The same reshaping took place on the right bank. Poor people were evicted, neighborhoods were leveled, boulevards and monuments were built.

By the time Zola returned to Paris, the area around Les Halles was unrecognizable to him just as it is to Florent in the opening of The Belly of Paris. Paris streets were renamed after men of power, and only a few names remain today, mostly in the former Les Halles neighborhood—rue de la Ferronerie (Foundry), pas du Mule (Mule Path)—to remind Parisians not only of the old Paris names but of what the old Paris was. The gentrification and destruction of working-class neighborhoods is a theme that runs through The Belly of Paris and many other Zola novels. In Au Bonheur des dames, published ten years later, in 1883, a department store opens and an entire neighborhood of shops is put out of business. It is a process that has, sadly, continued in Paris, but The Belly of Paris is set at the dramatic beginning of this process.

Zola writes about longing for the little remaining of old Paris, “les belles rues d'autrefois” the beautiful old-fashioned streets, and as an example he cites rue de la Ferronerie. I remember feeling the same way a hundred years later, after they tore down Les Halles and it was just a hole in the ground and some of these same streets, including rue de la Ferronerie, were all that was left of the old neighborhood. It is all gone now, of course.

Not only public works but also poverty expanded in the Paris of Napoleon III. Inflation dramatically reduced the spending power of the average Parisian. Many of Paris's 1.7 million people were near starvation. The average worker spent between a third and two thirds of his income on bread. At the same time conspicuous displays of gluttony were made fashionable for the ruling class, encouraged by the emperor. Peace was maintained by police repression. As many as 35,000 Parisians were arrested for vagrancy in a single year.

In 1866, things grew even worse when Haussmann was caught skimming funds from his enormous public works budget and fired. The work stopped, and perhaps as many as 100,000 workers who had been rebuilding the city were thrown out of work.

While much of the city starved, the new boulevards were packed with restaurants and cafés offering gaudy displays of gourmandism. This was especially true in 1867, when Napoleon hosted a universal exposition and threw almost daily galas for visiting dignitaries.

In 1858, when Zola as a young man returned to the Paris of his birth, the final touches were being put on the first six pavilions of the newly redesigned Les Halles Centrales, the central market. The market had already been there for seven hundred years. An irony for Zola, whose novel is so much about the connection between Les Halles and fat people, the market was started in the twelfth century under Louis VI, who was known as Louis the Fat.

Napoleon I had planned to redesign it but was defeated by the British before the plans could get under way. The look of the new pavilions was something no Parisians had ever seen. In the plans it was called “a veritable palace of iron and crystal.” Some disapproved, but others, like Claude the painter in Le Ventre de Paris, thought it was the only original building of the century that “has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times.”

It most definitely was a product of the times. In 1845, Victor Baltard, a leading Paris architect and son of a prominent Paris neoclassical architect and artist, Louis-Pierre Baltard, was commissioned along with his partner, Félix Callet, an older but less-known architect, to redesign Les Halles. Their plan called for eight pavilions of various sizes with stone walls and metal roofs. In 1848, construction was halted by the revolution. In 1851, the new president of the republic, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, laid the first stone. The Baltard-Callet stone buildings were massive in appearance, and Parisians sneeringly called the design the “Les Halles fortress.” In 1853, Bonaparte, now emperor, stopped the construction and searched for a new idea, which he said should be “vast but light, like the new train stations.” He called for buildings that resembled umbrellas. Amazingly, the winning design was by the rejected team of Baltard and Callet, with ten iron-and-glass pavilions (an additional two were not completed until 1936). It was a state-of-the-art innovation of the Industrial Revolution.

Les Halles were the first buildings in France—and among the first in the world—to display their metalwork; all of the struts and arches were clearly visible since the construction was an entirely glass-covered metal frame. Almost no one in Paris, Zola included, had ever seen such buildings, and they were a sight to wonder at.

Baltard's Les Halles was one of the great successes of architectural history, a huge step forward in the development of metal architecture. It seemed so light and airy, even transparent, yet offered the strength of metal construction. Soon more train stations, the new phenomenon of department stores, and exhibition halls copied the idea.