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Updated: June 29, 2025
I once asked him if he thought France, under the present bourgeois régime, likely to return to a healthier taste in literature, and received as answer the assurance that since coarse and sordid realism could go no further than L'Assommoir, a reaction must set in. From the filthiness of low life, I dare say, but how about the elegant fleshliness of the previous school?
The customers could watch its functioning, long-necked still-pots, copper worms disappearing underground, a devil's kitchen alluring to drink-sodden work men in search of pleasant dreams. L'Assommoir was nearly empty at the lunch hour. Pere Colombe, a heavy man of forty, was serving a ten year old girl who had asked him to place four sous' worth of brandy into her cup.
One need only think over his books and his subjects to be convinced of this: "L'Assommoir" and drunkenness; "Nana" and harlotry; "Germinale" and strikes; "L'Argent" and money getting and losing in all its branches; "Pot-Bouille" and the cruel squalor of poverty; "La Terre" and the life of the peasant; "Le Debacle" and the decay of imperialism.
Or rather the seductive murderer, the delightful destroyer of peoples! "You people do not know it the way I do. You may have read that admirable book entitled L'Assommoir, but you have not, as I have, seen alcohol exterminate a whole tribe of savages, a little kingdom of negroes alcohol calmly unloaded by the barrel by red-bearded English seamen.
But honest folks shrugged their shoulders. They knew what that meant: ascribing the effects of the peppery fire of l'Assommoir to grief, indeed! At all events, she ought to have called it bottled grief. No doubt at the beginning she couldn't digest Nana's flight.
It is like begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but really, is it a novel, in the sense that 'War and Peace' is a novel, or 'Madame Flaubert', or 'L'Assommoir', or 'Phineas Finn', or 'Dona Perfecta', or 'Esther Waters', or 'Marta y Maria', or 'The Return of the Native', or 'Virgin Soil', or 'David Grieve'? In a certain way it is greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.
The new Republic, meantime, was not Red, not Communistic, not Socialistic, but Republican. During the Revolution of 1848 there had been little intoxication in Paris; but in the twenty-two years that followed, the French had learned to drink absinthe and to frequent such places as "L'Assommoir." All accounts speak of the drunkenness in France during the Franco-Prussian war.
"You people do not know it the way I do. You may have read that admirable book entitled L'Assommoir, but you have not, as I have, seen alcohol exterminate a whole tribe of savages, a little kingdom of negroes alcohol calmly unloaded by the barrel by red-bearded English seamen.
Of the Rougon-Macquart series 1,964,000 have been sold; other novels, 764,000; essays and various works bring the total to 2,750,000, approximately. In a word, a few years hence Zola will easily pass 3,000,000. Nana still holds its own as the leader of the list, 215,000; La Terre, 162,000; L'Assommoir, 162,000.
But when she reached l'Assommoir, the fear of receiving the drubbing herself if she badgered her old man suddenly calmed her and made her prudent. The shop was ablaze with the lighted gas, the flames of which were as brilliant as suns, and the bottles and jars illuminated the walls with their colored glass.
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