A Moment of Truth- The Life of Zola

A Moment of Truth

Boson Books by Hugh McLeave A Moment of Truth Rogues in the Gallery The Bent Pyramid White Pawn on Red Square

BOSON BOOKS

2

A Moment of Truth

_____________________________________________

A MOMENT OF TRUTH The Life of Zola by Hugh McLeave ______________________________________

BOSON BOOKS Raleigh

BOSON BOOKS

3

A Moment of Truth Published by Boson Books 3905 Meadow Field Lane Raleigh, NC 27606 ISBN 0-917990-32-3 An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc. Copyright 2001 Hugh McLeave All rights reserved For information contact C&M Online Media Inc. 3905 Meadow Field Lane Raleigh, NC 27606 Tel: (919) 233-8164 e-mail:[email protected] URL: http://www.bosonbooks.com Cover art by Joel Barr

BOSON BOOKS

4

A Moment of Truth

PROLOGUE By the time Commissaire Principal Camille Gustave Cornette arrived, a crowd had massed round the carriage entrance of the tall building and two gendarmes had to barge a passage for the tiny, dapper figure to enter. Once inside, the detective mounted a rococo wooden staircase to the first floor. This house he knew inch-by-inch, having kept its owner, Émile Zola, under tight surveillance for nearly five years. When he reached the landing, he made for the main bedroom. There, the scene halted him in his stride. It looked like casualty station. Five doctors were toiling to revive the unconscious figures of Zola and his wife while half a dozen servants and friends stood watching. Three doctors worked on the novelist, stretched on an Egyptian divan under a window, while two others were giving his wife artificial respiration on a vast renaissance four-poster bed. Ordering the spectators out of the room, the chief superintendent approached the trio around Zola. Once doctor was flexing the arms, another the legs while a third was shuttling his tongue back and forth to try to ventilate his lungs. "What do you think of his chances?" the detective asked Dr Édouard Main, a local practitioner. Main straightened up. "He's still alive, but..." He shrugged and shook his head. What would you say it was?" "Poisoning of some sort," Main said, pointing to the vomit and excreta soiling the Aubusson carpet and patterned floor tiles. After listening to several more details, Cornette made his way across the room and round the high, ornamental grill dividing the four-poster from the rest of the room. Dr Marc Berman had an oxygen mask over Madame Zola's face and another practitioner was kneading her chest. "She has a bit of a pulse and I think she'll put through," Berman told the superintendent. Both doctors agreed that Zola and his wife had been poisoned. "Any idea what with?" "I'd say medicine," Berman replied. "Nobody else in the house is ill and the two dogs who were with them in the bedroom have survived." On the bedside table, the superintendent noticed a half-empty bottle, its label reading Eau Chloroformée. On that side of the four-poster, an open door gave on to a large bathroom. There, he tried the medicine cabinet and found it locked. On the floor, more feces made a trail to one of the lavatories. Someone had used the toilet without flushing it and had overturned a heavy towel-rack. A nickel-plated, slow-combustion stove stood in the bathroom but contained no fuel and felt cold. Where they had not installed electric light he checked the gas taps which were turned off. Back in the bedroom, the detective sat down to scribble a note to the Paris police prefect: BOSON BOOKS

5

A Moment of Truth This morning at about 9.30, Monsieur and Madame Zola, who returned yesterday from the country, were found unconscious in their bedroom, 21bis Rue de Bruxelles. Madame was in bed, Monsieur had fallen at the foot of the same bed. Monsieur Zola is thought to be dead. They hope to save Madame. They are believed to have been accidentally poisoned by medicaments. Two small dogs which were in the bedroom are not dead. —Cornette. For several minutes, the detective stood in the room taking stock of everything. Someone had broken down the anteroom door into the bedroom, splintering the lock, bolts and one panel; a Louis XIII chair lay askew and the right-hand bedside rug had slid across the blue-and-yellow floor tiles. Those things apart, nothing seemed changed in the bedroom, which he remembered well. Zola's jade Buddha sat, smiling benignly, before the tall mirror over the marble mantelpiece and his solid-silver replica of Our Lady of Lourdes stood on a shelf beside the fireplace. For a self-confessed atheist, Zola had a passion for religious trinkets, the commissaire reflected. With two bathroom hand towels, he carefully collected feces and vomit samples. Bending by the hearth, he caught a whiff of something acrid and sulfurous. Smoke. It came from the heavy, two-meter length of tapestry draped in front of the mantelpiece. When he went to raise the copper fireplace screen, he burned his hand. A fire was smoldering in the grate; several oval briquettes glowed red over a small pile of ash. He noted a bit of plasterboard under the gate which had obviously tumbled before the fire was lit. For no reason that he could fathom, Cornette sensed the drama in this bedroom hinged round this massive fireplace and those burning briquettes. And yet, in a room this size—ten yards by five and a ceiling three times his height—it would take some smoke to fill it. Nevertheless, experience of more than a quartercentury of detective work whispered that coal gas and not drugs had poisoned the Zolas. "It's no use," he heard one of Zola's three doctors exclaim as he stopped the tongue tractions. Cornette crossed the room to gaze at the unconscious writer, clad only in a woolen nightshirt. All expression had gone from his eyes and his bearded face and lolling tongue had a cherry-red tinge; his jaw lay lax and his right arm dangled. No amount of tongue tractions, artificial respiration and oxygen would bring Emile Zola back to life, Cornette reflected. And when news of his death spread from these northern fringes of Paris along the bourgeois boulevards and through working-class districts, it would cause a sensation and probably provoke riots. Those anti-Semitic factions who had made him the most hated and vilified man in France would openly rejoice; and the other half of his countrymen who hero-worshipped Zola might take to the streets to avenge his death. For they would contend he had died by somebody's hand for publicly defending and helping to free the Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island for high treason. Zola's supporters would blame the Army, the Church, the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy for his murder. BOSON BOOKS

6

A Moment of Truth Cornette had never wished Zola ill, dead or alive. Even though the novelist had kept his detectives and uniformed policemen in the Saint-Georges district in a ferment for five years. But he cursed his ill luck that Zola had landed him with this problem at fifty-two, so near the end of his career. Most of his superiors did not share his tolerant view of Zola, hating him as much as did the high-ups in the French Establishment. For his own sake, Cornette hoped that Zola had died accidentally and not by his own hand or through foul play. However, he could take no chances. "We'd better have blood samples from the lot," he told the doctors. Studying the phials of blood, he noticed Madame Zola's looked darker than her husband's, and both the dog samples seemed darker than hers. As he finished tagging them, a stoop-shouldered figure entered the bedroom. Charles Girard, head of Paris municipal laboratories, had come at the Prefect's behest to carry out the chemical tests; he stared at Zola's pink complexion then at the brilliant red of his blood sample before crossing to peer at the half-burned briquettes. "Was the trap up or down?" he asked Cornette. "Down." "Humph! I'd say it's hardly worth bothering to check for drugs in the stomach or blood stream. "Gas, is it?" "Carbon monoxide and dioxide. I can run spectroscopic tests and let you have confirmation." He pointed to the fireplace. "I expect they'll want us to repeat the room conditions and see how they affect experimental animals." "I'll see nobody touches the fireplace," Cornett said. He jerked his head towards the bed where Madame Zola had begun to moan and cough. "Why is it she and the dogs have survived when Zola didn't?" "Probably a better heart," Girard said. "But we'll have to wait until she recovers and can tell us." He gathered some of the ash and fuel from the fireplace, took the samples and departed. Cornette sat down at the small, antique table to write a second note to the Prefect: Further evidence establishes that the accident seems due to a chimney where fuel is still burning in the grate which seems in bad repair and is allowing gas to escape and spread through the room. An architect should be sent to verify this point. Monsieur Zola is dead. Madame Zola has been revived and is saved. —Cornette. In the dining room, he assembled Zola's servants, the caretaker and four men who had been working in the house that morning. In all, he had nine witnesses; Madame Monnier, caretaker; Jules Delahalle, valet; his wife, Eugénie, cook; her nephew Léon Laveau, coachman; Mademoiselle Claret, maid; Victor Lefebre, plumber; Donat Beaudart, carpenter; Robert Manchien and his assistant, chimney sweeps. For more than an hour, the superintendent interrogated them, noting exactly what had happened from the moment they reopened the house the previous day.

BOSON BOOKS

7

A Moment of Truth That day, September 28, 1902, the Zolas had returned from their country estate at Médan, less than an hour by train along the Seine; they had arrived at midday. Jules, the valet, had preceded them by four hours and since it had rained and the day seemed cold and damp, he had lit the fire in the bedroom; this had smoked so he had opened a window and lowered the metal screen until it drew better. Madame Zola ordered he chimney swept which she normally did on their return; she had spent the afternoon in the bedroom writing letters without complaining. Both the Zolas had dined well on clear soup, chicken, cheese and desert. They had retired to their bedroom between 9.30 and 10 o'clock. "What did the servants have to eat?" Cornette asked. "The same as the master and mistress," Jules replied. Next morning, the chimney sweeps reported and started work downstairs. At 8.30, the servants wondered why Madame Zola had not rung for breakfast. Getting no answer to their knock, Mademoiselle Claret and Eugénie Delahalle summoned the two workmen repairing a pipe and a panel in Monsieur Zola's study. Did Monsieur Zola always lock his bedroom door?" Jules nodded. "Even before he got those threatening letters over the Dreyfus business. He had a thing about someone entering his bedroom while he slept." When the workmen banged on the bedroom door, they heard Fanfan, the Pomeranian, whining and scuffling. "Only one dog?" "Yes, Monsieur le Commissaire," Eugénie Delahalle said. "They were jealous of each other which is why Pinpin slept in the bathroom." Now thoroughly alarmed, they told Beaudart, the carpenter, to break down the door. All four of them went into the room. Fanfan crept towards them so feeble that he could hardly stand. "Exactly what did you see?" "Monsieur Zola was lying between the steel grill and the four-poster with his head on the raised platform and his feet towards the window," Beaudart said. "He was moaning and his body was warm. I held a mirror to his mouth and it misted over. Lefebre and myself carried him over to the divan and tried to bring him round while the coachman fetched a doctor." "And Madame Zola?" "She was on the bed with her face buried between the pillows. But she was coughing so we left her for the doctors." Cornette drew the brown phial from a pocket. "Recognize this?" "Its Madame's chloroform water," Mademoiselle Claret said. "She takes it for her nerves and to make her sleep, I think." Cornette turned to Lefebre. "You're a plumber. When you broke into the bedroom, did you notice anything?" Lefebre shook his head. "No smoke, no smell?" Again, the plumber shook his head. "And the fire." "That was out. I raised the trap and put my hand on the grate. It was cold." "Cold? You sure of that?" When the plumber confirmed his statement, Cornette paused for a moment. Why had he almost burned his hand on the trap an hour and a half later? Why had the fire started up again? And why, when Zola BOSON BOOKS

8

A Moment of Truth had obviously died from coal gas poisoning, didn't a trained hand like a plumber catch a whiff of smoke? Little wonder the doctors had plumped for food or drug poisoning. "The grit and plasterboard in the fireplace...did you see it when you lit the fire?" he asked the valet. "Yes, I thought it had fallen recently, but I left it there for the sweep to see." "You left for Médan during the cold weather five months ago. Was the fire drawing then?" Delahalle, his wife and the maid all nodded. "It had never smoked the way it did this time," he said. "And it was swept regularly the day after we came back each year." Robert Manchien, head of the chimney-sweeping firm, verified this with a nod. "Was one sweeping a year enough?" "For the five months they used that fire—yes." When Cornet dismissed them, he had Zola's body moved from the bedroom to the study. Half an hour later, Madame Zola had recovered enough to ask for her husband. They lied, saying he had survived but had been taken to hospital. Her they transported to a clinic at Neuilly. Cornette placed seals on the furniture and doors, posted three gendarmes in the building then walked back to his headquarters in Boulevard Rochechouart. Already, newsboys were tripping along the boulevard brandishing bills like victory banners, proclaiming ZOLA POISONED. As they bawled their sensational news, people snatched copies of the first editions of the evening papers; groups were collecting on the Place Clichy and Place Pigalle and rumors were beginning to fly around; some people wept openly while others shouted their jubilation out loud. Halting to buy the early editions, the chief superintendent caught snippets of some wild stories: Zola and his wife had had a bust-up over his mistress and she had murdered him; Zola had emptied a whole bottle of arsenic down his throat out of remorse for defending that Yid officer who sold French military secrets to the Prussians; somebody with the honor of France at heart had broken into their bedroom and shot them both, no more than they deserved; the Deuxième Bureau or the army intelligence service had poisoned their food for the way Zola had humiliated them over the Dreyfus Case; God had brought down His wrath on the liar and pornographer, the Judas and treacherous spy, Zola. His bundle of evening papers merely magnified these rumors. In bludgeoning type, La Patrie broke the news of Zola's death then defamed him and his work; La Presse dilated on the sordid domestic drama ending in death at Rue de Bruxelles; and the news agency, Paris-Nouvelles, had embroidered his own first dispatch about drug poisoning to declare point-blank that Zola had committed suicide after a family row.

