No. 7 · 1877
L'Assommoir
The Dram Shop
L'Assommoir is the masterpiece of French Naturalism and one of the great novels of any language about poverty, alcoholism, and the mechanics of moral collapse. Gervaise Macquart arrives in Paris from Plassans as a young woman with her partner Lantier and their two small sons Claude and Étienne, lodging in a cheap hotel in the Goutte d'Or district of northern Paris. When Lantier abandons her for another woman, she is left alone with no money and two children, and proceeds — without drama, steadily, simply by working hard — to build a decent life. She finds work in a laundry; she falls in love with the roofer Coupeau, a good-natured man with steady habits; she marries him. For a few years it works: she opens her own laundry in the Rue Neuve de la Goutte d'Or, she has credit, friends, and the brief, real happiness of a working-class person who has achieved what she wanted. The famous birthday feast — a roast goose, the laundry table crowded with neighbours — is the novel's high-water mark and, in retrospect, the beginning of the end. The turning point is Coupeau's fall from a rooftop. He survives, but the long convalescence — during which Gervaise works double to support them, and Coupeau drinks to manage the boredom and the pain — starts the process that will kill them both. Lantier reappears, with his terrible ease and his endless appetite, and installs himself in their apartment as a lodger who pays nothing and costs everything. The laundry fails. Gervaise begins to drink. Coupeau's alcoholism deepens into something physical and then terminal — his death in the Sainte-Anne asylum from delirium tremens is one of Zola's greatest pieces of controlled horror: the body betraying itself, the room full of voices. Gervaise's death is worse: she starves and deteriorates by inches, ending her days in the stairwell of the same building where she once had a prosperous shop, living under the stairs like vermin. The novel was revolutionary not only in subject but in style — written largely in the slang and register of the working class, a formal choice that scandalized literary Paris and made Zola rich. Nana is a child in the background: the next generation already in formation.
Chef-d'œuvre du naturalisme français. Gervaise Macquart construit patiemment une vie honnête à la Goutte d'Or après l'abandon de Lantier — launderie, mariage avec Coupeau, bonheur ouvrier réel. La chute de Coupeau d'un toit commence la descente : alcoolisme, retour de Lantier parasite, faillite de la boutique, misère progressive. Coupeau meurt de delirium tremens à Sainte-Anne dans une scène d'horreur physique contrôlée. Gervaise meurt de faim dans la cage d'escalier de son immeuble. Roman écrit en argot ouvrier — choix formel révolutionnaire. Nana grandit dans le fond du tableau.
Setting: Paris — Goutte d'Or