In the Library
The Ladies' Paradise
Émile Zola, 1883
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 12 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (1895)
- Chapters
- Chapters 14
- Length
- Length 161k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
It was the cathedral of modern commerce, light but strong, the very thing for a nation of customers.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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About the book
In the window, headless dummies wear velvet and silver fox, each carrying its price on a ticket where a face should be, and the mirrors on either side people the whole street with beautiful women for sale. A girl of twenty stands looking at them with two brothers, a parcel and no money, and she will go to work inside. The Ladies' Paradise is the shop that eats a Paris street: the drapers and the furriers and the umbrella makers opposite go dark one by one while the sales floors swell through the wall. Octave Mouret scatters his departments on purpose, so that a woman coming in for ribbon must walk past silk, and Émile Zola writes the great sale days like battles, thousands of bodies pressed at the counters and silk coming off the rolls in a roar. Zola drew the plans of the machine that still works on you every time you go in for one thing and come out with four. What Mouret does not expect is the salesgirl who wants nothing from him.