The Vatard Sisters
The Bobino Theatre. A dry-point illustration by Jean-François Raffaëlli, taken from the illustrated edition of
Les Sœurs Vatard
(Ferroud, 1909).
Brendan King is a freelance writer, reviewer and translator with a special interest in late nineteenth
-
century French fiction. He recently completed his Ph.D. on the life and work of J.
-
K. Huysmans.
His other translations for Dedalus are
Là-Bas, Parisian Sketches
,
Marthe, The Cathedral, Stranded
and
Against Nature
.
He also edited the Dedalus edition of Robert Baldick’s
The Life of J.-K. Huysman.
To Émile Zola
From his fervent admirer and devoted friend.
The Vatard Sisters
Although
Les Sœurs Vatard
(
The Vatard Sisters,
1879) was J.-K. Huysmans’ second published novel and his third published work, in one key respect it represents the true start of his professional career as a writer in that it was the first of his books to be published independently, rather than at his own expense. Émile Zola, to whom the book was fulsomely dedicated, was instrumental in this new arrangement having introduced Huysmans to Georges Charpentier, who had been Zola’s own publisher since 1873. Urged on by his best-selling author, Charpentier somewhat grudgingly accepted this audacious new novel by a controversial young writer, who was already being seen as the most dynamic of those who grouped themselves round the ‘master’ and who formed the core of the Naturalist movement. The fact that
The Vatard Sisters
appeared in the distinctive yellow cover of Charpentier’s firm was a clear sign not just that Huysmans had officially arrived as a writer, it also cemented his position publicly with Zola and the Naturalists, a fact not lost on contemporary reviewers of the time hostile to the new movement.
The background to the novel, the atelier or workshop of a book bindery, was one that Huysmans had been familiar with from an early age. A year after his father died in 1856, his mother, Malvina, had married Jules Og, a Protestant businessman who in 1858 invested in a bindery owned by Auguste Guilleminot and Huysmans’ grandfather, Jules Badin. The bindery was conveniently placed, being on the ground floor of 11 rue de Sèvres, the same building in which Malvina now lived, her parents having an apartment there. As a child, Huysmans was not allowed into the bindery during working hours, but at night he would often lie awake listening to the thudding of the presses and the raucous singing of the women who worked there. Following Og’s premature death in 1867, his share in the bindery passed to Huysmans’ mother, and on her death in 1876, to Huysmans himself. During the 1880s the bindery was something of a financial liability for Huysmans: he became increasingly anxious about the possibility of bankruptcy and eventually sold his share in the business altogether in 1892.
Although Huysmans was not involved in the day-to-day running of the bindery, he would nevertheless have been acquainted with its general workings, its décor, and its personnel. Given the contemporary trend of representing working class life in fiction, especially among Naturalists who relied heavily on documentation and close observation in order to create an illusion of verisimilitude, it was only natural that when Huysmans was looking around for a subject for his next novel he should have turned his attention to a trade that was literally under his nose.
One of the first references to the writing of
The Vatard Sisters
occurs in December 1876, in a letter to the Belgian writer Camille Lemonnier, in which Huysmans talks of “preparing the foundations of my new novel.” A couple of months later, in mid-February 1877, he revealed that things were beginning to take shape:
I’m working, working, working, at the moment I’m dissecting a young female worker in a book bindery who is preserving her maidenhead for every reason except modesty. I want to make it into a very thorough, realistic study…but it’ll require writing a long novel and I’m only on the third chapter…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Camille Lemonnier
, 15 February 1877)
But finding the time to write was not always easy. Not only did he have a full-time job, he was also trying to make a name for himself by publishing pieces of journalism whenever he could. All this encroached on his time, as he complained to the Belgian poet and journalist Théodore Hannon:
You ask if my novel is progressing—hmmm! I’ve got three chapters done, but I’m always being interrupted by articles, though I hope to get it finished by the end of the year. I think there will be some things in it that will amuse you: among other things, a funfair, with parades, stalls, and a jostling crowd…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 27 February 1877)
Huysmans had become friends with Hannon around the time of the publication of
Marthe
in 1876, and for the next few months, in a series of letters, he kept him abreast of developments in the novel, which he had now provisionally entitled
Désirée
:
I’m still labouring away on my novel, and feel anxious and satisfied with it by turns. I think it’ll be a nice little ditty that’ll be one in the eye for the bourgeoisie…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 7 April 1877)
In the mean time, nothing new here, I’m labouring and belabouring away with a vengeance—I’m still dipping into my novel and splashing about in very simple settings—but finally, little by little, the chapters are getting longer and settling down one next to the other. Except that, by thunder, there are days when one gets bogged down with a phrase or when the words don’t come…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 20 April 1877)
I’m labouring, belabouring and slogging away, I’m harnessed into a chapter so fearfully perverse it’s a pleasure! I’m sketching out my Impressionist painter, a master of debauchery…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 10 July 1877)
In this last letter, Huysmans goes on to quote an extract that appears in Chapter IX of the published book, in effect almost halfway through. However, shortly after this he came to a halt and complained that he was unable to write. According to Henry Céard this was because Huysmans felt uncomfortable about describing the bindery that he nominally owned in such frank and unflattering terms, but in letters to other friends Huysmans gave alternative explanations. To Lemonnier, for example, he hinted that his inability to progress was caused by fear of prosecution:
I’m working without much enthusiasm on my novel, but I’m getting bogged down—if I’m not arrested for writing this book, it’ll be because there’s no God in heaven! It goes without saying that I’m forced to go out on a limb with it, the subject matter demands it.
