2 - The rhythms of performance

Summary

Quand une femme se donne à un homme, ce dernier, s'il était poli, enverrait ses cartes au père et à la mère de sa nouvelle maîtresse, en écrivant au-dessous de son nom, comme il sied: «avec mille remerciements.» Quatre-vingt-dix-neuf fois sur cent, il la leur doit.

The array of intertexts displayed by Pot-Bouille is not merely a source of éducation for characters such as Marie Pichon. Intertexts can illuminate the theme of éducation highlighted (perhaps unwittingly) in one of the English translations of the novel, Lesson in Love. Nor are the novel's intertexts simply other novels. As we have already seen, music played a vital role in the cultural competence of the bourgeoisie. In particular, piano arrangements of operatic arias were especially popular as forms of collective self-entertainment in middle-class homes. These transpositions were social and spatial as well as musical, for they allowed the bourgeoisie to absorb within the comfort and self-regard of their own domestic space high cultural forms reviewed in the newspapers they read. The narrator paraphrases the response of the audience to the performance in chapter 5 in this vein: ‘Vraiment, on ne réussissait pas mieux au théâtre’. The public forum of operatic performance is thus scaled down to size within the semi-private, semi-public domain of the Duveyriers' parties and the yet more intimate domain of the private rehearsal.