A fine house

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Book cover of the Charpentier edition

A fine house or the domestic stove (French: Pot-Bouille ) is a novel by Émile Zola and at the same time the tenth part of the Rougon-Macquart cycle . It first appeared in serial form from January to April 1882 in the magazine Le Gaulois . In 1883 the book was published by Charpentier.

The novel offers a picture of bourgeois society in the Second Empire . The restoration efforts under President Mac-Mahon with the attempt to restore the "moral order" in the country inspired Zola to the story. Most of the action takes place in an apartment building on Rue de Choiseul. The original title refers to a stew in which various ingredients simmer together for a long time and alludes to the various residents of the house who serve as representatives of the monarchist moral order.

The novel was adapted as a play by William Busnach in 1883 and premiered at the Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique . Julien Duvivier filmed the work in 1957.

action

The twenty-two-year-old Octave Mouret, who is already familiar to the reader from the novels The Rougon Family and The Conquest of Plassans , moves into the aforementioned apartment building. He has a job in a small nearby fashion store called "Ladies Paradise" . Octave is attractive and charming. He is successful with the ladies and has several affairs with the residents of the house, u. a. with Madame Pichon. His attempt to get closer to his boss, Madame Hédouin, fails and results in his dismissal.

He finds a new job in Auguste Vabre's silk shop, which is on the ground floor of the house. He begins an affair with Auguste's wife, Berte, which lasts for several months. Finally Auguste catches the two of them. A scandal ensues and Octave is laid off, who is employed again in the ladies' paradise. His further fate is described in the novel of the same name.

The appearance of decency in the fine house is only an external one. Different residents have affairs with each other. A marriage was concluded for financial reasons, with the groom being cheated of the dowry. The servants speak ill of their masters. When the lawyer Duverdy seriously injured himself in a suicide attempt, his wife's first concern was not about her injured husband, but about avoiding a scandal. A single pregnant seamstress is expelled from the house. An ominous tenant who visits his rented apartment only once a week to “work” is tolerated until it turns out that he is not meeting a lover there, as is generally assumed. Rather, he is a writer researching a dirty book about the bourgeoisie (Zola himself).

literature

  • Émile Zola: A fine house . Winkler, 1986, ISBN 978-3-538-06597-0 (French, original title: Pot-Bouille . Translated by Gerhard Krüger).
  • Colette Becker, Véronique Lavielle: Émile Zola: Pot-Bouille . In: Connaissance d'Une Oeuvre . tape 44 . Editions Bréal, 1999, ISBN 978-2-7495-2366-8 (French, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • Göran Blix: Property and Propriety in the Second Empire: Zola's Pot-Bouille . In: Excavatio . tape 18 , no. 1-2 , 2003 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pot-Bouille - Whenever the light goes out. In: www.moviepilot.de. Retrieved April 10, 2013 .