BOSON BOOKS

9

A Moment of Truth In his office, Inspector Denis was waiting for him. "They're getting het-up in the prefect's office about Zola," he said. "Isn't it an open-and-shut case?" "I don't know," Cornette replied. "There's something I can't put my finger on." "They've ordered a couple of chemists to do animal experiments in the room and a brace of architects to take the chimney apart and a pathologist to take Zola apart. Seems they're not leaving anything to chance." "With somebody like Zola, they can't afford to." "Oh, I forgot one thing—they've assigned an examining magistrate." "Who's he?" "Somebody called Bourrouillou...Joseph Bourrouillou." Observing the curl of Cornette's lip, Denis asked, "Do you know him?" "Not well. But I know he spent twenty-odd years in Algeria, and these colonial sweats are more chauvinistic French than the President's guard." "You mean, he'll be against rather than for Zola?" Cornette shrugged. "He's a bureaucrat...likes to cover his tracks with a lot of paper." That's maybe why they've picked him." Denis had asked the vital question. Who in France could remain impartial or objective about Zola, the villain or hero of the Dreyfus Case depending on your place or your politics? Cornette had his private idea about Judge Bourrouillou. From his experience, colonial judges had anything but a liberal viewpoint and, anyway, the judiciary as a whole had shown violent anti-Dreyfus sympathies. But his wasn't to reason why they'd chosen somebody who had spent most of his career judging natives and French settlers; as a police superintendent investigating a death and a serious case of poisoning, he had to take his orders and cue from Monsieur le Juge Joseph Bourrouillou. Cornette had little time to worry about the legal and political aspects of his inquiry. He had to take statements, arrange for the experiments and a room for the autopsy; he allotted the study where Zola lay for friends. There, he saw the twitching, shuffling figure of Captain Dreyfus come to pay his respects to the man who had done most to free him from Devil's Island; he recognized the writer, Octave Mirbeau, composer Alfred Bruneau, engraver Fernand Desmoulins (a revolver bulging under his black jacket) and the publishers, Georges Charpentier and Eugène Fasquelle. Next morning, he escorted a mother and two children, all in mourning, to pray by the body. Zola's mistress, Jeanne Rozerot, and their two children, Denise and Jacques. Late that morning after the drama, the detective had the autopsy results from Dr Charles Vibert and the findings of Girard's chemical lab. Apart from gallstones and several small kidney cysts, the pathologist discovered no organic reason why Zola had died and his wife had lived. Chemical analysis provided the physiological reason: Madame Zola's blood contained less than half the carbon monoxide they had found in her husband's body. Somehow, Zola had accumulated a massive seven percent. Vibert declared that, even had Zola survived, his brain would have suffered permanent damage. For Cornette's benefit, he defined how the gas fastened on hemoglobin, the blood fraction transporting oxygen, it stifled the blood cells, destroyed the brain cells and finally arrested the heart. BOSON BOOKS

10

A Moment of Truth "Would the concentration of gas be the same for someone on the floor, like Zola, and someone on a high bed, like his wife?" Vibert thought for a moment then shook his head. "If anything, she'd run the greater risk since the gas is slightly lighter than air," he replied. "Then that means she must have quit the room for some time during the night," Cornette said. To clarify that point, he took a horse-cab to Neuilly to interview Alexandrine Zola. Dr Larat, her friend and family doctor, had just broken the news to her. "I should have died with him," she sobbed. "He was always so afraid of death." She plunged her face into the pillows then looked up at Larat and Cornette. "I want to see him again...take me to see him...please, please." Against Larat's insistence, she refused to remain in the clinic unless they could do something to allow her to see Zola once more. Finally, Larat promised they would embalm Zola so that she could look at him before the funeral. Through Madame Zola’s delirium, Cornet pieced together what had happened that night after the Zolas had retired. She had noticed the fire still burning and had closed the trap. They had feared fire rather than smoke. At some time during the night she had woken. Her head seemed compressed in a giant vice; she had griping pains and felt sick. Without disturbing her husband, she groped her way to the toilet. She fell...once?...twice?...she couldn't remember. She reached the toilet and relieved herself. When she returned, her husband had woken and turned the electric light knob on. He said he was ill himself. They should go to sleep, he said. It was something they had eaten and they would feel better in the morning. When she woke again, she saw Zola leaning on a table, then kneeling on a chair. She tried to get up, to call for help, then she remembered nothing more. "I have to ask you this, Madame Zola—did you and your husband have a quarrel that evening?" "No, or course not...what do you mean?" "I have to rule out and refute stories that are going round. You didn't have a row about Monsieur Zola's mistress and children?" For a moment he noticed her eyes narrow then she shook her head and began to weep. As Cornette walked back to his cab, he remembered the feces in the room and bathroom. How long had Madame Zola spent outside that bedroom? Probably several hours since her absence from that smoke-filled room had saved her life. He deduced from her account that Zola had risen to open a window or a door, had collapsed and died. When he returned to Rue de Bruxelles, Judge Joseph Bourrouillou had arrived and was examining the bedroom and bathroom. He smoked a cigarette and listened while Cornette brought him up to date with his inquiries. A full head taller than the detective, he had an imperial moustache, wispy beard and a twangy, Mediterranean accent. His top hat, striped pants and spatted patent shoes stamped him as a product of the old school. To Cornette, he appeared unconcerned, even smug, as he noted the facts and continually referred to “the accident.” He had detailed two architects, Henri Bunel from the police prefecture, and Georges Debrie from the municipality, to

BOSON BOOKS

11

A Moment of Truth prepare a report on the functioning of the chimney after the chemists had performed their experiments. "Let's get these tests done and finish the case as quickly as possible," he said. "I want to hold a reconstruction of the accident on October 3." "We'll set them up tonight, Monsieur le Juge," Cornette replied, wondering what they could go to clear up the mystery in only three full days. That night, Girard and his associate, Jules Ogier, head of the Paris toxicology laboratory, brought four guinea pigs and four canaries. When the valet had lit the fire with paper, firewood and briquettes exactly as he had done on September 28, they deployed the animals and bird round the room. A candle held near the chimney bent its flames, showing the fire was drawing. In the morning when they opened the door, they noticed neither smoke nor smell; the fire was burning slowly. Both caged canaries had died, a third escaped when they levered a window up, but they caught the fourth. Neither in the birds nor the animals did the chemists discover measurable traces of carbon monoxide. Two dead canaries, birds notorious for their low tolerance to carbon monoxide, proved nothing. "Curious," Cornette remarked. "The same conditions, same fire in the same chimney killed Zola two nights ago, and now there isn't enough toxic gas to put guinea-pigs to sleep. "We'll repeat the experiments and see if we've done something wrong," Girard said. Cornette grunted assent. But he felt they could carry out a dozen such experiments and they'd get the same result. His mind went back to what the plumber had said, then to the moment that he had scorched his own hand on the fire screen. And now the fire was drawing well enough to keep the room free from smoke and gas. Walking back to his office, he observed that troops had already replaced the Republican Guard around the Rue de Bruxelles and Avenue de Clichy. Did they think the Guard would side with Zola if trouble started? Well, maybe they might. He had handled a lot of street rioting between Zola's supporters and enemies. On his desk he found a note from the police prefect, Louis Lépine, to say that they had postponed Zola's funeral until Sunday. Cornette picked up the pile of newspapers, which his staff had collected. All of them carried long articles on Zola, a few of them laudatory but most either deriding or denigrating the dead novelist. Four of the editors, Henri Rochefort of L'Intransigeant, Edouard Drumont of La Libre Parole, Charles Maurras of La Gazette de France and Ernest Judet of Le Petit Journal, repeated every slur, every stigma on Zola and his books; Italian upstart, Jew-lover, Imperial and Republican pornographer, money-grubbing traitor, sexual obsessive, pervert, pimp and pig. Even religious papers like La Croix attacked Zola as an anti-Christ. Much of this Cornette had encountered before, during the Dreyfus Case when he had to keep Zola under close watch as well as protect him. Did this sort of muck really stick to the gentle, myopic and rather nervous individual he had met so often while doing his duty?

BOSON BOOKS

12

A Moment of Truth He turned to the police files which, in a sense, reflected the newspaper attacks. For there he found hundreds of murder threats by people roused to fury by Press reports, political and clerical utterances. ZOLA TO THE GALLOWS! ran one indictment and with this came two black-bordered cards, one inviting everyone to attend the novelist's funeral, the other outlining a satirical version of his last will. Most menaces bore no signature, though many had obviously been written by well-educated people. Where is the Charlotte Corday who will rid France of your putrid presence? Dirty pig and Jewish cat’s-paw. I've just left a meeting where we decided to do you in. France will be well shot of an infamous character.—Signed Aubert. We'll have your guts out before long, be sure of that...Among a group of true Frenchmen, fate has chosen me to blow you sky-high; dynamite will rid us of your evil person.—Signed Georges Garnier. I shall do you in if you don't get out of France soon.—Signed Jean Mass, butcher's boy. I want you to know that I am leaving tomorrow for Paris to finish you off. You are going to croak, dirty pig... No one could discount all these threats. Nine months ago, Cornette himself had investigated a crude attempt to murder Zola with a homemade bomb planted in the doorway of Rue de Bruxelles. And each day and night for fifteen days, he had witnessed a crowd around the Palais de Justice ready to lynch the novelist when they tried him for accusing the army general staff of camouflaging the truth and perjuring themselves in the Dreyfus Case. He had seen anarchists and even good Frenchmen spoiling to wreck Zola's house the day they seized and auctioned his belongings. So many people had willed his death. Had one of them contrived to murder him? His detective's intuition whispered that Zola's death had a strong connection with his stand for Dreyfus. He felt sure of something else. Bourrouillou and his chosen experts would take the whole house to bits but they would still bring in the verdict that suited them and their superiors and la raison d'état regardless of the evidence. They would whitewash everybody and declare Zola's death an accident. After leafing through the recent files and noting some names, Cornette glanced at the older police reports on Zola. To his astonishment, he discovered they went back thirty-six years to 1866. So Zola had tangled with the authorities early in his career! Those police files filled in some of the gaps in his knowledge of Zola. For he realized he knew very little of the man whom had just left lying in an open coffin on his study desk with two Pomeranians and a marmalade cat sitting as though praying for a sign or a twitch from that marble, embalmed expression on their master's face, animated only by the prismatic light from the stained-glass windows.

