Il sublime e l’idillio in ‘Le ventre de Paris’

This paper analyzes the third novel in Emile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, Le ventre de Paris (1873), which paints an impressive tableau of modernity through the representation of the vast central market of Les Halles. As I will try to demonstrate, the novel marks a significant development in Realism and specifically in naturalistic writing, by redefining traditional aesthetic canons, modes and stylistic levels. From this point of view, the paper takes into consideration Zola’s rewriting of the sublime within the new “world” of the marketplace, and argues for an adaptation of the classical genre of the “idyll” to Marjolin’s and Cadine’s story (as told in the fourth chapter of the novel).