Patrick Link’s Reviews > Pot Luck > Status Update

A little upstairs downstairs more hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.

I love early chapter a in novels like this with a party to introduce a lot of characters and show their stereotypes and prejudices. There should be something on balls and parties in nineteenth century novels, I’d read that.

The reason I keep coming back to Zola is that his characters are still with us. His bourgeois mother, Madam Josserand, with the crosses to bare of a husband less successful than she wanted and daughters that she can’t marry off and won’t put out to respectable suitors, is as familiar to me as the back of my own hand.