BOSON BOOKS

13

A Moment of Truth

BOOK 1

BOSON BOOKS

14

A Moment of Truth

I From where he stood with the priest and mourners, Émile spotted his mother sitting beside the driver of the wagon as it breasted the rise at the end of the Marseilles road. For a whole week, seven interminable days, she had deserted him for his sick father. Wrenching free from the maid, he darted between the elm trees to the cart, climbed up and buried himself in his mother's arms. He hardly noticed that she wore a black coat and veiled hat. Or that a black-velvet drape covered an object at the back of the wagon. At the Calvary on the Rotunda at Aix-en-Provence, both mother and son dismounted and waited until they transferred the coffin to the horse-drawn hearse filled with flowers. "Does he know?" Émilie Zola whispered to the maid, who shook her head. "I told him his father was very ill, but it was you he missed...he cried every night for you." Émilie Zola had them re-open the coffin lid to let her son see his father for the last time; the boy gazed at the marble face with its pinched nostrils over a pomaded moustache and a more tranquil expression than he had ever seen on it. They fell into step behind the hearse, Émile grasping his mother's hand with white knuckles as though dreading another separation. As they slow-stepped along the new boulevard to the Nice road, he heard the three tocsin notes clang from Saint-Sauveur Cathedral and echo from a dozen other churches in Aix-en-Provence; that doleful sound filled the high-walled alley leading to the cemetery and dinned in his head. At the graveside, his mother's sobs ran like shocks up his arm as Monsieur Labot, a Parisian lawyer and family friend, praised his father. Names like Venice, Austria, England, Holland, Algiers, the Foreign Legion spun aimlessly in his head like the whorls of dust stirred round the coffin by the March wind. They signified nothing to a six-year-old boy. Except that he had never really known his father, never had the chance to grow close to him. He was always climbing in and out of coaches, bending over plans and columns of figures. That earth thudding on the wooden box reminded him of beatings and his father's stern manner. He had never much minded those long absences; they had given him the chance to invite himself into the double bed and snuggle up to his mother and fancy himself her protector. Accepting the crucifix from his mother, he made the sign of the cross over the coffin before they returned to the carriage, which drove through the town center. For the first time, Aix-en-Provence unrolled before his eyes—the mansion houses then the grim twins of the law courts and the prison, the town hall with its mediaeval clock tower, the eight facets of the cathedral and the old ramparts, which they traversed to enter the Impasse Sylvacane where they lived. His mother took off her black coat and veiled hat and sat down, weary and dazed from the twenty-mile trip on a makeshift hearse, and the emotions of the funeral. A widow at twenty-seven with a son nearly seven! She could still not believe it. Poor François had come home coughing from the gorge where he was BOSON BOOKS

15

A Moment of Truth building his dam and reservoir, but still insisted on going for a business trip of several days to Marseilles; she had packed his trunk and kissed him goodbye. Thee days later came the gendarmes to announce he was lying seriously ill at a hotel in Rue de l'Arbre. Somehow, in that strange, strident port, she had fumbled her way to the street and found the rundown hotel with its shabby room where her husband was agonizing with pleurisy; for a whole week she had sat there, numb, watching him develop pneumonia and finally die. In their eight years of marriage, he had never stopped running after that obsession to build his dam and canal and make their fortune; he had fought local nobility and half a dozen municipalities for construction rights; he had shuttled between Aix and Paris to lobby Adolphe Thiers, then prime minister, and even King Louis Philippe himself; finally he had triumphed, formed a company and started the dam which would make them rich. And now what did she have? A mass of paper—plans, accounts, shares. Yes, and bills by the score. All that and a boy to bring up. She fought back her tears as she saw his eyes fixed on hers. She adored Émile and had even defied François when he wanted to enroll him at school. "Maman, où est Papa?" he whispered. "Papa is in heaven looking down on us," she replied. "Ith he coming back?" he asked with that lisp which had made them both smile at first then worry when it persisted. She shook her head and tears spurted. He came to put his arms round her neck. Maman, don't cry," he said, his face grave. "I shall take care of you." She clung to him and wept. And the boy wondered why he should feel no remorse for wishing to have his mother and all her love to himself, no regret at his father's absence. Only a qualm at the thought he could still see them. Several months later, her parents arrived from Paris. Her father, Louis Aubert, had retired a few years before from his painting and glazing business in Dourdan, forty miles south-west of the capital; his wife, Henriette, persuaded him that their daughter and grandson needed them in Aix. Despite her silver hair, a life of hard work and no formal education, Henriette Aubert had more spunk and good sense than her daughter. She took one look at the long, two-story villa with it acre of garden that was costing more in rent than they spent on everything else. What did it matter that it had once housed the family of Adolphe Thiers, former prime minister, historian and sponsor of François Zola? "It's much too big," Henriette said. "We have to move." But they were bound by a seven-year lease. So Grandmother Aubert sacked the servants and ran the house herself. Émile posed a problem but she shelved that. With no friends of his own age, he played in their vast garden, a solitary and illiterate child who ran wild, held long dialogues with their neighbors' cats and dogs, soliloquized to trees, collected cockroaches and beetles and lisped worse than a three-year old. Left to Émilie and himself, he would finish a weakling and a cretin, the old lady thought. Yet, like her daughter, she could not bear to thrust him through the high wall of Impasse Sylvacane into the rough-and-tumble of school life.

BOSON BOOKS

16

A Moment of Truth They had bigger problems. "How do we live?” Émilie sighed. "We owe money everywhere." "We fight for your rights in your husband's dam. He worked himself to death for the town, so they can't refuse to help you." "But I know nothing about the dam." "Leave that to me," said Henriette. Armed with the dossier on François Zola's project, the old lady made the rounds, badgering lawyers, councilors, leading shareholders; but flint-eyed local bigwigs growled through their Imperial beards that the contract had no clause covering the founder's death and no one owed the Zolas anything; moreover, the company was running into money trouble and soon the creditors would force it into bankruptcy. Of the 1,200 shares of 500 francs issued to finance the venture, the family owned 50. One by one, Grandmother Aubert sold these to pay their debts, rent and food. Adolphe Thiers visited the dam site in July 1847. As leader of the parliamentary opposition, he wielded great influence in Paris and Aix. Émilie must take her son to meet the great man, her mother urged. So, amid blasting charges echoing down the Infernets gorges, the boy Émile shook hands with a thin-lipped, bespectacled homunculus, his quilted face dwarfed by a top hat. "What! Zola's son can't read or write? "Thiers barked. Get him off to school and when he has learned something I'll speak to the town for a college bursary." "There's that day-school three minutes from here near the old cemetery on the boulevard," Henriette Aubert said. "Louis will take him." Up to that moment in autumn 1847, Émile's world had begun and ended with high walls surrounding their Provençal villa. When his grandfather left him with Monsieur Isoard, the headmaster of the Pension Notre Dame, he felt lost, panicstricken. In the playground he stood crying while boys half his size hooted and jeered at him. Where was God, the Almighty ally his mother and grandmother had promised would protect him if he prayed. Well, he had prayed and implored; it seemed only to bring more taunts and clods of earth on his head. He took his first communion really imagining he was swallowing the blood and body of the sacrificed Christ, though wondering why it tasted like any other bread and wine. In class, too, they mocked when he lisped and stuttered through easy texts; after lessons he stayed behind with Monsieur Isoard to vocalize one more La Fontaine fable or Boileau poem. Yet this extra tuition helped little and he still sat a full head taller than the other, younger boys. He chose a desk beside the two who did not molest him: Philippe Solari, a self-effacing lad who sat molding breadcrumbs into heads and bodies; and Marius Roux, who prompted him when his reading faltered and his lisp worsened. Even though God had not lived up to his mother's and grandmother's exalted notions of Him, Émile always headed the queue for Sunday catechism at Saint John's Church; they all knew and twitted him about his girlfriend. Indeed, he had fallen in love. Love pure and mute. Loved fired by nothing more than the sight of a pink, frilly hat and the touch of a white, lace-trimmed BOSON BOOKS

17

A Moment of Truth dress as it passed in the aisle. Love sustained by the flutter of eyelashes over violet eyes. He was ten and she was a year younger and he knew nothing about her except that she was Louise Solari, Philippe's sister. He wanted to confess his passion to his mother and grandmother, but decided to keep it secret. Wouldn't they think it guilty? He recalled that night five years before, just after his fifth birthday, when his mother had entered his room and found Mustapha, the Arab servant boy, in his bed, sitting astride him. On that occasion, his mother had screamed and his father had run and seized Mustapha and swore at him in a funny language before thrashing him and sending for the police to come and take him away. And he, who had done no wrong that he understood, got the same beating. When he gazed at Louise Solari, he had the same fire in his blood. Why? That he could not comprehend either. So he kept his love to himself. Anyway, his mother and grandparents had more to preoccupy them. Work on the dam had stopped and the town hall had decided to auction the plans, equipment and completed part of the project. Now they had no hope of even recouping François Zola's own investment in the scheme; they had to sell their remaining shares to cancel their lease, pay their lawyers and some of their creditors and find cheaper lodgings. Near the Pont de Béraud in the country east of Aix lay a shanty town built by Italian masons and laborers, squatters, tramps and a gypsy colony; in this area, Grandmother Aubert discovered a dilapidated stone bastide (farmhouse); there, the family minus most of its furniture, set up home. For Émile it meant trekking a mile on foot to school and back; but the primitive house had its points. Twenty yards away ran the Torse, a slow, twisting stream where he could bathe during the blistering months; around him he had hills and woods where he and Philippe Solari and Marius Roux could live like savages during the holidays with a couple of dogs for company. He felt at one with the garrigue, the rock-strewn scrub on which pines and ilex had found a foothold. To his primitive ear, the wind carried on a dialogue with the pine needles; to his innocent eye, the kestrels and crows planing overhead seemed to trace more intelligible patterns in the air that Maitre Isoard on his blackboard; sun-bleached limestone outcropping in fantastic shapes became faces and figures that he could converse with; and the intoxicating scent of rosemary and jasmine, lavender and thyme, pine resin and peach blossom followed him into the bare bedroom of his bastide at night. But soon that idyll evaporated. With their few bits of furniture stacked on a farm cart, they trudged back into town. He had no idea where they were going to pitch up, only guessing they would have shed another piece of furniture to help pay the rent, that their next abode would be smaller and shabbier. But his mother wanted to live near him. For Monsieur Thiers had found him a place in Bourbon College. At twelve he should have joined the sixth class, but they put him into the eighth with boys two years younger who still left him gaping with their superior knowledge. On that first day when they had beaten and cuffed him round the junior playground, when even the sight of the cod stew and haricot beans in the

BOSON BOOKS

18

A Moment of Truth refectory made him feel sick, he cried himself to sleep among the forty-odd boys in his dormitory. His five years at day school now seemed only an apprenticeship in sadism; his classmates ragged him and roughed him up; they played football with his new kepi and stole his textbooks; they showered every insult they could imagine on his head. "Italian scum...snooty Parisian...filthy foreigner," they shouted as they laid into him with their fists. "Come on, let's duck him," one of them cried and they hustled him towards the stagnant pool between the junior and senior playgrounds. He was bleating for mercy as they picked him up and prepared to throw him into the deep end. Suddenly, he heard someone bellow and they released him to turn and attack a bigger boy who flailed into them until they smothered him in a tangle of arms and legs. When they had kicked and pummeled him into a limp heap, they carted him to the pool and tossed him into the slimy water. "That's what money-lenders' bastards get," they shouted. Zola went to help the boy climb out of the pool, but he thrust the outstretched hand away. "I'm thorry," Zola sobbed. "Stop blubbering. And if they kick you, kick them back twice as hard. Compris?" He shook the water off himself like a spaniel. "What's your name?" "Tho-la." Seeing the puzzled look, he spelled it. "So it was your father who was building the dam." He studied the boy with his seedy look, baby face and that Parisian twang and lisp which made him a pariah for these rich hooligans. That hunted look would have earned him a kicking on its own, but his dead father with his defunct dam had lost Aix folk a lot of money, which they prized above everything, and that accounted for some of the hostility. Anyway, some kids just asked for a kicking. "They kicked me until I kicked back," he said. "And they still call me a bastard." "What'th a bathtard?" "Never mind. My name's Cézanne, Paul Cézanne." That evening when they had eaten their meat stew and apple tart in the refectory, Cézanne approached the black marble table where Zola sat with the chief of his tormentors, Marie-Paul Seymard. Without a word, Cézanne grabbed the burly youth by his tunic lapels, hoisted him to his feet then forehanded and backhanded him across the face. "Every time you or anybody else lays a finger on Zola you get double," he said and returned to his table. At the break next day, Zola saw Cézanne standing alone by the dividing wall; he went up diffidently, holding out an apple his mother had given him. Cézanne took it, sank crooked teeth into it, halved it with a penknife and handed half to Zola. "My name's Paul," he said, holding out his hand. "Mine'th Émile." They shook hands solemnly. In everything but blood they become brothers. No one bothered Zola now that he had a protector, although they still sneered at both of them, calling them Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Cézanne ignored these sons of local gentry, BOSON BOOKS

