The Vatard Sisters Read Free

you all my gratitude and reaffirm my heartfelt admiration to the great artist that you are.
    ( Letter from Huysmans to Edmond de Goncourt , June 1878)

    But although Charpentier had formally accepted the book for publication, he still seemed to be dragging his heels. By the autumn of 1878, the date by which the novel was supposed to have been published, it was still only in the proof stage:

    I’m wading through printer’s proofs at the moment and I’m unspeakably disgusted with my book. The job of stitching it up I’m doing at the moment sickens me—I’m straightening club-footed phrases, I’m putting plasters over the hernias of my sentences, amputating repetitions—ah, as I said to Hannon, repetitions are the real syphilis—you plaster over them in one place and they spring up somewhere else!
    ( Letter from Huysmans to Émle Zola , 10 September 1878)

    To Hannon himself, Huysmans made his usual complaints about how dissatisfied he was with his finished work:

    I can see from the proofs that The Vatard Sisters is a long bloody way from being a masterpiece. It’s full of clumsy, halting sentences that it’s now too late to fix, and that depresses me greatly. In essence, I haven’t made it what I could have made it…
    ( Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon , 12 October 1878)

    Although Huysmans completed the proofs in November or December, there was still no imminent movement on the part of Charpentier to publish the book. This unsatisfactory situation dragged on and in February Huysmans was once again complaining loudly to Hannon:

    I am more and more depressed about The Vatard Sisters . The book is ready, bound and heaped up in magnificent piles at the publisher’s. All the employees at Charpentier’s are ecstatically enthusiastic, and are having great fun reading passages out loud. Yes, but if I have the whole firm counting on the book’s success, I have one thing against me: Madame Charpentier. She fears its effect on her salon…she fears the roasting it’ll get from the press! Certainly there’s no doubt that Madame Charpentier would stifle the book if she could, she’d prefer a flop to a riotous success.
    ( Letter from Huysmans to Théodore Hannon , 10 February 1879)

    However, not even the publisher’s wife could delay the book forever and on 25 February Huysmans was telling Hannon that the book would appear the next day, though he expected to be pilloried for it: “They’re going to shoot me down in flames!” There was nothing to be done now but await a response from the critics, the public and even his own relatives: “I’m going to be a disgrace to those fine upstanding bourgeois!”

Critical response

    The Vatard Sisters was finally published on the 26 February 1879. The book was reviewed more extensively than its predecessor and though it attracted a lot of negative press, this did not seem to harm its sales: a second edition was issued after just two days, and between 1879 and 1880 the book went through five editions. Although such sales represented only a small fraction of those that Émile Zola’s novels achieved—by way of comparison Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877) sold 50,000 copies in its first month—it was nevertheless an unprecedented success in terms of Huysmans’ career as a writer so far.
    One of the first notices of the book was by its dedicatee, though Zola’s polemical article wasn’t so much a review as a critical defense of Naturalist ideals that used Huysmans’ novel to illustrate his own thesis:

    I wish those fabricators of novels and inane melodramas about the common people would take a notion to read The Vatard Sisters by J.-K. Huysmans. There, they would see the common people as they really are. No doubt they would cry “what filth!”, they would affect expressions of disgust, they would talk about having to turn the pages at arm’s length. But this little show of hypocrisy is always amusing. It’s a general rule that literary hacks always insult proper