(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 5 September 1877)
Wait and see, my friend, the Naturalist school is going to cop it one of these days, get a right beating. It will probably kick off with
The Vatard Sisters
—I’ll be amazed if I’m not dragged before the magistrate’s bench.
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 19 September 1877)
As the book neared its conclusion the issue of who was going to publish it obviously became more pressing. Perhaps not unnaturally, given Zola’s connection, Huysmans had early on got the notion that Charpentier should publish it. Indeed, as far back as December 1876, when he’d barely even begun the book, Huysmans had mentioned the possibility to Lemonnier:
Charpentier, the publisher, has asked me for a copy of
Marthe
, and I’m going to see him—he seems very friendly and very intelligent and I hope to conclude a deal with him for a novel…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Camille Lemonnier
, December 1876)
Almost a year later, with the end of the book in sight, he returned more seriously to the idea and began to make plans. He told Hannon that he had only two more chapters to write before it was finished, and that he just needed a couple of months to “polish things up”, to “give Céline and Désirée a bit of a scrub” (12 November 1877), before the book was ready to be shown to Zola and Charpentier. A month later he wrote again, saying the book was effectively finished:
I’m writing to you absolutely worn out and exhausted, I’ve done such a sweatload of work these past few days that I’ve managed to get the Vatard Girls up on their legs. It’s done. I’ve still got a month to retouch and to recopy, but these two fantastic gals are finally up on their pins. All they need is to be cleaned up…and they can be handed to Zola, who I saw last Monday, and who is expecting them.
When will the book appear? As to that…soon I hope… if Madame Charpentier authorises it. I’m in a cold sweat just thinking about the diplomatic buttering-up I’ll have to do…Anyway, we’ll see…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 3 December 1877)
Huysmans was right to be sceptical: as it turned out, it would be over a year before the book was published. The reason for the delay was partly Charpentier’s sense of caution: even though he’d had a huge success with
L’Assommoir
, which had been violently abused in the conservative press as “pornographic”, he had no intention of acquiring a reputation for publishing indecent or obscene material, and wasn’t going to rush into print with anything that was overly controversial. Another factor was Huysmans’ own reputation. He was already gaining a name for himself as one of the more extreme and opinionated of the young writers who surrounded Zola, and this had inevitably made him a number of enemies in the press and the world of letters. As Huysmans told Hannon, after informing him that Zola had the manuscript of
The Vatard Sisters
and was going to show it to Charpentier, one of the problems he faced was that Alphonse Daudet and his wife, who were friends of, and published by, Charpentier, were both opposed to seeing Huysmans published by the firm, as was Marguerite Charpentier, the publisher’s wife. Huysmans added, however, that Zola had told him that if Charpentier listened to them, he would “
make it a personal matter
” (14 January 1878).
By March, nothing had been resolved and Huysmans’ sense of annoyance is tangible when, in a letter of that month, he told Hannon that “Charpentier had accepted Léon Hennique’s novel after reading only ten pages!!” For the next few months an increasingly exasperated Huysmans informed Hannon of the book’s progress—or lack of it—with the publisher, who he abused contemptuously as a
galapiat
(good-for-nothing) and “a beast”.
I’m still in the same state with Charpentier. It’s desperate. I’m in a black mood all the time. It’s making me ill!
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 1 April 1878)
Still no response from Charpentier, It’s so annoying…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, April 1878)
I still haven’t heard any news. Charpentier is ill in bed, which doesn’t do me any favours. I’m still very depressed about the whole thing and ready to pack literature in for good if this fails.
