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The Ladies' Paradise

by Émile Zola

First published: 1883
Pages: 411

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About this book

Denise Baudu arrives in Paris from the provinces with two younger brothers to support and takes a job at a vast new department store that is swallowing the small family shops around it. Zola built the eleventh novel of his Rougon-Macquart cycle as a study of modern retail, and it reads like one: the seductive window displays, the ruined neighborhood merchants, the exhausted salesgirls, and the owner Octave Mouret, who understands exactly how to make women spend. Against all of it Denise keeps her footing, and an unlikely courtship grows between shopgirl and master. It is a story about commerce as spectacle, written when the department store itself was still a marvel. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available to download.

About the author

Émile Zola

Émile Zola (1840-1902) was a French novelist and the leading figure of literary naturalism. His twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle traced one family under the Second Empire, and his open letter J'accuse in defense of Alfred Dreyfus reshaped the writer's role in public life.