19

A Moment of Truth advocates, rich merchants and farmers. "They’re just the OTHERRRS, Émeeloo," he said in ringing Provençal tones. "We can always lick them, you and me." "Yeth, Paul." Indeed, Zola had begun to redeem his lost years; he noted how Cézanne slogged at his books while the Seymards, de Julinennes, Marguerys and Abels were dating grisettes in town. He did likewise, haunting the empty classrooms of the former convent where the perfume of Provençal herbs mingled with the odor of powdered ink, chlorine and molting distemper from the damp walls. So well did he ply his books that the OTHERRRS saw him carry off prizes for French grammar and composition, history, geography, classical recitation and general excellence. He had always had a dread of dying, but somehow school routine and the ritual behavior reassured him. How could he miss morning prayers and roll call by dying—especially if he did his prep well! Cézanne also inducted him into the wider world of Aix, that curious citadel immured in mediaeval ramparts behind fifteen stout gates that opened at sunrise and shut at sunset as though Aix folk wanted nothing to do with the universe beyond. Indeed, from the fifteenth-century era of Good King René, Aix had drowsed and slumbered in the Provençal sun, a capital only in name. Zola trotted behind his new hero. In the Cours Mirabeau, the imposing cobbled avenue that split the town into plebeian and patrician districts, he tasted his first absinthe amid the Imperial trappings of the Deux Garçons café and got back to his mother's lodgings in Rue Bellegarde on Cézanne's shoulder. He saw the last Sedan chair in France bearing a wraithlike creature to mass, the Marquise de la Garde, a lady who had curtsied to Marie Antoinette before the Revolution. South of the Cours, aristocratic families like Saint-Marc, Forbin, Estienne d'Orves kept to their seventeenth-century mansions, hiding their poverty and political prejudices; on the north side lay cafés and shops, including the hat shop which had founded the fortune of Paul’s father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne. It occurred to no one to cross the thirty meters of carriageway between the noble and plebeian districts. Behind the Cours, on the north side, sat Old Aix, a jigsaw of narrow, crooked streets and alleys and mediaeval houses. Almost every street took the name of a trade or calling. Carders and coppersmiths, tanners and muleteers, friars and penitents. Like social or religious caste areas. Zola's sensitive nose told him what Aix did for a living. Whole streets stank of rabbit fur, which was tanned and converted into hat felt; whole districts smelled of olive oil which went out to the whole of France; or of wine pressed from thousands of acres of vineyards. These odors mingled with perfume from soap works and the aroma from factories processing tons of almond nuts into elliptical lozenges called calissons. Along the alleys and avenues filtered scores of priests and nuns holding cassocks and robes down against the mistral, a violent wind which winter and summer transformed the water-jets from thirty-odd fountains into fine rain. "All these priests, Paul?" "Émeeloo, I've never met your like for asking daft questions. We've got dozens of churches, monasteries and nunneries to fill around Aix." BOSON BOOKS

20

A Moment of Truth They met lawyers by the hundred coming and going through the splendid new Palais de Justice housing the departmental assizes and appeal courts. "I don't like lawyers," Zola muttered, thinking of the litigation over the dam. "I hate them, too," Cézanne grunted. "Papa wants to put me into a wig and gown." Zola had never met Louis-Auguste Cézanne, but like everybody else, had heard how he built up his bank by flint-hearted dealing and lending money at usurer's interest. He wondered why Paul, who feared nobody, always quavered when he mentioned his father. "What does that mean?" he asked, pointing to a street called Buèno Carrièro. "Good-Job Street," Cézanne sniggered. "It's a Provençal joke. In the old days women paraded their wares there." "Their wares?" "Prostitutes...they went naked from the waist up to show off their tits," Cézanne said and laughed when Zola blushed. "Want to see where it all happens now?" Zola nodded, mystified by the word Prostitute; he tripped along behind Cézanne through the Passage Agard, a narrow tunnel dog-legging from the main square into the Cours. Cézanne thumbed at the entrance to a dingy restaurant and Zola stretched to squint through misted windows. Inside, several women were sipping wine, absinthe or coffee, their legs crossed to show frilly petticoats, their faces daubed with paint under floral bonnets, ruffed corsages riding over ample white bosoms. Some even smoked cigarettes. "You can buy them," Cézanne whispered. "Buy them?” Zola caught his breath. "Yes...by the hour...by the day." "But Paul...but, what for?" "Don't worry, Émeeloo, you'll find out soon enough," Cézanne said slapping him on the back. One day we'll try a couple of those tarts in there. Or go to one of the maisons closes in Rue de la Fonderie." Tarts! Maisons closes! Zola ran his tongue over dry lips and wondered what went on in that smutty street where the windows giving on to the ramparts remained shuttered winter and summer. In this sun-drenched town he had already caught hints of the low boiling point of Latin blood; a hundred burning eyes would rake one flash of a female ankle and the flutter of a knowing eyelash could halt a dozen youths in their stride. But what other sins did women commit worse than drinking absinthe, smoking cigarettes and painting their faces? Whatever they did, he could never imagine an ethereal creature like Louise Solari would stoop to such conduct. She and these woman did not even seem to belong to the same world.

BOSON BOOKS

21

A Moment of Truth

II Bourbon College taught him one thing. Life meant struggle. For weeks on end he went hungry or had to fill his stomach with bread being unable to eat the refectory meat and mash; he allied himself with hunger strikers and petty revolutionaries when they threw their carafes and wine-bottles at the masters in protest at the revolting food; he climbed the wall to steal his quota of apricots and blackcurrants from the head's garden and ate these in the dormitory. But apart from Cézanne he made no real friends. He even chose subjects like math, science and religion where the human animal did not appear to remind him of his baleful schoolmates who mocked him and his family. His pile of prize-books grew. And hadn't old Carbonnel blinked over his halfmoon spectacles on reading one of his essays and murmured, "This is good, Zola. One day you'll be a writer?" He had already begun by filling several exercise books with a three-act drama and his own head with literary dreams, an infection he passed on to Cézanne. They converted one of the OTHERRRS—Baptistin Baille, something of a bookworm aiming at a civil service career. In August, the college gates opened releasing them for two months. Avid to see everything, they tramped all over Provence, hiking seven miles to Roquefavour to climb the 260-foot aqueduct and gaze along its 400 yards of dizzying arches. Halfway back, they were skirting a high wall when Cézanne jerked his head at it. "That's the Château de Galice," he threw out. Château de Galice! It resonated like some incantation in Zola's head. They had to scramble up the wall and look over. Behind a tangle of apricot, apple and almond trees sprouting from some wild scrub they spied a square mansion which looked to Zola like some fairy-tale palace; tree-lined alleys radiated from it and flowers had overgrown the lawns as though trying to invade the house; a cloying fragrance of linden blossom, rosemary, lavender, roses and other flowers wafted over the wall to him. A lodge sat by the main gate and south, an old mill appeared above the trees. "Who lives there?" Zola asked. "Search me," Cézanne replied. "The Galice family...Papal nobility, I think. They've a place in town." "It looks deserted," Baille said. "All right, then let's get a few fistfuls of those apples," Cézanne cried and made to slither over when Zola stopped him. "There's a girl yonder," he said. They looked towards the eastern gable to where she was playing with a sheepdog, throwing sticks for it. To Zola, she had a beatific face, like the nun who ran the college first-aid clinic and set all their hearts pounding. For some reason, he felt relieved they could not steal the fruit from this garden. Curiously, it reminded him strongly of Grandmother Aubert's bible stories. Genesis, wasn't it? A phrase gyrated in his head—"And God walked in the garden in the cool of the evening.” His imagination pictured something like this manor BOSON BOOKS

22

A Moment of Truth house and its garden as the paradise in the Garden of Eden. Eating those apples would have smacked of sacrilege, he thought, dragging the others off the wall. That summer of 1854 seemed to set the country aflame; beyond the town, the sugar-loaf outline of Montagne Sainte-Victoire glowed like a live coal; dust tarnished the olive, almond and pine trees in which cicadas racketed day and night; but a mile south of the town, the River Arc flowed through a lush valley and there the trio went to pitch camp, swim and talk literature. That normally meant Victor Hugo whom they worshipped for his revolutionary stand against Napoleon III and his sham Second Empire, for his romanticism in poems, plays, novels. But Zola had found a new hero. He held up a slim and shabby volume. "Two sous in the flea market," he told the others. And in his lisping voice, he read a whole cycle of poems where the poet dreamed and communed with his muse on four nights of the four seasons. Cézanne and even Baille sat in silence, entranced by the passionate, lyrical language. Zola ended with this poem: I am neither God nor demon, And you called me by my name When you took me for one of your own Where you are, there shall I be always Until the end of your days When I shall go and sit by your graveside. Hugo had gone. Deposed by Alfred de Musset, romantic and restless, breathing love and sorrow, laughter and tears in the same phrase, the brilliant artist rebelling against his era. "Ah!" What wouldn't I give to write poetry like that?" Zola sighed. "Your chance of a career," Baille commented. Cézanne turned on him. "You talk like my old man," he shouted. "He's a banker, so you needn't worry," Baille came back. "But Émile couldn't pay his paper and ink with poetry." "Émeeloo shall succeed as a poet, and I'm going to do the same as a painter." Baille burst out laughing, knowing how the art master and Gibert, the curator of the Granet Museum ridiculed and even sneered at Paul's drawing; but Zola had visited Cézanne's bedroom in Rue Mathéron and studied some of his watercolors. Though primitive in form and color, they had power and personality and had impressed him. "Paul, I know you could be a great painter," he said. "I shall be, Émeeloo. You will conquer Paris with your pen and me with brush and palette-knife." He poured red wine from an unlabelled bottled into their mugs. "That's worth drinking to." Zola held up his hand. "Better still, we'll make a pact," he said. "Whatever happens, the three of us will march through life together hand in hand so that if one falters the others can sustain him like climbers on a rope." "That way we all break our necks," said Baille. Zola ignored him and both noticed his stammer and lisp had disappeared as he continued, "Before I found you, Paul and you, Baptistin, what was I? A boy BOSON BOOKS