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 15 April 1878)
Finally, in June, Huysmans got a positive response and immediately wrote to Zola to tell him:
I went to Charpentier’s. He’s swallowed the egg-nog of the first two chapters, but still hasn’t cracked the peppercorns of the chapters that follow. I asked him when he would finish reading it. He replied: “Soon, but all the same it makes no difference to you. It’s a done deal—
I’m taking the book
and sending it to the printers in September.” There’s the good news. I wanted to tell you straight away…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Émile Zola
, June 1878)
Huysmans also wrote a similar letter to Edmond de Goncourt, likewise thanking him for his influence with the publisher. Although Zola’s involvement in Charpentier’s decision is clear, it is less certain what part Goncourt played. If Huysmans had asked Goncourt to support his cause with the publisher, Goncourt doesn’t mention it in his
Journal
and there is no letter from Goncourt to Charpentier on the subject either. Nevertheless, Huysmans had seen Goncourt in March 1878, and Goncourt had dined frequently with Charpentier during this period of indecision on the publisher’s part, so it is certainly possible that he put in a word on behalf of Huysmans’ book. Whatever Goncourt’s actual rôle, Huysmans diplomatically wrote to thank him:
My dear Master, Charpentier has finally given me his reply. He is taking my novel. Thanks to the welcome support you have offered them, my little bindery women are now assured of promenading in booksellers’ windows in their yellow dresses come the autumn. I wanted to tell you this good news knowing that it would please you and I take this occasion to express to you all my gratitude and reaffirm my heartfelt admiration to the great artist that you are.
(
Letter from Huysmans to Edmond de Goncourt
, June 1878)
But although Charpentier had formally accepted the book for publication, he still seemed to be dragging his heels. By the autumn of 1878, the date by which the novel was supposed to have been published, it was still only in the proof stage:
I’m wading through printer’s proofs at the moment and I’m unspeakably disgusted with my book. The job of stitching it up I’m doing at the moment sickens me—I’m straightening club-footed phrases, I’m putting plasters over the hernias of my sentences, amputating repetitions—ah, as I said to Hannon, repetitions are the real syphilis—you plaster over them in one place and they spring up somewhere else!
(
Letter from Huysmans to Émle Zola
, 10 September 1878)
To Hannon himself, Huysmans made his usual complaints about how dissatisfied he was with his finished work:
I can see from the proofs that
The Vatard Sisters
is a long bloody way from being a masterpiece. It’s full of clumsy, halting sentences that it’s now too late to fix, and that depresses me greatly. In essence, I haven’t made it what I could have made it…
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 12 October 1878)
Although Huysmans completed the proofs in November or December, there was still no imminent movement on the part of Charpentier to publish the book. This unsatisfactory situation dragged on and in February Huysmans was once again complaining loudly to Hannon:
I am more and more depressed about
The Vatard Sisters
. The book is ready, bound and heaped up in magnificent piles at the publisher’s. All the employees at Charpentier’s are ecstatically enthusiastic, and are having great fun reading passages out loud. Yes, but if I have the whole firm counting on the book’s success, I have one thing against me: Madame Charpentier. She fears its effect on her salon…she fears the roasting it’ll get from the press! Certainly there’s no doubt that Madame Charpentier would stifle the book if she could, she’d prefer a flop to a riotous success.
(
Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon
, 10 February 1879)
However, not even the publisher’s wife could delay the book forever and on 25 February Huysmans was telling Hannon that the book would appear the next day, though he expected to be pilloried for it: “They’re going to shoot me down in flames!” There was nothing to be done now but await a response from the critics, the public and even his own relatives: “I’m going to be a disgrace to those fine upstanding bourgeois!”
The Vatard Sisters
was finally published on the 26 February 1879. The book was reviewed more extensively than its predecessor and though it attracted a lot of negative press, this did not seem to harm its sales: a second edition was issued after just two days, and between 1879 and 1880 the book went through five editions. Although such sales represented only a small fraction of those that Émile Zola’s novels achieved—by way of comparison Zola’s
L’Assommoir
(1877) sold 50,000 copies in its first month—it was nevertheless an unprecedented success in terms of Huysmans’ career as a writer so far.
One of the first notices of the book was by its dedicatee, though Zola’s polemical article wasn’t so much a review as a critical defense of Naturalist ideals that used Huysmans’ novel to illustrate his own thesis:
I wish those fabricators of novels and inane melodramas about the common people would take a notion to read
The Vatard Sisters
by J.-K. Huysmans. There, they would see the common people as they really are. No doubt they would cry “what filth!”, they would affect expressions of disgust, they would talk about having to turn the pages at arm’s length. But this little show of hypocrisy is always amusing. It’s a general rule that literary hacks always insult proper writers. I’d even be very upset if they didn’t insult M. Huysmans. Deep down, I’m not worried: they
will
insult him.
