Certainly palates accustomed to the bland pastilles of our fashionable literary confectioners will grimace at the intense flavours of the spicy dish that is the object of this review, but what a strong and bizarre perfume it retains on the mouth! […]
The book is like a series of paintings: still lives, genre scenes, landscapes. To prove it, read for yourselves that stunning description of a funfair, with its odours, its noise, its hubbub and its joyous chaos…You have only to read a page of Huysmans to understand the suppleness, the edginess, the exuberance of the instrument he wields: he doesn’t write with a pen, he uses a glittering paintbrush, dipped in a magic inkwell.
(Journal des Etrangers, 19 March 1879)
Aside from the reviews in the press, Huysmans also received private feedback from two of the “fathers” of the realist school: Gustave Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt. Flaubert wrote a long letter to Huysmans in which he detailed a number of the positive things he found in the book, but he also took the occasion to castigate Huysmans over certain elements that annoyed him in his style and his general approach:
If you weren’t my friend and if I’d thought your book mediocre, I would have just made a banal compliment and that would have been it. But I feel that there is a lot of talent in the book, a lot; it’s a work that is out of the ordinary and very intense. So, I will tell you what I really think. Your dedication, in which you praise me for L’Éducation sentimentale, gave me an insight into the structure of your novel—and its faults—which, on a first reading, I hadn’t noticed. Like L’Éducation, The Vatard Sisters suffers from a falsity of perspective. There is no progression. The reader, at the end of the book, has the same impression he had at the start. Art is not reality. Whatever one writes, one is obliged to choose among the elements it provides… and as a result one must choose wisely. Your descriptions are excellent, your characters well-observed. One says throughout: “Yes, it’s just like that,” and one believes in your fiction, which is brilliantly executed. What struck me the most is the psychology, you analyse like a master. In your next book, give full rein to this facility, which seems natural to you and which is your own.
The basis of your style, its very substance, is very solid. However, it seems to me you don’t have confidence in it. Why did you feel the need to reinforce it with lively and often crude expressions? When it is the author speaking, why do you speak like one of your characters?…When a writer employs a whole pile of words that aren’t in any dictionary, I have the right to rebel against him, because it offends me, it spoils my pleasure…
You have an aesthete say that he finds withered wallflowers more interesting than blooming roses. Why? Neither wallflowers nor roses are interesting in themselves: what is interesting is the manner in which they’re depicted. The Ganges is not more poetic than the Bièvre, but neither is the Bièvre more poetic than the Ganges. Take care, otherwise you’ll fall, like in the time of classical tragedy, into an aristocracy of subjects and an over-refinement of words…You may have reversed the rhetoric, but it is rhetoric nonetheless. It pains me that a writer of your originality should spoil his work with such childish absurdities. Have a little pride, by God, and don’t believe in formulas.
That said, I can only admire your conception of the novel and its development. Vatard père is a real find…and the ending is almost sublime.
(Letter from Flaubert to Huysmans, 7 March 1879)
Despite Flaubert’s attempt to be encouraging in his letter to Huysmans, he was more laconic in his assessment of the book a week later in a note to the actress Edma Roger des Genettes, with whom he frequently corresponded on literary and political subjects:
I recently read three books which they sent me, The Vatard Sisters by Huysmans, one of Zola’s pupils, which I found abominable…
(Letter from Flaubert to Mme Roger des Genettes, 14 March 1879)
In any event, Flaubert’s criticisms were unlikely to have concerned Huysmans, who despite a genuine admiration for L’Éducation sentimentale, was not that taken with Flaubert as a man: “When this great writer hasn’t got a pen in his hand,” he told Lemonnier in a letter of May 1877, “he’s as thick as a butcher.”
