The Belly of Paris (50 page)

3
.
POSITIVISM IN ART:
At this time, the mid-nineteenth century, positivism was a very trendy idea and one that had greatly influenced Zola. It was originated by Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who is sometimes considered the first sociologist. Positivism holds that knowledge cannot be attained through such intellectual pursuits as metaphysics and theology but only through scientific observation.

4
.
SAINT-HONORÉ CAKES, SAVARINS, FLANS, FRUIT TARTS, PLATTERS OF BABAS:
These pastries, though still easily found, were invented in mid-nineteenth-century Paris and were the height of culinary fashion at the time the novel is taking place. Saint-Honoré was, according to legend, invented in 1846 in the Paris shop of a celebrated pastry maker named Chiboust. It is a ring of puff pastry topped with little cream puffs filled with pastry cream and topped with caramel. Chiboust's great invention, chiboust cream, which is pastry cream blended with meringue and set with gelatine, fills the center.

Savarins were invented at about the same time, in the Paris pastry shop of the Julien brothers. Their origin was the medieval Slavic cylindrical yeast cake known as a babka, which traveled to Alsace, where it became a yeast cake with dried fruit soaked in kirsch syrup, lost its
k
, and became baba. In Paris the dried fruit was eliminated, the yeast cake was baked in a small ring mold, the cake was soaked in rum syrup, and it was renamed after the great nineteenth-century French food writer Brillat-Savarin.

5
.
FROMAGE BLANC:
Fromage blanc is a fresh cheese made from milk, barely fermented so that it has at most the thickness of yogurt.

6
.
GRAS-DOUBLE:
A particular beef tripe. Tripe is made from the stomachs of ruminating animals—that is, cud-chewing animals such as cows and sheep, but also deer. Ruminators digest their food, usually grass, by regurgitating it through a series of stomach chambers until it reaches the fourth chamber, the abomasum, where it is finally broken down by gastric juices. All four chambers produce tripe, though the last, the most important to the animal, is the least important to us. The most popular tripe, the honeycombed, comes from the second chamber, the recticulum. Gras-double is made from the first chamber, called in French
the fame
and in English the paunch or rumen. The smooth exterior and rough interior provide two very distinct textures, thus double tripe, gras-double.

7
.
“HE'LL GO BACK TO THE PENAL COLONY, YOU KNOW”:
The word Zola uses here is
le bagne
, which originally referred to prison ships on which the navy kept as many as six thousand convicts off the coast of France. But after 1852, when the emperor Napoleon establishd the penal colony of French Guiana, it became known as
le bagne
and prisoners or former prisoners of French Guiana became known as
les bagnards
.

8
.
IN THE CLASSICAL POSE OF LEDA:
In Greek mythology Leda was the daughter of an Aetolian king and the wife of a king of Sparta. Zeus came to her in the form of a swan and raped her, a union that resulted in Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux. Since she also lay with her husband that night, there were varying theories about who was the father of whom. The legend of Leda and the swan became a popular Renaissance motif, painted by Michelangelo and Correggio, among many others. The swan, in what Zola calls “the classical pose,” is usually portrayed between Leda's legs, and there was always an inference, not missed by Zola and probably not by his contemporary readers, of an imminent sexual act.

9
.
TO THE GAÎTÉ:
At the time the novel is taking place, this popular theater was already nearly a century old. It was one of a number of theaters along boulevard du Temple, known as the
boulevard du crime
because of the melodramas that were popular there. This is the setting of Marcel Carné's brilliant 1945 film,
Les Enfants du Paradis
.

10
. restaurant philippe: See the note for Compas d'Or, page 313.

11
.
PROMISED THEM AN OMELETTE AU LARD:
An omelette with diced salt pork.

12
.
CHRISTMAS EVE DINNER:
Christmas Eve is called
réveillon
, and it is traditional in France to eat a huge feast to usher in Christmas after midnight Mass.

1
.
WHAT HAPPENED IN ′93:
In 1793 the French Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror, when a Committee of Public Safety was formed to prevent any undoing of the gains made by the Revolution. Under the leadership of Robespierre and the hébertistes a sweeping program of arrests was undertaken. Under the Reign of Terror only two trial outcomes were permitted— either acquittal or execution. Some forty thousand people were executed, including many clergy and finally Robespierre himself in July 1794, which marked the end of the Reign of Terror.