23

A Moment of Truth hiding in school corner, praying to God and wondering why everyone didn't love me and why they beat me. What crime had I committed? It was you, Paul, who showed me what rabble they were..." "Is this a speech?" Baille put in. Zola shook his head, his face deadly serious. "I just wanted you both to know how I felt—that if I am proud beside those brutes, I am not with you, my friends. I concede my weaknesses but also one quality—that of loving you." He turned to Cézanne. "As the wrecked man clings to a floating plank, I clung to you, Paul...I had found a friend and thanked Heaven for it. And in this world, friends are all that matter." Both Cézanne and Baille listened, amazed and embarrassed but impressed by Zola's frank and sincere outburst. All three of them drank gravely then clasped hands to seal their pact. However, Paul worried him. They had joined the local drawing class in the old Knights of Malta priory which the town had converted into the Granet Museum, after its most famous artist; for two hours three nights a week, they drew from casts and sometimes from a live model. Through mutton-chop whiskers, curator Joseph Gibert expounded the mysteries of pictorial composition, form and color, linear and aerial perspective. His museum typified French mid-century art philosophy; Italian renaissance masters and their French offspring covered his museum walls with scenes from Greek or Roman mythology or the Old Testament. And such subjects that had served his own heroes, Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Dominique Ingres, would amply serve his pupils. But Gibert could make nothing of Paul. And, sitting beside his friend, Zola dreaded the inevitable collision between master and pupil. "Mais voyons, Cézanne—you've drawn the model's arms too long. Remember, proportion and perspective." He stabbed his pencil at Zola's drawing. "Look, he's done it correctly. Tell him, Zola, what is the Golden Mean." "The body eight times the size of the head and as tall as the arms at full stretch." "Now, remember that, Cézanne." "What if the arms look that way?" "That means your eyes are playing tricks, that's all." "Did Ingres's eyes play tricks?" "Whatever do you mean?" Cézanne pointed his pencil at the museum. "Out there, he's given Jupiter arms at least ten centimeters too long and Thetis has a goiter the size of a tennis ball." Gibert flushed scarlet at this blasphemy and shouted above the uproar off laughter and stamping from the class. "Don't be absurd, Cézanne...an artist like Ingres..." "Go and measure it with your Golden Mean." Zola kicked Cézanne under the desk. "Paul," he pleaded, "don't argue with him." "When he's wrong." Cézanne ripped his sketch into a hundred fragments, threw them on the floor and stalked out. BOSON BOOKS

24

A Moment of Truth Zola knew he would head for the Deux Garçons and curse Gibert and his rules all the way to the bottom of a liter of Palette wine. Paul despaired so easily; a twitching model, a rowdy classmate and he would crumple his paper and stamp out. If only he could control himself and his talent...One evening he would sculpt something with pencil and paper that almost breathed then follow it next evening with a childish doodle. Yet Zola realized his art mirrored his odd character. Phobias sprouted from him like hog bristle: he feared his father; he went in terror of women, whom he deemed calculating bitches itching to sink their hooks into him; he dreaded noise and crowds; he stood no one a drink in case they were trying to fleece the rich money-lender's son; he spurned any sort of help. For instance, that day he cramped and Baille dived into the Arc to pull him out and Paul cuffed him away. Did he feel that even his best friends might invade and endanger his secret world? Or was it something to do with the shout of Bastard at college? Zola did not know. Nor Paul either, he guessed. On his way out after the lesson, he stopped at Ingres's immense study of Jupiter and Thetis in scarlet, gold and bitumen on the west wall. He had never noticed it before, but Ingres had indeed deformed the neck and added inches to the arms of the god and goddess. Trust Paul to spot that and throw it in the teacher's face! Would Gibert or any other classical artist thank him for questioning and spurning their Golden Mean, their proportion, perspective and all their other rules?

BOSON BOOKS

25

A Moment of Truth

III In he darkness, Zola groped through the bedroom, his clothes in a game-bag. As he dressed on the landing, he heard the Talmudic chanting of the rabbi in the next-door synagogue. Horses stirred and snickered in their stables when he quit their lodgings in Rue Mazarine where the Cours Mirabeau gentry housed their coachmen and stabled their horses. Turning at Rue Saint-Sauveur, he crossed the deserted Cours; only old Moss-jowls, the immemorial fountain in the center, seemed alive, its thermal water steaming in the raw autumn dawn. He scooped lukewarm water into his mouth and bathed his face and neck before trotting into the old town. In Rue Mathéron he took aim at a first-floor window and rattled it with a handful of gravel. A moment later, Cézanne appeared, a game-bag over his shoulder and his father's shotgun in the crook of his arm. Baille was waiting for them at the Platform Gate. Cézanne had wine and cheese, Baille had raided the larder and brought cooked meat while Zola provided yesterday's bread. Now final-year students, they escaped into the wild when they could, sometimes tramping for days and returning weary, dazed, burned by the sun and the biting mistral. They camouflaged their purpose with game-bags and shotguns, for no Provençal ever imagined that boys went trekking without the urge to shoot the odd rabbit, wild pigeon or even a thrush; their elders would have considered a bag full of books by Balzac, Hugo and Musset curious game indeed. Or pages of poetry like this fragment by Zola: O Provence! In my eye the tear springs When thy name trembles on my heart-strings... O country of love of light, of languid odor How sweet if I could call you my mother... Near Roman Aix is neither glen nor rill Nor hidden rock clinging to the hill, However far that my feet have never trod... Youthful dreamer chasing through the willows The snow-white nymph that only he sees... They plunged into the Torse Valley, through ilex groves and pinewoods; before them, etched against the blue morning stood the scalloped summit of Montagne Sainte-Victoire which they intended to climb that day. It was growing hot when they stopped at the Château Noir, three miles east of the town, to eat a crust of bread and allow Cézanne half an hour to sketch the gaunt, russet building with its curious Gothic windows and crumbling outhouses. Zola got out his notebook and pencil to work on the long poem he was composing to Aérienne, the name he had invented for his dream-girl. "Soul...soul...soul…" he muttered searching for the rhyming word. Baille looked up from the coffee he was brewing. "There's no such thing as a soul," he grunted. BOSON BOOKS

26

A Moment of Truth "Not for somebody like you with your heart drowned in arithmetic and algebra," Zola replied. "What you call soul is sex." "Never," shouted Zola so loudly that even Cézanne glanced up from his sketchpad. They knew Zola's ideas on love; in its pure form it had to precede marriage and only after marriage could it be consummated. Now red-faced with anger, he rounded on Baille. "Sex is brute passion, and only animals make love without soul. In true love, the soul and body must be intimately joined." "How do you know when you've never tried it—either your way or the animal way?" Baille sneered. They knew Marguery and others had lured Zola to the rented room they used for inviting their grisettes; he had gone, trembling, in the knowledge that they drank blackcurrant juice spiked with white wine, smoked cigarettes and cigars and explored the mysteries of sex. "You had your chance," Baille said. "I only went to watch what happened." "A Peeping Tom," Baille grinned. "And when Mireille from the calisson factory jumped at you to give you a kiss you didn’t stop running until you got home to mother." "Why scatter our love when we can pour it into a single heart to let it germinate and produce wonderful fruit?" "Ah! Zola, the Musset of Mazarine Street. All words and no action." Baille sniggered. "We all know your dream girl, Aérienne. Phil Solari's sister. Louise of the chestnut hair and pink hat with ribbons. You've been gone on her since you were nine." He picked up the loose sheets of the poem and began to read in a mocking vice: Brother, let us not cede to love's mad whim Of which fate and a smile made us the victim. We must reject this love, poor child of chance, Nurtured by nothing but a fleeting glance. Who shall say we yielded to our flesh By drinking love's potion to its lees? "Is that what Louise told you? Why didn't you grab and kiss her there and then? Pale with rage, Zola seized the poem. "If you're dragging your feet through that slime and vice, you're on the road to damnation," he cried, and Baille guffawed. When they had calmed down, eaten their crust and drunk their coffee, they hoisted themselves up the limestone bluff to the plateau above the Château Noir and entered the strange wonderland of Bibémus Quarry. Two centuries before, from a mountain of yellow sandstone, they had carved and fashioned the noble district of Aix and left pillars and columns and grottoes which looked like buried ruins vomited to the surface by some eruption; through this quaint architecture, oaks and pines had thrust to stand on a thick carpet of moss.

BOSON BOOKS

27

A Moment of Truth On the plateau, a mistral had set the pines hissing and creaking and this decided them to postpone their ascent of the Sainte-Victoire; instead, they explored the sheltered Infernets gorges. In the scrub on the quarry edge, Zola stumbled on a goat track zigzagging into the deep valley and he pressed ahead. Half an hour later he halted; when the others caught up he was staring at the lake where it narrowed to a point. "You two go on," he muttered. "Avanti, petit Émeeloo," Cézanne called. "But Zola held back, his eye on the concave wedge of reinforced concrete blocking the gorge. Nobody could guess how much that dam had cost him and his family in sorrow and strife. If only he could dynamite and destroy the thing and release all that water and his own pent-up emotions..."On, on, Émeeloo," he heard Cézanne intone, but still he hesitated. They had waited until his mother had spent everything on litigation then staged their sham auction, used his father's plans and built their dam in a year and were now reaping the profits. And the Zolas, the foreigners, upstarts? Forgotten, despised, pushed aside. His old grandmother had run herself to a standstill battling vainly for their rights; she and her husband had to live in sordid lodgings when they had earned their rest and retirement; and he and his mother had become nomads, carting their shrinking belongings from one set of shabby rooms to another before winding up between a synagogue and a stables in Rue Mazarine overlooking the ramparts, as though Aix meant to toss them out and shut its gates on them. Cézanne dragged him by the jerkin down the track until they stood on top of the dam with the reservoir on one side and a dizzy drop of a thousand feet or more to the streambed. Zola pointed into the gorge. "It was there he caught the chill that killed him," he whispered. "They robbed us, and there's nobody left but me to make them pay." This concrete ledge under his feet had meant so much to his father, who could never have guessed it would prove the last halt in his up-and-down career. "He was a brilliant man, Paul," he muttered. "We know that, Émeeloo." Never before had he spoken to anyone about his father; now he told his two friends the story as he had heard it from his mother. They noticed that, from time to time, his lisp and stammer returned. "You know he planned the first European railway line, in Austria," he said, and they shook their heads. Nor did they know that Francesco Antonio Mario Giuseppe Zola came from a long line of Venetian soldiers and priests, that he had joined the French army of Prince Eugène, Viceroy of Italy and Napoleon's son-inlaw. In 1814 when Napoleon fell and Venice reverted to Austria, he resigned his commission to study engineering and become a fellow of Padua Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He traveled—in Austria, Germany, Holland, England— always questing after some construction scheme or selling some invention like his novel earth-moving and leveling equipment. In July 1831, he arrived in France, joined the newly formed Foreign Legion and took part in the Algerian conquest. BOSON BOOKS

28

A Moment of Truth "I didn’t know he was in la Légion Étrangère, Émeeloo." Zola nodded. "I even have his plans of the hedgehog defense system he proposed for Algiers," he said. Francesco Zola had quit the Legion and set up as an engineering consultant in Marseilles. When his schemes to light the city with gas and enlarge its seaport and docks fell through, he thought of Aix and its dozens of silent fountains full of dust and vermin in summer for want of water. Now the town was offering a million francs to the man who could provide it with water all year. Prospecting the hilly country a few miles east, Zola discovered a stream called La Corse in the Infernets gorges. A natural dam. "And they wouldn’t listen to him, Paul." "Aix folk...a bunch of eunuchs!" Francesco Zola's ingenious scheme only earned him a slap in the face from the Marquis de Gallifet, seigneur of Tholonet, who claimed the stream as his. And from 1838 to 1846, Zola had to fight for his project until one man did listen. Adolphe Thiers, member of parliament for Aix and minister in Louis Philippe's government, promised the royal assent and financial backing. During a trip to Paris in 1839, Francesco spotted a dark, good-looking girl coming out of Saint-Eustache church near Les Halles market; within a few days he had met her and proposed. "They fell in love, j.j.just like that, Paul." Émilie Aurélia Aubert, then nineteen, from Dourdan in the Beauce country southwest of Paris, was swept off her feet by this volatile adventurer twenty-four years older. Soon, they married and set up house in Rue Saint-Joseph, though only to give him time to lobby parliamentarians for his scheme. "So you were born in Paris by accident," Baille put in. "Accident or not, I'm still proud of it." He had just turned three when the family moved to Aix. His father was still arguing with local mayors and notables for the land rights, trying to float a company and assemble men and materials to start his dam. A royal decree clinched his scheme in September 1846 and opened the way to a fortune. But in March 1847, two months after cutting the first sod, he caught his fatal chill in the Infernets gorges. "And my mother had to sit in that Marseilles hotel and watch him die then bring him back in a box," Zola muttered. "They robbed us, built the dam and didn't even give it his name.” Seizing a piece of rock, he hurled it over the edge of the dam to crash and splinter in the gorge several hundred feet below them. "But I'll make them pay for it, I'll make them pay." They retraced their way, up and over Bibémus, down to the Tholonet Road and then home. Dusk was darkening the face of Saint-Victoire and the curfew bell was tolling as they passed the Platform Gate and descended to the Cours. Zola found their lodgings empty. His mother must have gone to visit his grandparents, a few steps away. Walking across the Cours to the Rue du Trésor, he mounted the two flights of stairs and opened the door. His mother ran to hug him, tears tracking down her cheeks. "Mémé est morte,” she sobbed.