Edmond de Goncourt’s comments are interesting not just about the book itself, but for the advice he included about Huysmans’ future direction as a novelist:
Today I have read your book, properly read it, and I’m happy to tell you how artistic I found it, and teeming with admirably written passages. The neutral grey tones of your two girls are traced with the hand of a master realist, and there are beautiful things in the psychological representations of the older girl’s temptations, gratifications, and prosaic carnality…The incidental characters are well sketched and the girl with the toothache is really comical. It’s a powerful book and I offer you my sincerest compliments on it. Now, do you want some advice from an older man? Well, I believe that Germinie Lacerteux, L’Assommoir and The Vatard Sisters have, at the present time, exhausted what I call rabble-literature and I would advise you to choose another social milieu for your next book, a more elevated sphere.
(Letter from Edmond de Goncourt to Huysmans, 24 March 1879)
In his reply, Huysmans acknowledged the advice in such stiffly formal, not to say pompous terms, that it is difficult not to think he had his tongue in his cheek when he wrote it:
As for the advice about “rabble-literature” which the author of La Fille Elisa wished to give to us young writers, we can only appreciate it and tell you how happy we are that the Goncourt Brothers, who we have so much admired and supported when their great talent was being disputed, have been kind enough to repay a little in paternity that which filial literary affection has dedicated to them.
(Letter from Huysmans to Edmond de Goncourt, 2 May 1879)
Huysmans often took a slightly condescending tone when referring to Goncourt in his letters to close friends, but in this instance he seems to have heeded Goncourt’s advice, most notably when he came to write À rebours (1884) a few years later. Although the close public connection with Zola had paid off in terms of generating publicity for the book, Huysmans had no desire to be forever labelled as Zola’s disciple, or to have his books dismissed as sub-standard or diluted versions of Zola’s own. The Vatard Sisters was Huysmans’ last overtly working class novel and his next book did indeed shift its focus to a more elevated social sphere: En ménage (1881) dealt with the experiences of a character who was closely modelled on the author himself and who was recognisably from his own middle-class background.
Note on the translation
This translation is based on the French edition contained in Volume III of J.-K. Huysmans’ Œuvres complètes (Paris: Crès 1928-34). I have also consulted the version of the text published in Joris-Karl Huysmans: Romans (Robert Laffont, 2005), which includes an informative preface and useful notes by Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau. To avoid cluttering the text with intrusive footnotes, explanatory notes are provided at the back of the book for those who wish to consult them.
I
It struck two in the morning.
Céline played that silly joke on her sister that consists in placing your finger near the nose of someone who is falling sleeping and then suddenly waking them up. Désirée banged her left nostril against Céline’s index finger. ‘That’s so stupid!’ she cried.
The women creased themselves laughing.
‘All right, ladies, a little quiet,’ ventured the female supervisor.
Then, like a continual hum suddenly cut across by a flute-like laugh, two high voices, borne up by the whirring of the presses, blared out a patriotic song. The throats of the men, throats ravaged by trente-six, also thundered out, their raucous barks cutting through the shrill cries of the girls:
He died, that soldier sto–ic,
He died for the Re–pub–lic!
‘All right, ladies, a little quiet,’ ventured the female supervisor.
The press howled and panted even louder, the trimmers screeched and the soft swish
of wooden blades over paper could be heard; the sound of little cradles dropping down, throwing bundles onto the table reverberated around, interspersed by the quivering of the gas jets and the drone of the stove. Laughter burst out from one end of the workshop to the other, died down, then started up again in a slow rumble.
‘Ladies, ladies! a little quiet,’ ventured the female supervisor.
Here, the sound of bad colds grumbling; there, nervous giggles being stifled with snorts; here and there, a hawking and clearing of throats cutting through the rising storm of noise.
In one corner, a shrill peal of laughter skittered around, alone, dancing above the tumult. There was a moment’s respite. Then a cat in heat mewed loudly, and a voice on the edge of tears rose above everything:
‘Ladies, I’ve been patient with you all night!’
The thunderclap of an enormous pile of paper falling over abruptly cut off the chorus of jeers directed at the woman. The paper didn’t land on anyone’s head. The singing began again.
