Piping Hot! (Pot-Bouille): A Realistic Novel

Piping Hot (french - Pot-Bouille) is the tenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola. It was first published in 1887. The novel is an indictment of the mores of the bourgeoisie of the Second French Empire. It is set in a Parisian apartment building a relatively new housing arrangement at the time and its title (roughly translating as stew pot) reflects the disparate and sometimes unpleasant elements lurking behind the building's new façade. The novel follows the adventures of 22-year-old Octave Mouret who moves into the building and takes a salesman's job at a nearby shop The Ladies' Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames). Though handsome and charming Octave is rebuffed by Valérie Vabre and his boss's wife Madame Hédouin before beginning a passionless affair with Madame Pichon. His failure with Madame Hédouin prompts him to quit his job and he goes to work for Auguste Vabre in the silk shop on the building's ground floor. Soon he begins an affair with Berthe who by now is Auguste's wife. Octave and Berthe are eventually caught but over the course of several months the community tacitly agrees to forget the affair and live as if nothing had happened thereby restoring the veneer of respectability. Octave marries widowed Madame Hédouin and life goes on in the Rue de Choiseul the way it has always done with outward complacency morality and quiet. Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (1840 – 1902) was a French novelist playwright journalist the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France. Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902.