Endnotes

1 (p. 195) Galerie Montmartre ... Galerie des Variétés... Galerie Saint-Marc: These arcades, along with the Passage des Panoramas mentioned on page 33 and the Galerie Feydeau, on page 197, were pedestrian streets with glass roofs, lined with shops—the distant ancestors of today’s shopping malls. The German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin considered them to be the emblematic feature of nineteenth-century Paris and compiled and wrote an immense, unfinished book, The Arcades Project (1927-1940), that springs from a contemplation of their role in society. Although many arcades of the period have been demolished, these five, which are interconnected, still stand.

2 (p. 205) Fauchery’s article, entitled the “Golden Fly” ... which it entered by the windows: This article, entirely Zola’s invention, constitutes his thesis statement, baldly put forth, the least subtle detail in a book that manages to be at once deft and broad. The reference to the girl having been “born from four or five generations of drunkards” is the only direct allusion in Nana to its predecessor, LAssommoir (published in English as The Drinking Den, The Dram Shop, or The Drunkard) . The genetic notions advanced here have long been discredited, although we know that behavior is often handed down through the generations by example.

3 (p. 320) Then the conversation having turned... “may God preserve the Emperor as long as possible!”: This is another instance of Zola’s unsubtle message-bearing. We are meant to remark upon the irony of Nana—descendant of generations of alcoholics—denouncing the Republicans as drunkards, assisted, of course, by the propaganda that the right-wing Figaro fed to its readers. That newspaper called Zola a “socialist”—a contentious word—in its review of Nana, but also ran a page of illustrations of the book’s characters.

4 (p. 387) But the waltz still continued its voluptuous whirl . . . saucy rhythm of the music: In its foreshadowing of the events of the following two years—the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and the subsequent Commune (an insurrection against the French government in the spring of 1871), and the burning of many official edifices and homes of the rich during the week of the Commune’s suppression—this passage harks back to much of the literature evoking the dawn of the Revolution, seen by many in the following century as having been a sort of divine punishment for the decadence of the aristocracy. Nana appears here as the agent of that wrath, and we are perhaps meant to see her as a harbinger of the pétroleuses, the women who were alleged to have started the fires in Paris in May 1871.

5 (p. 436) During the day the Corps Législatif had voted for a declaration of war: This dates the scene exactly, to July 19, 1870. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who was then in the process of uniting the disparate duchies and principalities of Germany into a single state, actively welcomed war with France, both to exhaust his country’s nearest rival and to annex the German-speaking French provinces Alsace and Lorraine. He was too smart to declare war himself, however. When a member of the Hohenzollern family—a relative of the German emperor—was proposed as king of Spain, France took the fatal step. One military defeat followed another in quick succession, and the war was over by January, with France decisively trounced.