‘Come on, ladies…ladies, a little quiet!’ begged the female supervisor.
Then, in a huge crescendo, forty women cried out: ‘We want our pay! We want our pay!’ Then they joined in with the falsetto of one of them, a voice so sharp it seemed as if it would stick into the ceiling:
Have pity on my suff–er–in’,
Go, soldiers, be on your way!
We only serve wine in this inn,
We only serve wine in this inn,
To the brave boys of France!
Paper-knives were being banged against table tops, wine bottles were being passed from mouth to mouth, dripping saliva and wine; one woman, standing and wanting to regain her place, was being crushed in the belly by the backs of her companions’ chairs. Another girl blew her nose, blaring like a trumpet; the neck of a wine bottle broke against the edge of a table, spilling cheap wine over dresses; two women yelled obscene insults at each other, their companions holding them apart by their hair and their tattered dresses, but they twisted and barked, chins thrust out and teeth bared, slavering, hurling themselves at each other, arms raised, the hollows of their armpits exposed beneath their ripped blouses.
There was another moment of respite and one could hear nothing but the muffled tapping of the binding machines in the other room.
The voices of the bindery women were like broken kazoos, droning.
Then one of them brought up that stupid question that was repeated like an endless refrain whenever no one had anything to say:
‘Mam’selle Elisabeth, what’s your heart’s desire?’
Another woman got up stiffly, poked around in the stove and, gripped by the heat, remained bent double, eyelids fluttering, mouth wide open before the flaming hole.
At that moment, voices rasped out:
But whether the branches
Be covered in white
Or the grass is greening in spring,
Rose, I love you
And I always will,
Because love knows no season!
‘Ladies, a little qui…’
It struck seven o’clock, interrupting the supervisor’s sentence.
‘Seven o’clock,’ said a voice, ‘the man I love is in bed.’
Then the workshop got a new lease of life and shouted out pitifully: ‘We want our pay! We want our pay!’
A man came out of a small office adjoining the main room and called out: ‘Madame Eugénie Voblat!’
Cheers rang out: ‘Ah, at last! Not a moment too soon! We’re finally going to get our hands on our dosh!’ And they clapped, eyes sparkling, while the chairs groaned beneath the gallop of their rumps.
The Voblat woman, a mass of flabby flesh, a monster of hideous fatness, made her way through the tables, jostled and disorientated by all the female louts who were grabbing at her smock; she detached herself, scratching at faces at random, and, hoisting up her petticoats, she entered the boss’s office. She came out, shouting: ‘Your turn Angéle!’
The nightshift was coming to an end. The women were shattered by fatigue, worn down by lack of sleep, their heads in their hands. Those who’d got their money hurried off. The paying of wages was going slowly. The boss would call out a name, and another woman would come up. – ‘Madame Teston!’ – ‘Ain’t here.’ – ‘Who’s going to take her money?’ And a friend of the absent woman would run up and ask for her money at the same time, then there’d be furious complaints, stubborn arguments over a sou, the tenacity of a savage obstinately refusing to understand. ‘Stitching was so badly paid!’ ‘The poor were so unfortunate!’ It was the eternal refrain: ‘Oh, M’sieur! couldn’t you give me some small change with the sous?’ Then numbed fingers would let fall what they held and there’d be the flattening of a body on the floor, backside protruding, hands sifting through the dust in search of the fallen money.
The bindery women gathered opposite the water tank next to the pump; some propped against piles of paper, nodding faces as pale as calves’ heads in a butcher’s; others, draped around the pillars of the press, leaned backwards, tickling each other to keep awake, their hiked-up skirts revealing dirty, saggy stockings and hobnail boots. Alone, in her corner, the supervisor was huffing, calculating figures, adding them up with a pencil moistened with saliva, staring, stupefied, at this heap of girls on the floor.