BOSON BOOKS

29

A Moment of Truth In the gloom, Zola peered at the figure lying in the alcove bed, a linen cloth knotted round her head and jaw like someone with mumps. Grandma Aubert was dead, after all her struggles. And how she had struggled! And how homesick she had felt in this arid place for the green sweep of her Beauce country between Dourdan and Chartres! Tears welled as he recalled how she would invite Crimean soldiers into the house three years ago to feed them, hoping they came from her small town or her pays. And now they had hardly enough money o bury her decently in this alien ground. His grandfather sat staring at the vague shape on the bed as though nothing else existed. His mother beckoned him into a corner. Écoute-moi mon fils," she whispered. "We can't stay here any longer. I've made up my mind to go to Paris and see if Monsieur Thiers or Monsieur Labot can help us. Then I shall send for you and Pépé. Until then he'll move in with you and look after you." Paris! He and Paul had raved about storming the capital. But now he wondered how he would fare there, alone and friendless in that human jungle. Somehow, his hatred for Aix and the Aixois and what they had done to his father, mother, grandparents and himself had evaporated. He thought of what he would miss: Cézanne and Baille and Aérienne and carefree days like today in the garrigue and by the Arc. Paris! Those two syllables should have elated him, exalted him. Instead, they filled him with something like fear. They seemed to sound the knell of his youth.

BOSON BOOKS

30

A Moment of Truth

IV Paris and Aix seemed light years apart. He had swapped the dazzling colors and hot sun of Provence for a landscape of drab and miserable houses; he had expected palaces and mansions and had met nothing but slums and tenements; instead of the heady aroma of thyme, rosemary, pine resin and spices, his nostrils now filled with the stink of lath and plaster as Baron Haussmann's gangs hacked mediaeval Paris to pieces to give Napoleon III and his Second Empire a worthy capital. And one with boulevards wide enough to allow cavalry and artillery room for maneuver if anyone attempted a coup d'état. One thing had not changed for him—cruelty still reigned in the courtyard and classrooms of the Lycée Saint-Louis where his father's friend, Maître Labot had found him a place. Less brutal than his Aix classmates, these Parisian upper crust and bourgeois boys refined their torture with sly, sardonic remarks. In Bourbon College they had dubbed him the Parisian; here they mocked and mimicked what they called his oil-and-garlic accent and referred to him as the Marseillais; at Aix, they had considered him something of a prodigy; here, he had plummeted to the bottom ranks and felt humiliated beside smug and sophisticated youths who spat out words quicker than the livestock auctioneer in Aix market; who read newspapers and discussed high politics; who raved and joked with physiological precision and candor about the grisettes they had seduced. Why, some sported top hats and cutaway coats and drainpipe trousers and idled their afternoons away in the Closérie des Lilas waltzing girls round the floor, their patent-leather shoes tangling in petticoats that frothed like the bocks of beer they consumed through their cigarette smoke. His lisp returned and he gave up trying to keep pace with these smoothtongued geniuses; only with Monsieur Levasseur, the French master, did he make any impact. His essay on Milton Reading to his Eldest Daughter while his Second Daughter plays the Harp so impressed the master that he read it to the class. But in every other subject he backslid. In their lodgings behind the college in Rue Monsieur le Prince, Émilie Zola watched him grow more and more dispirited and morose and spend more energy writing to his Aix comrades than on his homework. She had her own worries. Out of what remained of their savings, she had to pay rent and feed three mouths; yet, somehow she saved two hundred francs which she slipped to her son a day or two before the holidays. "Why don't you go to Aix for the holidays?" she said. "We still have the rooms in Rue Mazarine and this will pay your rail fare and food." When he stepped out of the Marseilles coach at the top of the Cours, Cézanne and Baille took one sleeve each of has shabby coat and lugged him across to the Deux Garçons to stiffen his resolve with a vermouth and a cigar. Baille now had the moustache he boasted he would grow if he got his baccalauréat. "I'm ploughed," announced Cézanne. "If I fail my second shot in November, I'm behind bars in my old man's bank." To Zola, he looked wilder than ever, and his coal-black hair had ebbed an inch up his brow. BOSON BOOKS

31

A Moment of Truth "I haven't a hope," he said. "I'm a peasant in Paris and they treat me worse than they did here." "Cheer up, petit Émeeloo, we've got six weeks in the old haunts; and you can chase and catch the beauteous Aérienne." "What about your drawing and painting, Paul?" "Oh, that!" Cézanne dismissed it with a wave of his hand and Zola's heart sank even lower. Had his truest friend forgotten their pledge to set Paris ablaze? Had the old banker finally scared him into throwing away his brushes? However, it did seem like old times; they scrambled over the garrigue and the marquis; they swam in the Arc and ventured on to the crenellated face of Montagne Saint-Victoire. In the warm sunshine of Provence, Zola found himself thawing in body and spirit; he also had a new literary hero, Jules Michelet, historian and novelist, who advocated pure and noble love and the exaltation of women. Ah! if he could only write a novel putting Michelet's philosophy into dramatic form, invent a world where the goddess Woman would redeem Man. "You'd have to learn about real women and real love to write that," Baille scoffed. "Maybe I've never loved outside of dreams, but I could still fill three hundred pages about love from its beginnings to the marriage day." "All out of your head?" "Well, love is a spiritual thing," Zola countered. Once again he burned with his old enthusiasm; he had glimpsed Louise Solari on the Cours and resumed his pursuit of her—though only in verse. She would figure as a heroine in the immense verse drama he had conceived and called La Chaîne des Etres (The Weft of Life). By candlelight in his seedy rooms with their four bits of unsold furniture, he imagined his epic poem in three great frescoes; in Genesis, he would trace the prehistory of man to the beginnings of mankind; in Humanity, he would tell the story of man's ascendancy; in The Future, he would rely on science, philosophy and religion to point the way. Reams of verse piled up, echoing Hugo and Musset; but such efforts left him so weary and dejected that he almost flouted Michelet's ideals and appealed to Aérienne, alias Louise Solari, for help. He wrote her a note that read: Mademoiselle: It is not a lover who writes to you, it is a brother. I am so alone in this world that I feel the need to know a young heart which beats for me, which pities and consoles me, which judges and encourages me. I neither wish nor dare to demand your love; this would be to profane such a sentiment, that of believing love could be born in two hearts which do not yet know each other. The only thing I desire is your friendship heightened by a reciprocal knowledge of our two characters. If you think me worthy one day of a more tender sentiment, that day we shall examine our hearts, and if they beat equally, both of them, we can begin to love in a new way. But until then, my hand will press your hand like that of a sister, my lips will only kiss yours when I am certain that yours will return the kiss. BOSON BOOKS

32

A Moment of Truth

"They'll laugh you out of town if they get hold of that," Baille said when Zola read it to his friends. "Don't for God's sake send it Émeeloo. You're just asking her to get her hooks into you," Cézanne warned. In the middle of September, they saw Baille off to Marseilles and the École Polytechnique, then Cézanne helped him carry his valise to the coach. "When are you coming to join me, Paul?" he said, a plea in his voice. "When I get my bachot, Émeeloo. Then I'll come to Paris even if I have to walk." That thought kept him going during the coach ride of Marseilles and the 36hour train journey to Paris. But once there, he felt homesick for Provence; he pursued girls with chestnut hair and lissome stride in pink bonnets, overtaking them to scan their faces only to blush and flee when they bore no resemblance to Aérienne. Hardly had he resumed his classes than he collapsed with a fever; for six weeks he lost track of time and place, lying raving in delirium or following, wideeyed, the fantastic visions his mind projected on to the ceiling of his mother's seedy rooms. And throughout, he had one recurrent nightmare, a macabre leitmotif; he was sprinting and scrambling along a gallery like a coal-mine, blindly seeking daylight and air; yet always a wall thwarted him and the gallery narrowed while rocks and debris showered down blocking his path; with his head, hands, feet, body, he tried to bulldoze through the obstacle but only succeeded in dislodging more rubble over himself... Somehow, he emerged from the tunnel. When he finally crawled out of bed, his limbs felt paralyzed, his teeth had loosened and he had grown a full inch in those weeks. Worst of all, his mind had corroded and his tongue had seized up; he could not read the posters on the opposite wall and had to write messages on a slate. Typhoid, the doctor said. Zola did not enlighten him about his hallucinations, though privately he wondered if his fever had its roots elsewhere; in his despair at quitting his friends and losing Aérienne; in his misery at the Lycée Saint-Louis; in his fear that he would make nothing of his ambitions or his life. Perhaps a more intuitive doctor might have looked at the spoiled mother's boy and interpreted the nightmare as an almost incestuous dread of the blind tunnel of sex and the paralysis as a form of flight from life's problems and responsibilities. He might even have seen Émile Zola as one of those boys who never wanted to grow up. When he felt well enough, Zola went back to his writing-table. Those years in Provence had meant so much to him, those days of insouciance, running wild in the garrigue. If he could not prolong them, at least he could relive them on paper in the form of fairy-tales. Provence he would cast as his heroine, his paramour under the name of Ninon, and he would confide everything to her. So, he began to jot down the first of his Contes à Ninon. From Aix, the grim reality did nothing to cheer him. Baille and Marguery had both succumbed to carnal love. He chided Baille for exalting vice and dragging BOSON BOOKS

33

A Moment of Truth himself and his ideals through the slime of wickedness. Youth erred more by amour-propre than innate evil. "You have taken that tack and must know," he wrote to Baille. Cézanne worried him for other reasons. Poems that illustrated his drawings had a bizarre, nightmarish tinge. Blonde, soft-bellied beauties melted into skeletons in his arms amid thunder and lightning; his drawings seemed even more macabre, one showing his own father eating a human head. Yet Paul had not surrendered like the others; he was vying with Seymard for a raven-haired midinette called Justine, but she would vanish in dreams like Aérienne. He had finally passed his bachot and was enrolling in the law faculty and could finish up shuffling his life away between Aix prison and the nearby Palais de Justice. Zola thought: I must inject enough fire into Paul to brave the old miser and join me in Paris. First, he had to carve out some niche for himself. In France where everything had to bear a nametag or it did not exist, he would get his bachot then a degree, which would convince them he could write poetry. So, in their dingy, two-roomed apartment, he slogged over the classics, French literature, history, math and science until the letters and symbols fused together in his candlelight aura. At the beginning of August, he sat the written part of the baccalauréat, which he passed; a week later, he appeared before the oral examiners, his mother sitting anxiously in an empty classroom waiting for the results. In math, science and philosophy, he gave the right answers; it only remained to satisfy the professors of German, history and French. He had never excelled in German and floundered through a Schiller text until the language professor stopped him. His first Blackball. "Well then, Zola," said the history professor, "what do we know about Charlemagne?" Charlemagne! What had he read but fragments? He stuttered and lisped something about the Holy Roman Empire, but faltered when the examiner asked him to define its boundaries. "But you don't say anything about his championship of Christianity," said his inquisitor. Zola tried to fill that hole with the bits and pieces he recalled about Charlemagne and the Saxon Wars, but he sensed the ground giving under him. "All right. At least you can give me Charlemagne's dates," the professor piped, fixing him over his half-moon spectacles. Zola hesitated, flummoxed, then made a random stab. "Between 1490 and 1540...or...thereabouts." A wintry smirk crossed the professor's face as he polished his glasses. "You're no more than six centuries out in your reckoning," he grinned, enjoying the joke. "First time I've ever heard Charlemagne confused with Francis the First." Another Blackball! He would do better in French literature, his pet obsession. He rapped out the usual answers on Villon, Boileau and others before the professor halted him. Now La Fontaine and the fables. What's his place in our literature?"