(
Letter from Huysmans to Camille Lemonnier
, July 1877)
But later the same month, he wrote to Hannon giving a much more prosaic reason, saying that he couldn’t write any more at present because it was impossible to find any medical books with the information he needed “on how
chlorosis
affects an individual with regard to their character”.
Whatever the true cause of this bout of writer’s block, Céard, perhaps a little undiplomatically, mentioned it to Zola and Zola’s piqued outburst set off a whole chain reaction of correspondence:
What are you telling me? That Huysmans is dropping his novel about the women at the bindery? For what reason? It’s simply an excuse for laziness, don’t you think? An inability to do anything because of the heat. But he must work, tell him from me. He is our hope. He doesn’t have the right to drop his novel when the whole group has need of his work.
(
Letter from Émile Zola to Henry Céard
, 16 July 1877)
Céard dutifully informed Huysmans of the master’s displeasure, and in his turn Huysmans vented his annoyance to Hannon:
Zola heaped insults on me in his letter under the pretext that I wasn’t working hard enough! He claimed that I didn’t have the right to do nothing because they were all counting on me etc. Ouf! a cold shower! I’ll have to write to him and reassure him…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 23 July 1877)
A week or so later, Huysmans sent off the promised letter of explanation to Zola:
I’ve been meaning to write to you, my dear Zola, for over a month, but then…but then…I was ashamed to admit to you that I’d done nothing, so I put off my letter to a day when, without too much of a lie, I could say to you, I’m working. And now is that time! Not very much, but it’s going. I am very undecided, very disconcerted, not at all sure if my novel is worth anything, bogged down in a devilishly tricky subject, one so simple it terrifies me. Enough!…Lazy as I am, up to the moment I have nevertheless done as many pages as
Marthe
, plus ten more, but there’s no action in it, no action at all.
(
Letter from Huysmans to Émile Zola
, July 1877)
Zola’s answer was slightly dismissive, and probably did little to reassure the fears of a man who had taken the manuscript of his first book to be published in Brussels from fear of being prosecuted for obscenity if he published it in Paris:
You are working, that’s the main thing. And how wrong you are to be uneasy in advance, push ahead defiantly with your book without worrying yourself whether it contains any action, whether you’re happy with it, or whether you’ll end up in Sainte-Pélagie prison as a result!
(
Letter from Émile Zola to Huysmans,
3 August 1877)
Whether it was Zola’s sharp rap across the knuckles that had the desired effect or not, Huysmans restarted work on the novel and was soon back once again keeping Hannon informed, though it is clear that the possibility of being prosecuted over the book still weighed on his mind:
I am saddled up again on
Désirée
, which now has this title:
The Vatard Sisters
. It’s progressing, the two bloody sisters are beginning to take shape and maturing in sins and graces.
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 23 August 1877)
Voilà!
—I’m labouring away well enough in the mean time. My Vatard girls are coming along, and I hope that when he comes back Zola will see them almost finished… and that he won’t be too disappointed with them…All the same, my dear friend, it’s a damn thing is a novel, it’s tiring and bloody difficult to do.