Mouret branch
Octave Mouret
Entrepreneur, department store magnate
Son of François Mouret and Marthe Rougon, arriving in Paris from Plassans with southern charm and unashamed ambition. His education in Pot-Bouille — the bourgeois apartment building on the Rue de Choiseul where he lodges — is an immersion in the hypocrisies and hidden lives of the Parisian middle class, in which he both participates and observes. He uses women as instruments of social advancement without compunction, while working his way up through the drapery trade. In Au Bonheur des Dames he reaches his full expression: the great department store he builds, one of the first of its kind, is an engine for understanding and exploiting female desire — cheaper goods in greater variety, temptation on every counter, the thrill of spending made irresistible. He is enormously successful and largely unscrupulous about the small traders he ruins. His one genuine surprise is Denise Baudu — the shop girl who refuses to be dazzled by him, who sees through his methods and will not yield to them, and whom he ends by genuinely loving. She is the only thing he cannot buy or manipulate his way to obtaining.
Fils de François Mouret et de Marthe Rougon, il arrive à Paris du Midi avec charme et ambition. Son passage dans l'immeuble de Pot-Bouille lui donne son éducation parisienne — hypocrisies bourgeoises, liaisons instrumentalisées, ascension professionnelle. Dans Au Bonheur des Dames il bâtit un grand magasin comme machine à exploiter le désir féminin. Il réussit tout — jusqu'à Denise Baudu, la seule qu'il ne puisse ni acheter ni manipuler.
Handsome, charming, with the easy confidence of a man who has always succeeded with women and with business — and who has never, until Denise, had reason to doubt that confidence.
Handsome, charming, with the easy confidence of a man who has always succeeded with women and with business — and who has never, until Denise, had reason to doubt that confidence.
Family & Relationships
- Child Marthe Rougon
- Child François Mouret
- Sibling Abbé Serge Mouret
- Sibling Désirée Mouret
- Lover Denise Baudu — He pursues her relentlessly; she refuses until he truly loves her; they marry.