BOSON BOOKS

34

A Moment of Truth La Fontaine! No quicksand here. Hadn't he read some of the finest modern criticism of the poet and fabulist by Hyppolyte Taine, the philosopher? Without a second thought, he launched into his exposition of the fables; La Fontaine, he said, had avoided official censorship and jail by camouflaging his vicious critical assault on Louis the Fourteenth's reign under the blanket of satire and allegory; but anyone reading between the lines would discover a complete portrait of seventeenth-century French society from the Sun King through courtiers, courtesans, lords, ladies down to the meanest laborer. "For instance, the lion is the king and the ape the lord, the fox and dog are courtiers and the ordinary people are rats..." "Enough, Zola! Enough"" cried the professor, banging on the table. "Where did you get such opinions?" "From several sources Monsieur le Professeur. Monsieur Taine..." "Taine!" That name had turned the professor's face purple. "Taine! That renegade...that upstart...that heretic. That'll be all, Zola." His third Blackball. One too many. Émilie Zola did not need to ask how he had fared. When they reached home, he noticed she had packed a grip with his clothes but so depressed did he feel that he accepted the money she had earned by sewing to pay for his summer in Aix. "I can try again in Marseilles this autumn," he said. "It'll be easier in the provinces." But even after a holiday in Aix with his two comrades, he acquitted himself worse before the Marseilles examiners, even failing the written French paper. This meant that when he returned to Paris, they cancelled his bursary at the Lycée Saint-Louis. "I'm twenty and have no profession," he wrote to Baille. "Moreover, if by chance I needed to earn my living, I feel I'm almost incapable. I've been dreaming up to now, I have walked and still walk on quicksand...If that devil, Cézanne, could come we should take a small room together and lead a Bohemian life. At least we'd have lived our youth while both of us are now leading miserable lives." However, the first of his Tales for Ninon had appeared in La Provence, an Aix newspaper; in “The Amorous Fairy,” he had depicted his dream world with a Gothic castle and a lovely nymph guarded by an unbending uncle; when a troubadour steals the heroine, a fairy conceals them and finally transforms them into intertwining tendrils. Into that tale he had written all his own longing to escape from the harsh and ugly everyday world like his mediaeval lovers! But who understood that wish? Only Paul, who shared some of the same illusions, the same desires. "There are days," he wrote to Paul " when I believe I'm without intelligence, when I wonder what I'm worth for having such proud dreams. I haven't finished my studies, I can't even speak good French. I am ignorant of everything...the world's not for me. I'd cut a sad figure if I stepped out into it one day." Yet, he had to face life; his mother and he had to gather their belongings together and move to a scruffy room in Rue-Saint-Jacques after her father died. He felt beaten and humiliated and confessed to Baille, "I'm still dependent on my mother who can hardly support herself. I must seek work to eat and I haven't found it yet, though I hope to do so soon." BOSON BOOKS

35

A Moment of Truth That winter the Seine froze over and snow fudged the Paris skyline and converted its streets and building sites into quagmires. He wrapped himself in his old coat and wrote. Aérienne kept his mind off his poverty and hopeless situation and he toiled steadily until he had finished the twelve hundred lines; he then took up the tattered manuscript of his Weft of Life. If compelled to earn his living during the day, he would move into a room of his own and write his great cyclic poem at night. Maître Labot, his father's friend, called just before the New Year with a bundle of cards for Émile to deliver. Zola took them and the gold louis, his first earnings. "Oh! Émile, I've found a job for you," Labot said. "In the customs house at the Docks Napoleon as a copy clerk. I'm afraid it's only sixty francs a month." Through his tears, the gold piece blurred and wavered. He who had dreamed of setting Paris alight, of picking up the torch dropped by the exiled Victor Hugo, of cramming Humanity whole into a vast ode—what had he become? A clerk. Grasping the New Year cards, he stumbled out into the slush.

BOSON BOOKS

36

A Moment of Truth

V He turned on his heel to have a last look at the five V-shaped customs sheds silhouetted against the barges and warehouses along the Canal Saint-Martin. There, he had spent the worst two months of his life in a dingy office full of purblind clerks mouthing commercial jargon and earning hardly more than his own subsistence wage. At times, he had felt so desperate he almost walked across to the PrinceEugène Barracks, bought out somebody's call-up number and joined the army. If he hadn't had his mother to look after... But he had made an end to sitting there, gradually merging into the thick layers of grime and dust like the others. A few minutes ago he had put down his pen and inkbottle and quit. He would never go back. He'd rather die of starvation over his great poem in his garret than fill in one more pink customs chit. He walked through to the Boulevard Saint-Martin in the chill northwest wind, which sent dust vorticing in the Paris sky; on Rue Panorama, Haussmann's demolition gangs were flattening acres of slums and punching a gaping avenue up to the new Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est. Paris was bulging with immigrants—peasants, tradesmen, professional men, writers and artists—all of them imagining a railway ticket to the capital would turn their fortune. They could have his job. He touched every third and seventh lamppost for luck and noted those numbers on the horse-drawn buses. A belief in omens was competing with his faith in God, shaken by misfortune. He cut through to Rue Saint-Jacques. There, wooden stalls and slum shops were vanishing under pick and shovel to create the great Halles market to feed the growing appetites of Paris. "What a novel that'll make for somebody who can write it," he reflected as he headed for the Seine. On the left bank, the bouquinistes knew him as the youth in the mottled, moth-eaten overcoat who read everything and bought nothing. Ah well, they'd recoup their money when his epic poem was selling in its thousands. Ferreting among the books and prints, he picked up Madame Bovary where he had hidden it the previous day. No wonder it set everybody raving and melted the Imperial moustache wax. Gustave Flaubert could write like an angel. And those characters! Emma Bovary, the romantic who didn't know the difference between love and lust, and Homais, the sticky-handed, cynical pharmacist, who always floated to the top like all bourgeois scum. When he had read another couple of chapters, he hid the book and searched among the prints. Paul would chuckle at those bawdy Rembrandt peasants; but he chose a renaissance scene by Ary Scheffer. Much safer when old Cézanne, the banker, vetted every line he wrote. He made his way home. Turning into Rue Neuve, he noticed his mother's curtains were drawn which spared him the ordeal of confessing how he had thrown in his hand. At Moreau's grocery he stopped to buy his usual supper—a baguette of yesterday's bread, two sous' worth of parmesan and an apple. These he bore to his own lodgings at Number 11 Rue Soufflot. BOSON BOOKS

37

A Moment of Truth Rue Soufflot. A sleazy terrace wedged between the Panthéon, a prison, a poorhouse and a law faculty. Another halt in his odyssey of the left-bank underworld. Like Aix. Flitting from one grubby room to another even smaller and grubbier. Monsieur le Prince, Rue Saint-Jacques, Rue Saint-Victor, Rue Neuve SaintÉtienne du Mont. Round and round. Like a circus horse. And now this! A garret on top of a knocking-shop. When he entered, Berthe was standing in the foyer whispering to the old hag from his own landing. "Bonsoir, Monsieur Zola," she said. How had she got his name? Her story he had culled from the old pro who had lived the seven ages of the street-woman, moving from the favored ground floor to the top of Number 11 as she lost teeth, looks, legs and lastly clients. Berthe would follow her if that consumptive flush did not catch her before she'd gone halfway. Number 11 made Paul's Passage Agard and Buèno Carrièro look like convent schools. You could write a smutty novel just setting down what you saw and heard through these thin, wooden partitions. He had lost count of Morals Squad raids and the times Berthe and her men and women friends had disappeared in the police salad-wagon. "Bonsoir, Mademoiselle Berthe," he muttered then took the five runs of rickety stairs to his attic two at a time. Reaching his hovel, he plunged his flushed face then his hands into the washbasin to cool the fever of that encounter with Berthe. Was he, too, weakening? Going the way of Baille, Marguery and all flesh? Drawing the blanket curtain, he shut out Paris and the last night then lit his candle. Curious, he read and wrote so much at night that now he could only concentrate within that small spear of flame. Piled on the wobbly table lay The Weft of Life. He ignored it, turning to the two dossiers marked Paul and Baptistin. He preserved every scrap of correspondence. And each letter to his friends had a double purpose: to indoctrinate them with his ideas and fire them with the intention of honoring their boyhood pledge and joining him in Paris. With Baille, he struck an oracular note, chiding him for his slide-rule mind and careerism. "Position," he had written. "Those eight letters sound like some well-paunched grocer on the make...you've become the champion of a truly ugly cause (free love). This letter you have written to me is not that of a young man of twenty, of the Baille that I knew. I like my dream, so great, so sublime, better than your tawdry and desolate reasoning." He pumped Baille full of his philosophy of love, of art, of living. "Among what sort of women should I choose my lover? Will she be a prostitute, a widow, a virgin? Grub among the filth, my friend, and demonstrate the near impossibility of finding the one we seek." However, he knew Baille would come to Paris of his own accord to carve himself out a POSITION. But Paul! Sometimes he despaired of the whole Cézanne brood. Paul had promised to arrive in March 1860 but had broken that promise like so many others. Zola had therefore switched his attack to Old Cézanne, filling his letters to

BOSON BOOKS

38

A Moment of Truth Paul with facts and figures and advice that this canny, cloth-capped peasant banker would understand. "You ask a curious question," he wrote to Paul. "Of course, here as everywhere else, one can work if the will is there. Paris offers, besides, an advantage which you can find nowhere else, that of the museums where you can study from eleven to four from the Masters. Here is how you can break up your time. From six to eleven you will go to a studio to paint from the live model; you lunch, then from midday until four you copy, either at the Louvre or at the Luxembourg, the masterpiece you choose. That makes nine hours' work, which I believe is enough. With such a routine you cannot fail to do well. "Work, work: it's the only road to success. "As for the money question, it's a fact that 125 francs a month will not allow you much luxury. I'd like to calculate what you can spend. A room at 20 francs a month; a lunch at 18 sous and dinner at 22 sous; that makes two francs a day or 60 francs a month; add the room and you have 80 francs a month; you have your studio to pay; the Suisse, one of the cheapest, is 10 francs, I think; that makes 100 francs; there remains 25 francs for your laundry, light, the dozens of little things that you'll need, tobacco and the odd outing...Anyway, it will be a good school for you to learn what money is worth and how a man of character can get by...I advise you to let your father see the above figures; perhaps their sad reality will make him loosen his purse-strings." For Paul himself, he baited his letters with art—Jean Goujon's Fountain of Innocents, Rembrandt, Rubens, Veronese—and spoke of Aix painters who were already making their way. He reminded Paul of their pledge. "I had a dream the other day," he wrote. "I had written a sublime and beautiful book which you had illustrated with sublime and beautiful prints. Our two names shone together on the title page in gold lettering and passed on to posterity in their fraternal genius." He had filled his pipe, scraped his pen and begun another letter to Paul when the old hag knocked. "From the concierge," she mumbled, handing him a letter. "From Paul! He ripped it open and read: "When I've finished my law studies, perhaps I shall be able to come and join you." After a year of waiting, it was too much. He grabbed his pen. "What is painting to you?" he scribbled. "Isn't it just a quirk which seized you by the hair in a moment of boredom? Isn't it only a hobby, a table-talk subject, an excuse for not reading law? If that is it, then I understand your conduct...But if painting is your vocation—and that's how I've always imagined it—if you feel able to do it well after hard work, then you seem to me an enigma, a sphinx, a shadowy and impossible character...In a lot of ways our characters are similar; but by God's Cross, if I were in your place I should wish to put in my word, gamble all or nothing and not float vaguely between two such different careers, art and the Bar. One thing or another; be a real lawyer, or else a real artist; but not some nameless being wearing an advocate's robes spotted with paint." Such effort and emotion made him tremble. To avoid the temptation to destroy the letter he walked slowly downstairs and handed it to the concierge to post.

