The Ladies’ Paradise

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.