The Attack on the Mill and other Storiesby Émile Zola

A still from the 2016 film Cézanne et Moi

“In Paris, everything’s for sale: wise virgins, foolish virgins, truth and lies, tears and smiles.” In such a “commercially-minded place”, says the narrator of Rentafoil ( Les Repoussoirs , or The Contrasts ), French writer Émile Zola’s scathing satire on objectification, “beauty is a commodity... People buy and sell big bright eyes and charming little mouths...” But what is astounding is that a businessman, “that old Durandeau”, has come up with the ingenious idea of finding a market for an “unsaleable article” like ugliness.

He opens a firm to provide “a unique service for the preservation of beauty” — for a fee, lovely ladies can rent ugly girls. The venture is a great success. “You can’t imagine the pleasure of a pretty woman leaning on the arm of an ugly one. Not only was she enhancing her own beauty, she was enjoying someone else’s ugliness. Durandeau is a great philosopher.”

Many of Zola’s stories written in the late 19th century seem eerily prescient, and this collection has tales from his first,

Contes à Ninon , published in 1864, to his last,

The Haunted House, which appeared 30 years later.

Wry playfulness

Zola (1840-1902), who turned to journalism and writing short stories to combat economic difficulties, used the form to cover a wide range of French society, from the aristocracy to the peasantry and the proletariat. A modernist and realist, Zola’s tone was of “wry playfulness”. From farcical humour to savage irony, he brushed his tales with various hues. As Douglas Parmée says in the introduction, “We see a well-composed and authoritative fresco, of a wide range in full colour. Zola’s themes — love, death, money (or lack of it), religion (or lack of it), work — are always with us and to many of them he gives a strikingly modern, even prophetic, slant.”

In

The Attack on the Mill , for instance, Zola builds up a picture of an idyllic village, only for its peace to be shattered by war. In the end, there’s a terrifying image of a French captain shouting ‘We’ve won! We've won!’ amid piles of corpses and ruined buildings. Love and its ways find place in

Shellfish for Monsieur Chabre ,

The Girl Who Loves Me ; and religion in

Priests and Sinners where we meet the fanatic Father Pintoux.

His colourful palette can be traced perhaps to his association with Paul Cézanne, the famous post-Impressionist artist he went to school with. The budding writer and painter would walk for hours in the countryside talking about art and literature.

Zola became famous for his 20-novel series Les Rougon-Macquart , and for his role in the Dreyfus Affair through his open letter, J’accuse. A superb introduction to Zola, the novelist, however, is through his short stories, each a world unto itself and brilliant.

The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.