A friend once told me she always brings a “less attractive” friend to parties. It’s not that she’s mean, she said. She just feels more relaxed that way. I didn’t respond at the time, but the thought came back when I reread Zola’s Les Repoussoirs. That’s an 1880s short story about a Parisian businessman who rents out ugly women to serve as human contrast. He calls them repoussoirs, the dark figures painters use to make the light parts stand out. Then he turns that artistic trick into a profitable business.
The narrator’s coldness feels perfectly ordinary. He finds poor, plain women from the slums and pays them next to nothing. Rich clients then hire those women to stand beside their wives or daughters at social events. A repoussoir’s only job is to exist in the same frame as someone beautiful. And the system works, because society loves it. One client reports that her daughter looked “like a goddess” next to a three star repoussoir. Yes, he rates them: one star for slightly plain, three stars for “can make a princess look divine.” I laughed at that line the first time I read it, then felt bad for laughing.
What struck me, actually what got under my skin, is Zola’s refusal to pity these women. He gives the repoussoirs no names, no histories. They are inventory. When one of them collapses from hunger and exhaustion at a party, the narrator barely breaks stride: “We found another. Supply is reliable.” He says it the same way someone might talk about potatoes or coal. The worst part is, he’s not wrong. Poverty never takes a day off, and there’s always another desperate woman waiting.
I kept thinking about my friend who brings a “less attractive” friend to parties. She’s not a bad person, and neither is Zola’s narrator. That’s what makes the story so unsettling. The cruelty never gets loud or theatrical. It’s just business as usual, a quiet calculation we all make now and then. We bring along friends who are less funny, less sharp, less put together, so we can feel better about ourselves. We hire people to do the dirty work, then we look away. Social media has turned into a repoussoir factory. You scroll through curated images of perfect lives, and your own mess feels messier. Then you post your own best angles, hoping someone else feels worse. Same ugly business, just digital now.
Zola wrote this as a satire of Parisian high society. But it reads like a commentary on any era you care to name. The ending is deliberately flat. No hero saves the day. No repoussoir rises up. The business keeps going because the market wants it. That’s the real horror. Not cruelty, but indifference. The system doesn’t hate those ugly women. It simply doesn’t care about them.
I finished rereading it on a Sunday afternoon. I sat on my couch for a while and thought about all the times I’ve played both roles: the frame and the painting. The times I’ve stood next to someone prettier and felt invisible. The times I’ve secretly enjoyed standing next to someone slightly less together than me. You don’t need to be a monster to play this game. You just need to avoid thinking about it too hard. Zola makes you think about it, and that’s uncomfortable, which is exactly why you should read it.
