Yet Another Department Store….

Au Bonheur des Dames by Emile Zola

usually translated as The Ladies’ Delight or The Ladies’ Paradise


this excerpt translated by Moira Redmond ie Clothes in Books


published 1883





‘Stop worrying about the customers’ eyes’ Mouret said, ‘Take a chance. Blind them with colour! With red! With green! With yellow!’

He grabbed the material, throwing it round, messing it up, putting it in dazzling and weird colour combinations. Everyone knew, the boss was the finest window-dresser in Paris, an honest-to-God revolutionary who had introduced a form of brutalism on a giant scale into the world of display.

He wanted the goods to look as though they were tumbling out of boxes that had been ripped apart, colours flaming, each contrasting with and setting off the next piece. When they leave the shop, he said, the customers should have sore eyes.

Hutin, on the other hand, was of a more classical school of thought: he liked symmetry, harmony, subtlety. He watched this incendiary display being created in the middle of the table without allowing himself the slightest criticism, but his lips were pinched as befitted an artist whose sensibilities were being offended.

‘There!’, cried Mouret when he had finished. ‘Leave it like that, and just see if it brings the women in on Monday.’





commentary: I loved and adored this book: it was a tremendous read. Apparently it was made into a TV series in the past few years, though I didn’t see it, and I’m surprised it wasn’t more successful – such opportunities. (Last week I wrote about Norman Colliins’s Bond Street Story, another great tale in a similar setting.)

Zola tells the story of a department store in Paris, one that gets bigger and better as time goes on. He follows it through the eyes of a young woman, Pauline, who gets a job there and begins the long haul out of poverty, while catching the eye of the young and handsome owner. But that story is really just an excuse to talk about retail merchandising. Zola is known to have done huge amounts of research on the subject and I would say became obsessed with it – every so often he seems to have to force himself back to the human stories. His long descriptions of displays and departments are individually mesmerising – by the end you start to think there are too many of them, that they are facile, but I did enjoy them very much.

I am very prejudiced against Zola, after a very bad experience with the worthy but frightful book Germinal – it takes some kind of prize for the most depressing book ever, and one that took me an unprecedented length of time to read. But this one completely won me over.

Arthur Hailey used to write very long complex blockbusters centred on an organization – Hotel and Airport for example – and although nobody is comparing Zola to Hailey in the literary pantheon, there is a certain similarity. (And Hailey’s greatest achievement was surely to inspire the best spoof/parody of all time – the film Airplane! I don’t think Zola can quite compete with that.)

All kinds of unexpected details of life came up: who’d’ve thought that shoplifiting was such a huge problem at the time? The store detectives have to be particularly suspicious of pregnant women – I thought this might be hormonal blame, but is actually because their size and voluminous clothes make it easy to hide the loot.

The days of the sale are secret and important – nice link with the very similar goings-on in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn nearly 100 years later: see blog entry. The small local shops are being put out of business by this new arrival – and the owner wants to buy their premises to expand his shop.

He looks at the finances of work: the store offers accommodation to the young unmarried female employees – it’s rather horrible but Zola explains that otherwise the women could not earn enough to live on, and that that is why so many of them are forced to become prostitutes.

My only problem with the book was that the translation I was reading (via Penguin) was absolutely terrible, and eventually I lost patience and had to start reading it in French. So that above is my own translation. Here is one small example: a customer buys ‘a muff and some gathers for herself, stockings for her daughter.’ Gathers? What are gathers? It is obvious from the French that ‘frills’ would be a better word choice. This is repeated over and over. The translator has ‘lorries’ driving round 1860s Paris: the French word is camion, which would be lorry today, but in 1883 surely wagon or cart would be a better choice. These vehicles are horse-drawn, they are NOT lorries.

The colour picture is The Dressmakers Studio by Edouard Vuilliard from The Athenaeum website.

Window display of silk fabrics from the McCord Museum in Canada

Zola featured on the blog before, but as a defender of Dreyfus in the Robert Harris book An Officer and a Spy.