2
.
ONE PER ARRONDISSEMENT:
One of a number of anachronisms in this book. Paris is divided into twenty sections called arrondissements, but this division was done in 1861 and the book takes place in 1858.

3
.
MARRONS GLACéS THAT HAVE FALLEN TO PIECES:
Candied chestnuts. The trick is to keep the chestnut whole while peeling it and then slowly cook it in sugar syrup without it crumbling. They are expensive because so many of them break, and then there is nothing to be done with the pieces except sell them cheaply to children.

4
.
JEAN GOUJON'S NYMPHS:
Goujon (c. 1510-68) was a leading architect and sculptor of the French Renaissance. His most famous works were in Paris, where he worked with the architect Pierre Lescot. These include the sculptures for the western wing of the Louvre and the fountain at square des Innocents. Goujon did six nymphs and other decorations. Not all of the fountain, built between 1547 and 1550, remains in the square, and some of Goujon's bas-relief decorations have been moved to the Louvre.

5
.
BARLEY SUGAR:
Sucre d'orge
, a hard candy that was already two centuries old at this point. It is brown in color and resembles a hard caramel. Originally it was actually flavored with barley.

6
.
CULS DE SINGE:
Literally monkey bottoms, this is a slang term that shows up in many ways in France, usually for objects with grooves that recede
toward the center. It is a type of military insignia, a woodworking term, a type of chair, and, in this case, a melon.

7
.
“RAUCOURT”:
Raucourt, annatto, or achiote is a pod from a tropical tree, the raucou tree, with small pebblelike seeds inside that give off a reddish orange dye. The first recorded use of annatto was by the Carib Indians, who rubbed it on their bodies to greet Columbus, and because of this, native Americans for centuries were called redskins, or
peaux-rouges
, as is sometimes still said in France. Today it is widely used in the Caribbean to make rice yellow. It was initially imported to Europe to give a reddish tint to chocolate, but by the eighteenth century it was being used in Europe to give a deeper color to cheeses and butters. It is the source of the color in most deep orange cheeses. It is a nearly natural process because annatto contains the same carotene, bixin, as is produced by cattle grazing on rich grasses. But in the wintertime in northern Europe, cattle are given feed, which does not allow them to produce the pigment, and butter and cheeses made from winter milk are very pale. The deeper color of spring and summer was correctly associated with richer milk, but butter and cheese producers made their products look richer in winter by the addition of just the right touch of annatto.

8
.
BONDONS … GOURNEYS:
Bondon is a soft cheese made of cow's milk from Pays de Bray, Normandy. It is a fairly rich cheese, 45 percent fat, molded but not cooked or pressed, and shaped like a small roll. Gourney is also a very soft molded cheese, often mixed with herbs.

9
.
“TÉTES-DE-MORT”:
Dead heads.

10
.
THE STATUE ON THE COLONNE DE JUILLET:
This is the statue of the Spirit of Liberty, sometimes referred to as the Spirit of July, or Juillet, after July 14, 1789, when the Bastille prison was overtaken by a popular uprising. The Bastille, which was later torn down except for a few stones that remain as a monument, was located several blocks closer to the Seine. The place de la Bastille was actually built in 1803, and the column on which July is perched was built in 1830 to commemorate the 504 people killed in a three-day uprising that year that ousted Charles X for Louis-Philippe; 196 more who died in 1848 were later added to the memorial.

11
.
THE WHITE SHIRT AND VELVET CAP CROWD:
This appears to be an anachronism referring to people dressed this way who went to working-class demonstrations against the empire and disrupted by damaging property. It
was widely thought that they worked for the government and were providing the troops with an excuse for violent repression. The problem is that this was happening in 1869, more than ten years after the action of this novel. But Zola is clearly suggesting that this crowd was infiltrated by government stooges.

12
.
MORNY:
See note 13 on page 318.

13
.
GOT INTO A CAB:
A fiacre, a four-wheeled coach pulled by two horses.

1
. an extremely unpopular tax: The unpopular tax was a special pension that the emperor had asked to be paid to General Charles-Guillaume Cousin-Montauban. The emperor had awarded him the title comte de Palikao after his victory at Palichaio, near Bejing, in 1860. The legislature opposed this giveaway, and this was the beginning of a popular movement that, coupled with the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, would lead to the overthrow of the empire. But Zola has stepped a little out of time. The novel takes place from 1858 to 1859. But the furor over the general's pension did not take place until 1862.