Latest English Edition

translator Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. ISBN: 1-55713-066-3. Boston: Sun & Moon Press (Consortium distributors), 1995.

Summary

The Belly of Paris is Les Halles centrales, the enormous (21-acre) market complex built by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s. Into it flowed great rivers of vegetables, cheeses, butter, fish and meats, and out of it sewers of blood and putrefaction.

In this third volume of the Rougon-Macquart series, available in the U.S. for the first time, Zola describes both with typical hypnotic exhaustiveness.

Escaping from undeserved exile on Devils Island, the starving quondam scholar Florent finds the markets occasionally seductive but more often repellent. From the moment he arrives, he is caught in what his friend the artist Claude Lantier (from La Confession de Claude) calls the Battle of the Fat and the Thin being waged between the well-fed, self-satisfied petty burghers and the hungry, envious lower classes.

Gradually he takes up with the local Socialists, who are more at home in bars than on the revolutionary streets.

Commentary

One of Zola's own favorites, La Ventre de Paris is a brilliant exposition of one man's fragmentation and an often painful indictment of those who live innocent of infamy or praise.

Many find the long catelogues of produce, both fresh and foul, rather trying, as well as the long chapter divisions (only five throughout 397 pages).Nonetheless, a good read.

Last Updated January 29, 2003