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BRUTAL REALISM 77
less on discovering that her son has been killed by her daughter-in-law, Therese, with a lover's aid. While the murderers attempt to enjoy the freedom and possessions their crime has brought them, she fixes them with a glare of implacable hate that changes to gloating over their misery. When this play, the classic of its period, failed in his own country, Zola expressed what he thought of the stage in criticism and essays. He wrote no more plays and he disowned L' Assommoir, dramatized from his novel by Busnach and Gastineau, which was played at the Ambigu in 1879. Sala went there, intending to be disgusted in print. On the way he stopped at an actual assommoir and found it rather worse than Zola's ; since he published lurid details that were not in the novel, he was plainly of the same mind as the novelist. Self-deception was infinitely preferable to admitting that. A good word must not be said for Zola, but a bad word had to be said for the play, however much the public might like it. Sala " sat out " several scenes — the squalid garret with the abandonment of Gervaise by Lautier, the laundry with the " abominable fight " between Gervaise and Virginie, the Boulevard de la Chapelle with the blacksmith's speech about temperance, the restaurant garden with the double-wedding feast of Gervaise-Coupeau and Virginie-Poisson, the street with the fall of Coupeau from a roof, the grand dinner on Gervaise's saint's day, and the assommoir itself. The sordid characters on the stage had been drinking and smoking and gobbling for three mortal hours and a half. Everybody had changed his or her shabby garments three or four times over. To Sala it was a masquerade of rags. " I dare say that it was all very realistic; but so is Seven Dials on a Saturday night. Seven times had the curtain descended. ... I was told that there was a beautiful scene coming of a padded room at a hospital, where the alcoholized Coupeau, in the saltatory stage of delirium tremens, dances himself to death. I thought I would not wait for the discovery of the remains of Gervaise in the hole under the staircase, and * quite green ' ; so I went to bed."
To yawn would always be the best way out of the difficulty. Sala, whose bottle-scarred nose hung out like an inn-sign proclaiming good fare within, was more inclined to be shocked by the apostrophe in favour of temperance than by alcoholized antics, but he had to write for a public which regarded itself as a child playing with fire and chiding itself. All who read " L' Assommoir " discussed it as " too " — and hastened to the Princess's when Charles Reade's version, Drink, began its run there in 1879 of 222 — this, the actual figure, is not meant as a pun — performances. There had been modifications to appease the censor, but still the trump card was a display of delirium tremens.