paul Cézanne.
1858
The family moves back to Paris and Zola is sent to the Lycée Saint-Louis. His school career is undistinguished and he twice fails the baccalauréat.
1860
The start of a period of hardship as Zola tries to scrape a living together by various kinds of work, while engaging in his first serious literary endeavours, mainly as a poet. These years saw the height of the rebuilding programme undertaken by Baron Haussmann, Prefect of Paris from 1853 to 1869, which is reflected in several of Zola’s novels, including The Drinking Den.
1862
Zola joins the publisher Hachette, and in a few months becomes the firm’s head of publicity.
1863
Makes his début as a journalist.
1864
Zola’s first literary work, the collection of short stories, Contes à Ninon, appears.
1865
Publishes his first novel, La Confession de Claude. Meets his future wife, Gabrielle-Alexandrine Meley; they marry in 1870.
1866
Leaves Hachette. From now on, he lives by his writing.
1867
Publication of Thérèse Raquin, the story of how a working-class woman and her lover kill her husband, but are afterwards consumed by guilt. In the Preface to the second edition (1868), Zola declares that he belongs to the literary school of ‘Naturalism’.
1868-9
Zola develops the outline of his great novel-cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, which he subtitles ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire’. It is founded on the latest theories of heredity. He signs a contract for the work with the publisher Lacroix.
1870
The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War leads in September to the fall of the Second Empire. Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie go into exile in England and the Third Republic is declared. Paris is besieged by Prussian forces. La Fortune des Rougon starts to appear in serial form.
1871
Publication in book form of La Fortune des Rougon, the first novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle. After the armistice with Prussia, a popular uprising in March threatens the overthrow of the government of Adolphe Thiers, which flees to Versailles. The radical Paris Commune takes power until its bloody repression by Thiers in May; the events would have great importance for the Socialist Left. Zola was shocked both by the anarchy of the Commune and by the savagery with which it was repressed.
&n
bsp; 1872
Publication of La Curée, the second of the Rougon-Macquart novels. Part of it had appeared in serialized form (September–November 1871), but publication had been suspended by the censorship authorites.
1873
Publication of Le Ventre de Paris, the third of the cycle set in and around the market of Les Halles.
1874
Publication of La Conquête de Plassans.
1875
Publication of La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret.
1876
Son Excellence Eugène Rougon follows the career of a minister under the Second Empire. Later in the same year, the seventh of the Rougon-Macquart novels, The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir), begins to appear in serial form and immediately causes a sensation with its grim depiction of the ravages of alcoholism and life in the Parisian slums.
1877
The Drinking Den is published in book form and becomes a bestseller. Zola’s fortune is made and he is recognized as a leading figure in the Naturalist movement.
1878
Zola follows the harsh realism of The Drinking Den with a gentler tale of domestic life, Une page d’amour. Buys a house at Médan.
1879
Nana appears in serial form, before publication in book form in the following year. The central character, whose childhood and adolescence were described in The Drinking Den, grows up to become a high-class prostitute; the novel was to attract further scandal to Zola’s name.
1880
Publication of Les Soirées de Médan, an anthology of short stories by Zola and some of his Naturalist ‘disciples’, including Maupassant. Zola expounds the theory of Naturalism in Le Roman expérimental. In May, Zola’s literary mentor, the writer Gustave Flaubert, dies; in October, Zola loses his much-loved mother. A period of depression follows and he suspends writing the Rougon-Macquart for a year.
1882
Zola’s next book, Pot-Bouille, centres on an apartment house and the character of the bourgeois seducer, Octave Mouret. The novel analyses the hypocrisy of the respectable middle class.
1883
Mouret reappears in Au Bonheur des Dames which studies the phenomenon of the department store.
1884
La Joie de vivre. Towards the end of the year, Germinal starts to appear in serial form and is published in book form the next year. Set in a northern French mining community, this powerful novel is Zola’s most politically committed fictional work.
1886
L’Œuvre provides a revealing insight into Parisian artistic and literary life, as well as a reflection of contemporary aesthetic debates, drawing on Zola’s friendship with many leading painters and writers. However, Cézanne reacts badly to Zola’s portrait of him in the novel, and ends their friendship.
1887
La Terre, a brutally frank portrayal of peasant life, causes a fresh uproar and leads to a crisis in the Naturalist movement when five ‘disciples’ of Zola sign a manifesto against the novel.
1888
Publication of Le Rêve. Zola begins his liaison with Jeanne Rozerot, the mistress with whom he will have two children.
1890
La Bête humaine, the story of a pathological killer, is set against the background of the railways. Though not the best novel in the cycle, it is to be one of the most popular.
1891
L’Argent examines the world of the Stock Exchange.
1892
La Débâcle analyses the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the end of the Second Empire.
1893
The final novel in the cycle, Le Docteur Pascal, develops the theories of heredity which have guided Les Rougon-Macquart.
