Flâneurs and Shoppers: Huysmans, En ménage

Abstract

En menage takes up the story of Cyprien after Celine Vatard has ended their relationship. He bemoans the situation he now finds himself in, having expended his capital in fruitless speculations on women he hoped would inspire him to paint works that would make his fortune: Et, quand on songe que j'avais trois cents francs de rentes a manger par mois et que j'ai boulotte le capital avec des cocottes, sous le pretexte de mieux les peindre! – je devais regagner avec le tableau ce que me coutait la peau du modele […] fichue speculation! […] Mes toiles ont ete refusees a tous les salons et ne se sont pas vendues. (322) His companion in misfortune is Andre Jayant, a novelist, recently married, who has found his young wife in bed with another man and has left her to resume his bachelor life. The dominant perspective in this novel is therefore that of the single man in search of creature comforts that marriage seems to offer but signally fails to deliver. Financial details recur as in Les Sœurs Vatard , but without the same degree of urgency; we are dealing here with rentiers leading the vie de boheme in contrast to the workers’ existence in which every sou counts. In general, monetary indications are of a different scale in the universe of these men. A former school friend now earns ‘1,800 francs dans un ministere’ (322). However, in their own way they are preoccupied by making ends meet on income that is inadequate to their aspirations. Andre is not well-to-do: ‘Plusieurs fois deja, il etait demeure sans le sou, aux approches du terme’ (431). These artists show themselves to be, like their author, highly sensitive to the commercial fabric of the environment they inhabit, while paradoxically claiming to disdain everything associated with business in the name of their higher artistic calling. This, of course, is wholly in keeping with the development during the fin de siecle of a radical separation between literary production and a concern for financial viability, the latter being seen to be fundamentally inimical to the former. However, although Huysmans subscribes to a lofty Flaubertian detachment in respect of the marketplace, the judgements and the practices of his characters are profoundly embedded in the economics of labour, production and consumption.