"Comment avez-vous pu vous laisser prendre à la plaisanterie imbécile du Panurge ?"

Autograph letter signed by Emile Zola - apparently unpublished - written in black ink on a double sheet and addressed to Léon Carbonnaux, department head at Bon Marché. Folds inherent to mailing. Envelope included.
Only two letters from Léon Carbonnaux to Emile Zola are known: they can be consulted in the digitized preparatory file for Au bonheur des dames made available online by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. However, we know from this same file, which contains a long section entitled "Notes Carbonnaux," that this department head at Bon Marché provided Zola with a significant amount of information, particularly about employee customs, their remuneration, and especially inventory techniques. The two men probably met when Emile Zola, eager for information about the workings of department stores, conducted field research in February and March 1882.
Very important unpublished letter shedding new light on the pre-original publication of Au bonheur des dames.
In his biography of Emile Zola, Henri Mitterrand writes: "Even before the novel was completed, Zola gave an extract to Panurge in November; and on November 23, 1882, Gil Blas announced its imminent publication in its columns." Our letter, discussing precisely this alleged pre-publication in Panurge, attests that it was simply a joke and thus contradicts Henri Mitterrand: "But your letter surprises and saddens me somewhat. How could you have been taken in by Panurge's stupid joke? Did you not notice that the entire issue is a 'farce'? Not one of the articles is authentic, they are parodies, and very poorly done ones at that." Indeed, reading the said extract cannot fool the assiduous reader of Zola, despite the introduction that the journalists wrote: "After Nana and Pot-Bouille, those epics of elegant vice and bourgeois vice, M. Emile Zola wanted to create one of honesty: Au bonheur des Dames, which will appear shortly, is a reassuring painting of innocence and virtue; the greatest success is assured for this new work whose characters move in the setting of a large novelty store; Parisian high commerce will not long await its observer and painter. We thank Emile Zola for having kindly cut out, especially for Panurge, a few pages from his still unpublished work, and we are proud to give the public first an extract from this work of such high morality and such powerful interest." (Panurge no. 4 of October 22, 1882)
The sentences of this false Zolian text are exaggeratedly long and Panurge took the liberty of endowing the novel with a male main character, Denis Mouret, an amalgam of Denise (the true heroine of the book to appear) and Octave Mouret. One can think that it is a text composed from elements of Pot-Bouille, the previous volume of Rougon Macquart where Octave - future owner of Bonheur des Dames - exercised the function of clerk before his meteoric social rise: "For already more than two months, he had been attached to the 'silks and furs' department; he arrived in the morning at seven o'clock to return home, his day finished, only at nine o'clock in the evening, when all of Paris buzzed strangely with a feverish animation of pleasure and enjoyment, and, on his way back, he followed gawking the great crowded boulevards, where blazed the cafés full of girls, and where, on the asphalt, at theater doors, the crowd jostled with, here and there, in the vague rumor of trampling and pressing, the roguish intonation of the cries of program vendors and ticket sellers." (Panurge) In his letter of November 30, 1882, Léon Carbonnaux - reading the extract from Panurge - had reproached Zola for his errors: "Nowhere except at the Fabriques de France near Les Halles does one arrive at 7 a.m. It's at the earliest 7:30 but more often 8 a.m. and even then. There is no silk and fur counter at the Louvre. [...] It is so easy for you to be accurate that errors of this kind, especially if they were repeated, would not be forgiven." The Master defends himself against these remonstrances in our letter: "The extract given is not mine, it is full of inaccuracies as you have noticed, not to mention that it is inept from a literary point of view. Disabuse those who may have attributed such a thing to me."
Fundamental letter for the restoration of truth and understanding of a detail in the announcement made in Panurge of the publication of the eleventh volume of Emile Zola's natural and social fresco.