Nothing is more simple than this book. Its subject isn’t even a news item, because a news item requires drama. They are two sisters, Céline and Désirée, two workers in a bindery, who live with their dropsical mother and their armchair philosopher father. Céline “lives it up”. Désirée, who is keeping herself for her future husband, has a chaste relationship with a young worker, then she breaks up with him at the end and marries someone else; and that’s it, that’s the book. This bareness of plot is typical. Our contemporary novel is simplifying itself, out of a hatred of plots that are over-complicated and which don’t ring true…A page of human life: that’s enough to hold one’s interest, to present deep and lasting emotions. The most trivial record of human experience grabs you by the guts more forcefully than any contrivance of the imagination. It’ll end up giving us simple studies, without sudden plot twists or denouements, the account of a year in someone’s life, the story of a love affair, the biography of a character, notes taken from life and arranged in order.
Here, we see the power of the record of human experience. M. Huysmans has scorned all picturesque arrangement. There is no straining of the imagination: scenes of working class life and Parisian landscapes are tied together by the most ordinary story in the world. And yet, the novel has an intense life, it grabs you and impassions you, it raises provoking questions, it is hot with struggle and triumph. Where does this flame come from? From the truth of its representations and the personality of its style, nothing more. All modern art is here.
(
Le Voltaire
, 4 March 1879)
Zola’s influence on the contemporary reception of
The Vatard Sisters
was significant. Up to this point in his career as a writer, Huysmans was still relatively unknown outside a small, specialised readership (a number of reviewers had difficulty with his name, referring to him variously as J.-R. Huysmans, Huismans, and Huysmanns), so the association with Zola brought a great deal more publicity and attention to the book than it would otherwise have received. However, Zola’s efforts to praise the novel as an embodiment of the Naturalist method inevitably did as much harm as good in certain quarters, and a large proportion of those who reviewed the book used the opportunity to attack Zola and Naturalism in the process. Louis Ulbach, for example, who had violently attacked Zola’s
Thérèse Raquin
when it appeared in 1868, made an explicit reference to Zola’s comments, using them as a launchpad to attack the Naturalists in general and Huysmans in particular:
With a formidable irony Zola wishes that M. Huysmans, the author of
The Vatard Sisters,
be “dragged through the gutters of criticism, that he be denounced to the police by his colleagues, and hear the mob of the envious and the impotent screaming at his heels. It’ll be then that he’ll feel his power.”
Zola flatters his disciple too much and compromises him by dedicating him to martyrdom…As for the gutters of criticism, the author of
L’Assommoir
evidently seems to believe they’re neither very clean nor very healthy. If they are infected, it is not by critics, but by Naturalists.
(
Revue Politique et Littéraire,
8 March 1879)
Ulbach rejected Zola’s description of the book as a simple story about two girls. For him it was nothing more than “a transcript of their physical needs. When they’ve had their fill, the author closes his book, loads it onto the rubbish cart, and that is that.” Ulbach then countered Zola’s claim that “All modern art is here” by noting that Charpentier had published a string of writers, such as Théophile Gautier, Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Saint-Beuve, who represented a considerable section of modern art, and that
The Vatard Sisters
had no relationship to them whatsoever.
The reviewer in
Le Siècle
also used Zola as a kind of critical yardstick, mostly in order to make Huysmans’ novel seem even more extravagant and crude by comparison:
M. Huysmans is a wild representative of the Naturalist school; it is difficult to push infatuation and advocacy of it any further. From M. Zola, M. Huysmans has copied only the minor part, the mean, vulgar part. Wide open horizons scare him. In reading
The Vatard Sisters
one asks oneself if the author hasn’t wanted to make a caricature of the genre.
L’Assommoir
is pale and colourless beside the crudity of language in
The Vatard Sisters
. The opening chapter, which introduces us to a book bindery workshop is a masterpiece of the genre. Good God, what language! And what a literature! It makes you shudder. Which won’t stop
The Vatard Sisters
from selling a considerable number of copies. On the contrary!