I’m so perplexed by this story’s comparative obscurity that I’m half-inclined to propose cultural-psychological conspiracy theories to explain it. Like, is there something in this story that people just desperately don’t want to think about? If there is, that’s perhaps part of why it feels so fantastically fresh and inventive, even 160 odd years after it was written.
I’ll give you the premise, as it was hearing of this story’s premise (in, if I remember rightly, Edward Said’s Reith Lectures) that propelled me to seek it out. A business entrepreneur in Paris establishes an agency from which women can hire other women who are less attractive than they are to keep them company and so make them appear, in the eyes of men they encounter, more attractive themselves.
What follows is a delightful skewering of the ‘stupidity’ of the male gaze, the beauty industry, capitalist enterprise, Great Man-based media coverage… but it’s more than that… It’s of course utterly tragic. And it gets at something unbearable, the fundamental inaneness of frequently determining factors in even matters so great as love.
First published in French, with the title ‘Les Repoussoirs’, in Zola’s collection Esquisses parisiennes in 1866. Douglas Parmée’s English translation first appeared in 1984 in his Zola collection The Attack on the Mill and Other Stories. The original French text is available on Wikisource
A Personal Anthology 