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  • Newtonianism, Thermodynamics, and Information Theory in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris
  • Thomas Byron (bio)

In Le Ventre de Paris's struggle pitting the maigres (the "thin") outcasts against the gras (the "fat") bourgeois, it is only a matter of time before Lisa, the paradigm of the gras' excess, comes into direct conflict with her maigre houseguest and brother-in-law, Florent. Her animosity seems to begin as a general uneasiness towards Florent and the inconsistencies between his past and the bourgeois society surrounding him,1 but swells as the neighborhood's gossip feeds her own growing suspicions about Florent's intentions. Eventually, a desire to know overcomes her—she has to visit Florent's bedroom to learn for herself what he is doing:

décidée d'ailleurs à mentir, à dire qu'elle venait s'assurer de la propreté du linge, si Florent remontait. Elle l'avait vu, en bas, trèsoccupé, au milieu de la marée. S'asseyant devant la petite table, elle enleva le tiroir, le mit sur ses genoux, le vida avec de grandes précautions, en ayant grand soin de replacer les paquets de papiers dans le même ordre. Elle trouva d'abord les premiers chapitres de l'ouvrage sur Cayenne, puis les projets, les plans de toutes sortes, la transformation des octrois en taxes sur les transactions, la réforme du système administratif des Halles, et les autres. Ces pages de fine écriture qu'elle s'appliquait à lire l'ennuyèrent beaucoup ; elle allait remettre le tiroir, convaincue que Florent cachait ailleurs la preuve de ses mauvais desseins, rêvant déjà de fouiller la laine des matelas, lorsqu'elle découvrit, dans une enveloppe à lettre, le portrait de la Normande.2

having otherwise decided to lie, to say that she came only to check on the cleanliness of the laundry, if Florent were to come [End Page 195] up. She had seen him down below, very busy, amid the fish market. Taking a seat in front of the little table, she removed the drawer, set it on her knees, emptied it with great care, being sure to put the packets of paper back in the same order. She first found the beginning chapters of the work on Cayenne, then the projects, the plans of all kinds, the transformation of the taxes due upon entering the city into sales taxes, the reform of the administration of Les Halles, and others. The pages of small handwriting that she had to strain to read bothered her; she was about to put back the drawer, convinced that Florent was hiding the proof of his ill-intentioned plans elsewhere, already dreaming of scouring the wool of the mattress, when she discovered, in an envelope, the portrait of La Normande.

To begin at this point in the story is to trace a profound fissure in Zola's society of Les Halles. Implicit in Lisa's rummaging through Florent's drawers is a direct contrast of two visions of an ideal world. On one hand, Lisa's vision of utopia involves a comfortable existence built on daily work, removed from the wild buffetings of fortune and the constant quest for money that plague an Aristide Saccard, for example.3 It is, in effect, the life that she actually leads. For Florent, by contrast, a vision of utopia appears confusedly on the sheets lining his drawer, through his machinations and plots to overthrow the then-current government and establish a new order, post-Empire and, by extension, post-Lisa.4 Unlike Lisa's ideal existence, Florent's is not based in reality. Far from it—his ideal fits within a larger theme of Zola's of the utopian vision as an escape to the imaginary and unrealizable (the "no place" of Thomas More), be it the musings of Maurice Levasseur,5 the political discourse of Etienne,6 the communism-inspired plans of Canon7 or the sketches of Florent8 (among others). The vision of the world to replace the flawed present proves no more than so many castles in the sky. Indeed, inasmuch as utopia means an organization at the level of society in general, the very conflict...

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