No. 10 · 1882
Pot-Bouille
Pot Luck
Octave Mouret — son of François and Marthe Mouret, arriving from the south with provincial charm and undisguised ambition — takes a room in a gleaming bourgeois apartment building on the Rue de Choiseul. The building's white marble staircase and impeccable facade present the image of respectable middle-class life; behind every door, Zola systematically reveals, there is adultery, hypocrisy, cupidity, and cruelty that its occupants would die rather than acknowledge. Octave both observes and participates: he pursues several of the building's wives (Berthe Josserand, the feckless daughter of an ambitious bourgeois family, becomes his main entanglement), edges his way upward professionally through the drapery shop on the ground floor, and ultimately emerges ready to take over the shop across the street that will become Au Bonheur des Dames. Zola's satire of the bourgeoisie in Pot-Bouille is without mercy: these families are, in his view, no better morally than the working-class characters of L'Assommoir — they simply cover their identical vices with a veneer of respectability and call it virtue. The servants who gather in the internal courtyard — who hear everything through the walls, see everything on the stairs — provide the novel's darkest and funniest commentary.
Octave Mouret arrive à Paris du Midi et s'installe dans un immeuble bourgeois de la rue de Choiseul. La façade blanche cache un monde d'adultères, d'hypocrisies et de calculs sordides. Octave observe et participe — plusieurs liaisons, ascension professionnelle — et en sort prêt à bâtir Au Bonheur des Dames. Satire impitoyable : la bourgeoisie cache exactement les mêmes vices que les ouvriers de L'Assommoir, mais les appelle vertu.
Setting: Paris — bourgeois apartment