The workshop looked like a scene from a morgue. A cart-load of petticoats seemed to have been emptied there in a pile, and arms and legs teemed beneath this bundle of old clothes. The paying of wages was going slowly. The workers who still remained began undoing their protective oversleeves and smoothing their hair with spit, laughing at the sight of a little girl who was dozing, oblivious, sprawled amid the offcuts of paper, her little finger dangling in the sticky mess of a tub of glue.
The day broke. The supervisor extinguished the gaslights, and through the grilled windowpanes streaked by streams of rain, a pale winter sun, a dawn of a sinister whiteness, spread over the various clusters of women, illuminating pallid cheeks and the tips of tongues that from time to time brushed the grimy corners of their mouths. In dribs and drabs, the bindery women disappeared; soon only two remained, a little girl suffering from an incurable toothache, and a large woman with swaying hips who was checking herself for fleas and sucking at a drop of blood flecking her chapped lips.
The fanlight was opened to let in some fresh air.
A heavy fug was hanging over the room: an unbearable odour of oil and gas, of the sweat of females with dirty underwear, a strong smell like that of goats that had gambolled in the sun, mingled with the putrid emanations of cold meat and wine, acrid cat’s piss, the nauseous stench of the toilets, and the sickly smell of damp paper and buckets of glue.
The supervisor arranged the chairs thrown haphazardly on their sides or on their backs, their legs in the air, their intestines of pale straw sticking up in corkscrews or fleeing in strands through the holes in their bellies. She piled up the riot of stools on the trestles.
It struck nine.
The sun made up its mind to come out. It emerged, getting redder the higher it rose. The dance of dust in the rays of sunlight began, revolving in spirals from floor to windows. The light leaped, gushed, splashing the floor and tables with large spots, ignited with a trembling spark the neck of a carafe and the belly of a bucket, set fire with its glowing red embers to the heart of a peony which was wilting, quivering, in its jar of turbid water, before finally breaking in a large golden wave over the piles of paper which blazed out in raw whiteness against the sooty walls.
II
Of the four women who, apart from the odd escapade, regularly worked in the book binding and pressing workshop of the firm Débonnaire & Co. – ‘the sieve’, as the supervisor called it – three were wise virgins: the first, because she was too old; the second, because she wasn’t very enticing; the third, because she was young and wasn’t stupid. The fourth wasn’t quite so wise, changing her lover every month, though never having more than one or two at the same tim
e. The first was Madame Teston, a married woman, an old nanny-goat of fifty, tall and skinny, who would bleat away, perched on her thin legs, with her craggy face and her ears like pot handles; the second was Madame Voblat, a wicker-hamper of fat, a feast of flesh barely restrained by the stays of her corset, a stupid, self-satisfied lass who would laugh and clutch her sides over the least thing, the mewing of a cat or the buzzing of a fly; the last pair were the two Vatard sisters: Desirée, a scamp of fifteen, a brunette with large, weak eyes and a slight squint, plump but not excessively so, a pleasant, comely girl; and Céline, the dirty stop-out, a big girl with bright eyes and hair the colour of straw, a solid, good-time girl whose blood seethed and danced in her veins, a right minx who’d been running after men since the first stirrings of puberty.
Old Ma Teston had worked at Débonnaire & Co. for more than thirty years. The other three had bawled and suckled there, while their mothers wiped them with one hand and folded reams of paper with the other. In addition to these four workers, about twenty other women, girls and little misses, would assemble at seven o’clock in the morning along the tables and leave, according to the season or the greater or lesser pressure of work, at six, seven, or even eight o’clock in the evening.
These twenty girls, renewing themselves every couple of weeks, formed part of that nomadic population, that coterie of female bookbinders, that strange sisterhood who vie with each other in screaming the most frightful insults, who pour abuse by the bucket-load over one another’s heads; a very curious race of girls who rarely look for relationships outside their own class, who are never truly aroused except by the whiff of wine-soaked breath; a bunch of female reprobates, hatched for the most part in some slum, who by the age of fourteen have already slaked the maiden fires of their flesh behind the wall of the abattoir or down some dark alleyway.