7.39 Zola — L'Assommoir — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the opening of Émile Zola 's L'Assommoir and the scene in which Coupeau courts Gervaise in a Paris bar. Follow Zola's naturalism: the crowded street, the bar, the still that makes the alcohol, all described as forces acting on the characters. Read popular Parisian speech of the 1850s, which Zola put into the narration itself, not only into the dialogue. Recognise the modest ideal that Gervaise states, and the threat that the novel will make of it. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English elle tamponna un mouchoir sur sa bouche, pour étouffer les légers cris qui lui échappaient. she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth to stifle the little cries that escaped her. et elle fouillait les angles écartés, les coins sombres, noirs d’humidité et d’ordure, and she searched the out-of-the-way corners, the dark nooks black with damp and filth, Lentement, d’un bout à l’autre de l’horizon, elle suivait le mur de l’octroi, Slowly, from one end of the horizon to the other, she followed the toll wall, à la porte des deux marchands de vin qui enlevaient leurs volets, des hommes ralentissaient le pas at the doors of the two wine shops that were taking down their shutters, men slowed their pace Le comptoir énorme, avec ses files de verres, sa fontaine et ses mesures d’étain, s’allongeait à gauche en entrant The enormous counter, with its rows of glasses, its fountain and its pewter measures, stretched along the left as you came in La mâchoire inférieure saillante, le nez légèrement écrasé, His lower jaw jutting, his nose slightly flattened, Prerequisites : 7.38 — this reading follows 7.38 Reading . You read the first chapter of Zola's Germinal in 7.21 Reading ; this novel, written eight years earlier, made his name. The familiar register of 5.21 Vocabulary will help with the dialogue. About this text L'Assommoir (1877) is the seventh of the twenty novels of Zola's Rougon-Macquart , the natural and social history of one family under the Second Empire. It tells the life of Gervaise Macquart, a laundress from the south who comes to Paris with her lover Lantier and their two children. Abandoned by him, she marries a zinc-worker, Coupeau; she works hard and prospers; after a fall from a roof leaves Coupeau idle and then drinking, she still opens her own laundry, but the family slowly sinks. An assommoir is a low bar where workers drink spirits; the word comes from assommer , to knock senseless. The novel caused a scandal for its picture of the poor and for its language: Zola wrote the narration in the slang of the Paris working class. It was also his first great success. This lesson gives about 3,500 words: the beginning of the first chapter, in which Gervaise waits for Lantier at the window of a cheap hotel, and the opening of the second, three weeks later, at the bar of père Colombe . Omissions are marked […] . The text is that of the edition published in Paris by Charpentier in 1879, as transcribed in French Wikisource. Reading Zola The window. Gervaise looks out from her hotel on the edge of Paris, and Zola gives the city through her eyes: the slaughterhouses on the right, the hospital being built on the left, and the tax wall, l'octroi , where every morning a crowd of workers pours into Paris, qui, un à un, les dévorait . The city is a monster that eats men; the bars at the corners are its traps. Popular speech in the narration. In the second chapter Zola reports Coupeau's thoughts in his own words, without quotation marks: Quant au vitriol, à l'absinthe et aux autres cochonneries, bonsoir ! Mes-Bottes, a drunken worker, gets the same treatment. This free indirect speech in slang was new in 1877, and it shocked many readers. The still. At the back of the bar stands l'alambic , the copper still that makes the spirits. Zola describes it as a living thing, un travailleur morne, puissant et muet , whose sweat of alcohol could flood the whole of Paris. Gervaise shivers in front of it. It is the true main character of the novel. The ideal. Gervaise asks for little: to work in peace, to have bread, a clean place to sleep, to bring up her children, not to be beaten, and to die in her own bed. Read it carefully: every item on the list will be taken from her in the course of the novel. Reading it a second time, part by part The night. Gervaise has waited for Lantier until two in the morning; for the first time he has not come home. She looks at the poor furnished room and the two sleeping children. The street. At the window she watches the slaughterhouses, the hospital, the tax wall and the stream of workers entering Paris. Coupeau. A young zinc-worker who lodges in the hotel comes in, sees that Lantier is out, and offers kindly to help her. The workers. Some workers stop at the wine shops before work and stay there. Three weeks later. Lantier has left her. Coupeau has persuaded Gervaise to eat a brandied plum with him at the Assommoir of père Colombe . He asks her again to live with him; she says no, calmly, for sensible reasons. The ideal and the still. They agree that drink is ugly. Gervaise describes her modest ideal, looks at the still and shivers; Coupeau promises he would never beat her, because he never drinks. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. L'Assommoir Gervaise had waited for Lantier until two in the morning. Then, shivering all over from having stayed in her camisole in the sharp air at the window, she had dozed off, thrown across the bed, feverish, her cheeks soaked with tears. For a week now, on leaving the Two-Headed Calf, where they ate, he had been sending her to bed with the children and not reappearing until late in the night, saying that he was looking for work. That evening, while she was watching for his return, she thought s