The Vatard Sisters Read Online Free Page A

the enormous mass of books which are published these days you have to strike hard in order to be heard, you even need to cause a scandal.”
    Although Huysmans complained about the torrent of bad press The Vatard Sisters had received, there were financial compensations:

    With the exception of Zola’s notice and a favourable remark in Le Gaulois, I’ve received nothing but insults: which makes me happy, as nothing is better for a book’s sales.
    ( Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon , 17 March 1879)

    There were some genuinely sympathetic reviews, however. Jules Christophe gave a long and studied account of the novel, setting it in the context of the rest of Huysmans’ work, which he was obviously familiar with.

    What do they reproach the novel for? Above all for its lack of imagination, for showing nothing but common people meeting each day, for describing places and things familiar to everyone; objections endlessly reprinted by obstinate idealists. To which the author could reply: “Yes, I scorn imagination in the novel as I would a lie in real life, I describe and I explain what I see and what I know. Make of that what you will!”
    M. Huysmans having had the occasion to see a bindery at close hand, he has quite naturally given himself up to describing a few of the workers, both male and female, he recounts what he has seen and set the action in locales he has scoured, in both senses of the word; such is his crime, but isn’t it that of all writers who are enamoured with the truth? Now what if his characters in this story are badly dressed, lacking in education, spouting bad ideas? The author fashions them as he has seen them, he has a duty neither to embellish them nor to uglify them. One sees things through one’s own particular temperament: now M. Huysmans sees like a Dutch or a Flemish painter, and the present novel is like Parisian modern life as painted by Teniers.
    ( Le Coup d’Oeil , 17 April 1879)

    Christophe praised the book’s “lively comic feeling”, singling out the scene where the Testons arrive at the Vatards during a rainstorm as a particularly fine piece of comic writing. His only real reservation was about Huysmans’ literary style, and he advised him to use a simpler vocabulary, less obscure expressions, and fewer archaisms and neologisms.
    Another positive review came from Huysmans’ friend, Théodore Hannon. Like Zola, Hannon also used the occasion to promote his own aesthetic views. Hannon was a supporter of Naturalism, but more in a Baudelairean sense, as an attempt to capture Modernity through the distinctively individual temperament of the artist. Whereas Zola praised the book’s “human simplicity” and criticised Huysmans for “over-using rare words which sometimes makes his best analyses less realistic,” Hannon vaunted the novel as the work “of a gourmet”, of a “refined man”, and enthusiastically described its “bizarre perfume”, its “nervous style”, its “jewel-like adjectives and adverbs”:

    Certainly palates accustomed to the bland pastilles of our fashionable literary confectioners will grimace at the intense flavours of the spicy dish that is the object of this review, but what a strong and bizarre perfume it retains on the mouth! […]
    The book is like a series of paintings: still lives, genre scenes, landscapes. To prove it, read for yourselves that stunning description of a funfair, with its odours, its noise, its hubbub and its joyous chaos…You have only to read a page of Huysmans to understand the suppleness, the edginess, the exuberance of the instrument he wields: he doesn’t write with a pen, he uses a glittering paintbrush, dipped in a magic inkwell.
    ( Journal des Etrangers , 19 March 1879)

    Aside from the reviews in the press, Huysmans also received private feedback from two of the “fathers” of the realist school: Gustave Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt. Flaubert wrote a long letter to Huysmans in which he detailed a number of