In 1860, shortly after the two Michelet books were published, Zola wrote to Cézanne, “A husband has been given a major project, to reeducate his wife. It takes more than sleeping together to be married, they must also think in tandem.” And that same year to a different friend:

It is true that it is rare to see a happy couple. But that is because married people only know love in a superficial way. They are still strangers to the heart, and if they remain that way they will be unhappy all their lives. But if you put together a young man and a young woman, they are beautiful and they have physical love, but this is not yet love. Soon they discover each other's qualities and deficiencies, and little by little their personalities do not compete, because there are no unforgivable faults, they love with their souls, truly and entirely.

Marriage in Zola's novels, as in life, is a complicated relationship full of pettiness but also love, stifling at times but at others comforting. In The Belly of Paris the marriage of the weak and simple Quenu to the forceful Lisa, in the hands of a lesser writer would have been a tale of an Amazonian tyranny, but in Zola's gifted hands it is a relationship of love, spite, jealousy tenderness, support—a marriage that is both difficult and solid. Even a character such as Lisa, who symbolizes all that was wrong with the petite bourgeoisie—fat, selfish, complacent, indifferent to the suffering of others, and a maddening hypocrite, who, despite a complete absence of religious belief, has a priest at the ready to rubber-stamp what she knows are misdeeds—is still a complete woman, so fully drawn, so human and real, that we cannot quite hate her, though she infuriates us.

Zola sets us up. Just when we are ready to hate a character, he shows us a human side that melts us. The horrid old gossip Mademoiselle Saget takes such pleasure in damaging everyone else with her gossip, but then we see her buying table scraps to eat, trying to cheer herself with the idea that she is eating scraps from the aristocracy but hoping no one sees her buying them. And we feel sorry for her.

Curiously, Zola's strong women have strong smells, and he devotes substantial space to describing them. Though the fleshy Beautiful Norman is described as an extremely attractive woman, lengthy descriptions are given of the odors she gives off and finally it is concluded that she is too “strong-smelling” for Florent's tastes. But Zola was obsessed in all his writing with descriptions of tastes and smells. He loved good food and detested bad eating. The Belly of Paris, a novel of food, of tastes and smells, has often been described, especially by English-speaking admirers, as “strange” or “bizarre.” Zola's friend the writer Edmond de Goncourt was one who noted Zola's curious olfactory obsession. In his Journal he wrote, “The nose of Zola is a very articular nose, a nose that interrogates, that approves, that condemns, a nose that is gay, a nose that is sad, a nose that punctuates the physiognomy of its master; the nose of a true hunting dog.”

Today, in an age when gastronomic fiction has become fashionable, this book seems ahead of its time. But despite Zola's being a bourgeois who loved food and looked it, the social criticism in The Belly of Paris revolves around the graphically illustrated conceit that the bourgeoisie not only eats too much but has an unhealthy obsession with food.

Zola's father, an Italian immigrant, was an adventurer who had done everything from joining the French Foreign Legion when it was first formed to becoming an engineer and building a major dam in Provence. Emile Zola was born in 1840 during a brief stay in Paris not far from the Les Halles neighborhood that would be the setting for The Belly of Paris. But his family soon returned to Aix-en-Provence, where Emile grew up. Like the central characters in The Belly of Paris, Florent and Quenu, Zola grew up in Aix and went to Paris as a penniless student. Many of Zola's characters have their roots in Aix, a town always referred to in his fiction by the pseudonym Plassans.

In Paris people who had little money found small apartments on the upper floors, and Zola for a time lived in an eighth-floor apartment with a view of the rooftops of Paris. As an aging and respected writer he looked back and recalled this view and the vow it inspired: “It was then, from my twentieth year on, that I dreamed of writing a novel of which Paris, with its ocean of roofs, would be a principal character, something like the chorus of antique Greek tragedies.” Twelve years before publication, he was already laying the groundwork for Le Ventre de Paris.

He lived meagerly in those years; he had little to eat, often surviving on bread dipped in olive oil from Provence that friends and family sent him. Later in life, when he had money, he would make up for the lost meals.

The Paris Zola came to in 1858 was considerably different from the one he had been born in. The emperor Napoleon III wanted to leave his mark on France by remaking the capital, an act of publicly financed arrogance that would often be imitated. Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand, and other French leaders have sought to leave their mark by changing Paris, but the most thorough remake was by Napoleon III. To accomplish this he brought in an architect, Georges Haussmann.

The wide boulevards and squares with resplendent monuments designed by Haussmann are much admired today, but at the time were regarded by many as the destruction of Paris. Haussmann himself was nicknamed “the great destroyer.” Paris had been a medieval city of narrow, winding streets, a teeming maze. Within these crowded and nearly unnavigable neighborhoods lived the Parisian masses that had risen up against Napoleon III's despotic rule on several bloody occasions.

It is not by chance that the layout of today's Paris bespeaks power and militarism. To many at the time, the emperor was simply bulldozing neighborhoods and building streets through them in which troops could quickly be deployed. A wide boulevard, later known as the boulevard Saint-Michel after a statue that was erected in a central square, cut a wide swath through the Latin Quarter.