Octave Mouret panic women desire. Its Parisian department store, Au Bonheur des Dames is a paradise for the senses. Tissues pile up, dazzling, delicate, fault or silk. Everything a woman could buy in 1883, Octave Mouret sells it, with revolutionary techniques. Its success was immense. But this stuff is a disaster for the neighborhood, small businesses die, property speculation is growing. And the staff knows a life of hell. Denise fails Valognes in this furnace, destitute but tenacious. Zola is the girl and her powerful boss in love with her the symbol of modernism and crises it generates. Zola plunges the reader into a walkabout erotic. No one will go into a department store without feeling that Zola tells with genius: the tingling life.