1 - Demon lover or erotic atheist?

Summary

What do men who can command, who are born of rulers, who evince power in act and deportment, have to do with contracts? Such beings are unaccountable, they come like destiny, without rhyme or reason, ruthlessly, bare of pretext.

At least religious atheists could believe that God was dead, but what can the erotic atheist believe?

Though its origins precede the death of Flaubert, Pot-Bouille is at the heart of the rewriting of the Flaubertian novel which we observe after May 1880. Of course, it enjoys a literally and symbolically central location as the tenth novel in Zola's twenty-novel cycle. (As we shall see, there is a particular way in which the final novel, Le Docteur Pascal, responds to the patriarchal concerns voiced and ironised in Zola's own novel of adultery.) Indeed, the opinion of Lionel Trilling and George Steiner that Pot-Bouille is actually the archetypal bourgeois novel can be clarified in the cultural context of the novel of adultery, as well as in the social context of hypocritical bourgeois values. So whereas readings of this novel have traditionally stressed the satire of social norms, an awareness of hitherto uninvestigated intertextual links will highlight its parody of cultural forms, which might be described as ‘authorized transgression’. Zola's novel displaces the focus of the great nineteenth-century tradition of adultery in fiction by returning in a tragicomic (and thus Mozartian) vein to the Don Giovanni theme.