Shell-Fish by Emile Zola

Risqué humor elevated to literature
In its departure from European romanticism, Emile Zola’s writing was ahead of its time. His naturalistic style was so audacious for its day that many readers and critics considered the blunt and explicit realism of his works to be obscene. Before he ever achieved much renown in his French homeland, Zola found a receptive audience for his works in Russia. Early in his career, several of his short stories and essays first saw publication in the St. Petersburg journal Vestnik Evropy (The European Messenger). One such story, entitled “Shell-Fish,” appeared in the September 1876 issue of that Russian periodical. Perhaps because of this foreign debut, the story is one of Zola’s more obscure works, not found in many short story anthologies and often absent from even so-called “complete works” collections. In 1911, however, the English-language publisher Warren Press produced a series of thin volumes by Zola that includes Shell-Fish as a stand-alone book of 64 pages. A scan of this book can be found online at the HathiTrust website.

Monsieur Chabre is a retired grain merchant, 45 years of age, with a healthy fortune and a beautiful young wife of 22. The one great unfulfilled desire of his life is to have children. The Chabres’ efforts toward this goal, however, have not been successful. At first Monsieur Chabre blames Madame Chabre for the couple’s infertility, but when she suggests that perhaps the problem lies with him, he consults a physician. The doctor prescribes an unscientific remedy to boost Monsieur Chabre’s reproductive potency: shell-fish (a word which is always hyphenated in the book). Willing to try anything, the Chabres retreat to a secluded seaside resort in Brittany so that Monsieur can indulge in all manner of oysters, mussels, limpets, and shrimp.

Shell-fish, therefore, is basically just a risqué joke about a married couple’s sex life that Zola has elevated to a brief literary novella. Zola takes the racy humor a bit further than just the eating of molluscs. To reveal more would be to spoil any possible surprises, but the average reader will likely see where this story is headed a mile in advance. That doesn’t lessen its appeal, however, as Zola handles the humor deftly. True to his more serious works, the characters are well-developed personalities based on keen social observation. The coastal setting also benefits from Zola’s excellence at natural description as he picturesquely brings the resort culture of Brittany to life, though not without a fair helping of wry criticism.

In his more serious novels, Zola often features humorous subplots and buffoonish supporting characters, so the sense of humor he displays here will not be unfamiliar to his habitual readers. Amid a career filled with masterpieces, Shell-fish is a rather inconsequential work, but it is nonetheless a fine piece of writing that demonstrates that Zola could also excel at lighter fare.
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