1894
With Lourdes, Zola starts a trilogy of novels, to be completed by Rome (1896) and Paris (1898), about a priest who turns away from Catholicism towards a more humanitarian creed. In December, a Jewish officer in the French army, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, is found guilty of spying for Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony on Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana.
1897
New evidence in the case suggests that Dreyfus’s conviction was a gross miscarriage of justice, inspired by anti-Semitism. Zola publishes three articles in Le Figaro demanding a retrial.
1898
Zola’s open letter, J’Accuse, in support of Dreyfus, addressed to Félix Faure, President of the Republic, is published in L’Aurore (13 January). It proves a turning-point, making the case a litmus test in French politics: for years to come, being pro- or anti - Dreyfusard will be a major component of a French person’s ideological profile (with the nationalist Right leading the campaign against Dreyfus). Zola is tried for libel and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. In July, waiting for a retrial (granted on a technicality), he leaves for London, where he spends a year in exile.
1899
Zola begins a series of four novels, Les Quatre Évangiles, which would remain uncompleted at his death. They mark his transition from Naturalism to a more idealistic and Utopian view of the world.
1902
29 September Zola is asphyxiated by the fumes from the blocked chimney of his bedroom stove, perhaps by accident, perhaps (as is still widely believed) assassinated by anti-Dreyfusards. On 5 October his funeral in Paris is witnessed by a crowd of 50,000. His remains were transferred to the Pantheon in 1908.
INTRODUCTION
(New readers are advised that this Introduction
makes the details of the plot explicit.)
The Drinking Den (L’Assommoir)1 was one of the publishing sensations of nineteenth-century French literature, selling out edition after edition from the time of its first publication in January 1877; by November of that year it had already reached sales of fifty thousand copies. The success represented a turning-point in Emile Zola’s life, confirming his reputation as one of the leading figures in the literary world of his time and the most prominent exponent of literary Naturalism. It also brought him a measure of financial stability and allowed him to buy a house, in Médan.
He was coming up to his thirty-seventh birthday – it fell on 2 April 1877 – and was already the author of a collection of short stories, three plays and eleven other novels, as well as a steady output of journalism. He contributed regularly to the Russian review Vestnik Evropy, published in St Petersburg by Mikhail Stassiulevich, who had been introduced to Zola by their friend, the writer Ivan Turgeniev. Zola’s novels were rapidly translated into Russian and his reputation, at least before the publication of L’Assommoir, was probably higher in St Petersburg than it was in Paris.
However, the success of The Drinking Den was to a great extent a succès de scandale. Before its appearance in book form, the novel had been published in instalments in Le Bien public, from April 1876, and immediately attracted hostile criticism. After six parts, publication was suspended, and not resumed until later in the year in a different newspaper, La République des lettres (from July 1876 to January 1877), concluding a couple of weeks before the book itself came out, on 24 January. By that time, Zola’s novel was already notorious and the subject of heated debate. Subscribers to Le Bien public had threatened to cancel their subscriptions if the paper continued to carry The Drinking Den. A writer in Le Figaro described it as ‘not realism, but filth; not crudity, but pornography’. It was denounced by Le Gaulois as ‘an inexcusable scandal’. Even some of Zola’s friends had reservations. Guy de Maupassant and Stéphane Mallarmé were enthusiastic, and Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote an appreciative review; but Turgeniev told Ludwig Pietsch that he had read the book ‘with a mixture of horror and admiration’. Gustave Flaubert, with whom Zola was engaged in a continuing debate on literary realism, found it shocking because of the use of popular speech and the depiction of poverty and working-class life, while the Goncourt brothers felt that The Drinking Den owed an unacknowledged debt to their own fiction, for example, the novel Germinie Lacerteux (1864), which dealt with the life of an impoverishe
d and dissolute servant girl. The charge of plagiarism was renewed with respect to other works, especially Denis Poulot’s study of Parisian popular culture, Le Sublime (1870) – which Zola freely admitted having used as one of his sources for information about working-class speech and manners.
There were two immediate effects of the scandal. Not only did it ensure fame and fortune for the author, it also induced him to make a number of very specific statements about his intentions in writing The Drinking Den, in order to correct what he saw as his critics’ mistakes in their reading of the book. These statements appeared in letters to the newspapers and in the Preface to the novel (which is translated below); Zola was to develop his literary theories in Les Soirées de Médan and Le Roman expérimental, both of which were published in 1880. As a result, we know a good deal about what he hoped to achieve with The Drinking Den. An author may not always be the best judge of his own work, but his point of view must be of special interest. Since he was answering what were mainly moral strictures, he emphasizes the moral lessons of the novel, the significance of the characters and their behaviour, and the relation of the events to the social realities of his time. He was also attacked, in particular, for his use of vulgar language and he defends this, countering with a charge of hypocrisy against those who would prefer him to have written in a more elevated manner: ‘All the anger directed against the stylistic experiment that I have attempted, is too hypocritical for me to answer it…’2
