No. 11 · 1883
Au Bonheur des Dames
The Ladies' Delight
Au Bonheur des Dames is Zola's great novel of modern capitalism, and also — unexpectedly — one of the most generously ambivalent books he wrote. Octave Mouret, having served his apprenticeship in the bourgeois apartment building of Pot-Bouille, has taken over and transformed the department store he inherited from his first wife. What he is building is something genuinely new: the first modern mass-market retail operation in Paris, inspired by Le Bon Marché and the Grands Magasins du Louvre, but expanded beyond anything that has existed before. Mouret is a genius of consumption. He understands female desire — he says so, and Zola does not entirely disagree — and he builds the store as a machine for exploiting it: fixed prices (the end of haggling, the democratisation of luxury), seasonal sales engineered to manufacture desire and urgency, goods arranged to create temptation at every turn, the pleasure of spending raised to an aesthetic experience. The store expands relentlessly through the novel, buying up and demolishing the surrounding buildings, including eventually the old linen shop of Denise Baudu's uncle, who watches his livelihood disappear across the street in real time. Zola is not simple about this: he does not pretend the old world of the small draper was admirable. Baudu is rigid, paternalistic, and doomed not only by Mouret but by time itself. The store's working conditions are another matter — employees are surveilled, underpaid relative to their effort, dismissed for the slightest infraction, housed in dormitories, their private lives controlled. Into this world arrives Denise Baudu, from Valognes in Normandy, with no connections and two younger brothers to support. She is taken on without enthusiasm, fired for a minor infraction, scrapes through a desperate period, and comes back. She rises on merit alone — not beauty (she is not considered beautiful), not manipulation, not the use of her sex. Mouret offers her everything: a director's position, money, his desire. She refuses all of it until he can offer something he has never offered any woman: genuine love and marriage. Bourdoncle — Mouret's cold, brilliant business partner — advises against her throughout, seeing sentiment as a fatal weakness. He is not entirely wrong. The novel ends with the store at its most triumphant expansion, Denise promoted to a directorship and about to marry Mouret — a conclusion that Zola renders with genuine warmth and without irony. The store has ruined Baudu. It will ruin others. But the old ways were not better; progress is real, even when its mechanism is merciless.
Grand roman du capitalisme moderne. Octave Mouret bâtit un magasin-machine à exploiter le désir féminin : prix fixes, soldes manufacturés, séduction systématique. Le magasin s'agrandit et écrase les petits commerçants, dont l'oncle Baudu de Denise Baudu. Denise, vendeuse normande sans protection, monte par son seul mérite. Mouret lui offre argent, poste, désir — elle refuse tout jusqu'à ce qu'il lui offre un amour sincère. Bourdoncle, associé rationnel, déconseille tout sentiment. Zola n'est pas simple : les vieux commerces n'étaient pas admirables, le progrès est réel même quand il est impitoyable. Fin heureuse, ambivalente.
Setting: Paris — department store