BOSON BOOKS

39

A Moment of Truth He thought: "That's the end of Paul, the end of our dream, the end of our future." What had he expected of the future—an alien without French citizenship, with no pull and no job? He felt small, miserable and alone. As he mounted the stairs, a door on the first landing opened; cheap perfume wafted over him; a pale face with burning cheeks confronted him; lack-luster eyes gazed at his; a turned-down mouth murmured: "Bonsoir, Monsieur Zola." His resolution dissolved. And with it his Michelet ideals. They had gone with his youth and his hopes. He had dreamed of the pure, virginal Aérienne. But now...an open door, even if it led nowhere or to damnation. A miserable creature to share one's own misery. As Berthe retreated into the squalid room, he blundered after her, slamming the door.

BOSON BOOKS

40

A Moment of Truth

VI He still believed in his own fairy-tales and his grandmother's bible stories. Love acted as an antidote for everything, cleansing the body of sin. But only pure, unselfish, unsullied love. No woman had fallen so far that she cold resist the healing power of love. Had he not dunned this into the heads of Paul and Baptistin? Now he had the chance to prove his principle. For Berthe came pleading for help when the landlord threw her into the street. Out of pity mingled with guilt for having used her body, he let her share his room. For his experiment, she seemed the perfect specimen; she had one ragged dress, one shabby bonnet, one change of underwear, one pair of scuffed shoes. Anybody in the district could have her body for a meal, a bottle of pinard (cheap red wine), a loaf of bread, a slice of ham. Berthe fell sick and he nursed her through two weeks of fever. When she felt strong enough and they walked the streets together, she stared at him incredulously when he addressed her as Madame and challenged men who recognized and importuned her. It amused her to hear him say he loved her; it amazed her when he spoke earnestly of marrying her; she shook her head in disbelief, then dissent. To her, love meant only one thing; passion worked out in carnal intercourse. And against his will, Zola found himself yielding to this brute love and cursing himself for having failed both of them. "Berthe, listen, do you believe in redemption through love?" She gazed at him, wide-eyed, hearing biblical echoes in the question. She shook her head. "All right, you know you have a soul, don't you?" She shrugged then listened as he expounded his philosophy of true love which was animated and kept alive by the soul; she wondered exactly what he was getting at, this short-sighted young gent with a fuzz of beard and such quaint notions which he threw at her like the priest back home. In her five years patrolling the Latin Quarter, she had seen almost everything; but this was the first time any man had wanted her for her soul. She was glad when he gave up and they got into bed together. That part she did understand. Salvation also came through work, he told her. She would find a job, forget her past and redeem herself with hard toil. He found her a job as a seamstress, but she lacked both the skill and the will and gave up after a few days. Why should she work when she could sponge on him? And he let her—because, in spite of his high ideals, she had hooked and even enslaved him. Was it lust, or love? He hardly knew. They had no money and when he went job-hunting no one wanted a twentyyear-old without qualifications. So, they lived from hand to mouth. In their attic that winter, ice formed over the water in their pitcher and they huddled together over a candle to keep warm. To buy food, they pawned everything—his books, their two chairs, the table on which his manuscripts lay; like rag-pickers, they scavenged the street and BOSON BOOKS

41

A Moment of Truth demolished buildings for fuel; to provide them with a morsel of meat, Zola even tried trapping hungry sparrows with a net over the skylight window. Without compunction, Berthe grabbed everything she could put on the nail in the state pawnshop. First, his mottled coat, then his trousers, his shirt, his shoes. He could do nothing then but curl up in bed and sleep most of the day. At least there he felt warm. For weeks he stayed in that room, mostly in bed, relying on her to provide for him; he lacked the courage to seek work or finish his epic The Weft of Life. He only had the energy to eat what she brought home and make love. He saw no one, and for days on end Berthe disappeared and refused to tell him where she had been. With the spring, he ventured out and some of his old fervor returned; he redeemed some of his clothes with money borrowed from his mother, who had suffered just as much that winter. Berthe, he discovered, had reverted to her old ways; she had even betrayed him with one of his friends and with anyone who offered her a meal or a few francs. At first he could hardly believe it. He, who had wanted to relive the story of Mary Magdalen with himself playing the redeemer—he had wound up the dupe and the victim of a common prostitute! As a boy, they had pumped him full of religion and that had let him down. And now love! Pure love existed only in books by romantic novelists. How many other high ideals would melt in contact with harsh reality? Sadly, he returned to his attic and put Berthe's few belongings on the landing where they lay for two days before she retrieved them without a word. He went to see his mother and borrowed enough to buy a junk-shop table and chair and keep himself for several weeks until he had found a real job; he gathered together the scattered pages of The Weft of Life and began to put them in order. He was lying in bed one Sunday morning in March when a knock came to the door and a ringing, nasal voice cried, Émeeloo, Émeeloo." Leaping out of bed, still in his shirt and socks, Zola opened the door and peered at the landing. "Paul," he shouted. "It's not true.” Throwing his arms round Cézanne's neck, he pulled him into the room. He left the blanket curtain in place and lit the candle. Squalor looked better in poor light. Cézanne's eye took in the rumpled bed, chair, table with several bread-crusts and an apple core lying among piles of manuscript; his gaze fastened on the carboy of olive-oil from Coste's in Aix. Had Émeeloo been surviving on bread and oil? He studied Zola's pale, emaciated face. "Émeeloo...I didn't know...How long have you been living like this?" "Oh, my other places—the ones I wrote you about—were much better. I just couldn't stick the docks. I'd no money and had to move. But things are different now you're here." He dressed quickly. Before quitting the room, he drew the curtain and pointed to the cupola barring the end of Rue Soufflot. "The Panthéon," he said. "That's where we're both going." He led the way downstairs. At her door, now on the second-floor landing, stood Berthe wearing nothing but a thin négligé. "Bonjour, Émile Chéri," she said and smiled at Cézanne.

BOSON BOOKS

42

A Moment of Truth Muttering a Bonjour, Zola quickened his stride. They zigzagged over rubblestrewn holes out of which they were carving the Boulevard Sebastopol and stopped at the ornate entrance to a restaurant. Even at that Sunday-morning hour, the Closérie des Lilas rang strident with music and dancing. For a moment, they watched the girls, white flesh glimmering above black stockings and frilly garters as they can-canned for the paying customers. Zola led Cézanne across the square to a pavement seat at a small café. "It costs a franc to go in," he said, nodding at the Closérie. Cézanne glanced at Zola, who looked as cold and wan as this Parisian sun. When had he last eaten a good meal? He beckoned a waiter and ordered lamb chops for Zola and vermicelli soup for himself. When it came, he grabbed the carafe of olive oil and poured half into his soup. Looking at him, Zola wondered what impact Cézanne and Paris would make on each other. "That whore on the stairs, Émeeloo? What that the one you said you'd tell me about when we met?" Zola nodded as he attacked the lamb chops. "She gave me a rough time, Paul— a worse going-over than my first days at Bourbon College." For the first time in years, Cézanne noticed his friend's lisp had returned. Zola continued, "I had a great idea straight out of Michelet. I was going to lift a prostitute out of the gutter and save her through love. And I lost my coat, my jacket, my trousers—and my self-respect." Cézanne guffawed so loudly that everybody in the crowded café turned to stare at them. "Maybe the trouble was that she hadn't read Michelet's book on love," he said, grinning. Zola heard neither his laughter nor the quip; nor the can-can strains from the Closérie; nor the four-in-hands and the horse-drawn buses clattering on the cobbles round Maréchal Ney's statue. His voice muted as though he was mumbling through a confessional grill, he recited his and Berthe's stories. Listening, Cézanne realized what an ordeal Zola had been through and how the “rough school” had transformed him. When he had finished, Zola gazed dismally at his friend. "I should have done what everybody else does—had her, paid her and chucked her out." "That's right, Émeeloo. Women are all calculating bitches. So never let them get their hooks into you." "It's an animal thing, an animal thing." "What are you talking about, Émeeloo?" "Love." Cézanne had come to Paris with his father and sister but they went sightseeing leaving the two youths alone. It was now Zola's turn to induct Paul into Parisian life, to watch him rubberneck monuments and tall buildings and stand in awe at Second Empire society notables parading their carriages and liveried servants along the Champs Élysées. He stared at the huge canyons gouged out of the city center, which Baron Haussmann seemed to have turned into a enormous building-site; yet this did not appear to have prevented the fashionable set from carrying on bravely; tophatted, frock-coated beaux escorted demi-mondaines along the half-built boulevards; frilled petticoats and crinolines swept cobbled streets; from balBOSON BOOKS

43

A Moment of Truth tabarins and café-chantants, music and song and the frenzied rhythm of the cancan resonated. Offenbach was filling the Théâtre des Variétés with Orpheus in the Underworld and the Bouffes-Parisiens with The Bridge of Sighs; on the Place de la Concorde or the site of Garnier's new opera house, the heavy-footed could perish beneath the stampede of hooves, so thick was the traffic. For several days, Zola steered Cézanne through the seventeen museums that made up the Louvre, leaving him open-mouthed in the Great Gallery where hundreds of painters, men and women, had set up their easels and were copying the masters; dozens of others were copying both the masters and their colleagues. Next month, they pushed and butted through the crush in the Official Salon to gaze at contemporary masters like Meissonier, Gérôme, Cabanel. Four thousand paintings! Six miles of art from floor to ceiling! Zola did not like to discourage Paul by disclosing that the official jury had rejected no fewer than 3,000 submissions by rapins (daubers) like himself, and even masters like Courbet and their brilliant pupils like Edouard Manet. When Cézanne's father and sister had returned to Aix, Zola found his friend a cheap, fourth-floor room in Rue d'Enfer and went to enroll him in the Atelier Suisse. In this studio they had no recognized master but drew and painted from live models for which they paid ten francs a month. They walked through the Ile de la Cité—almost razed by demolition gangs to create a new barracks and police commissariat—to reconnoiter the studio. On the second floor of a slum building housing a bistrot, a pawnshop and a dental surgery, it looked anything but impressive; however, Ingres, Préault, Courbet and Manet had all worked there. Zola omitted to mention that the Suisse boasted the rowdiest, roughest students in Paris. During the following weeks, Zola kept his head down at his poem and Cézanne, the new boy, had to put in a long day, from six in the morning until the light failed, at the Suisse. On their one free day, Sunday, Zola posed for his portrait in Cézanne's room, sitting in a decor of shredded drawings, canvases turned to the wall and dirty dishes. His portrait mirrored Cézanne's frustration and inner drama as he strove to put his own vision of Zola on canvas. But the portrait changed with his moods and rages. Zola would leave it as a profile and return to a full or three-quarter face; his wispy beard and moustache appeared and disappeared like some conjurer's prop. Paul, he knew, was taking stick from the rabble at the Suisse as well as suffering from the growing pains of the artist. He was also homesick. Zola well knew that feeling. For five weeks of cramped sessions he sat for Paul who forbade him to move even a muscle; on the sixth Sunday he arrived to find nothing on the canvas but a murky, grayish-green background. "It was just a piece of crap," Cézanne exclaimed by way of explanation. "The technique wasn't there." "What's technique? It's the thought, the poetry that matter. And you had them in that portrait." "It was a bloody awful daub."

BOSON BOOKS

44

A Moment of Truth "A daub and a masterpiece, what's the difference. Almost none to the vulgar eye, but the masterpiece has something nameless, an artistic vision, a halo to be discovered and admired." Émeeloo, you talk like a painter." "Poet and painter, what difference is there? One creates with words, the other with images." "One's full of theory and the other has to put something on canvas," Cézanne said, sarcastically. "Try again, Paul." Cézanne scraped the canvas then swabbed it clean with turpentine. "Maybe I'd better go back to the bank," he said. "After fighting for three years to get here. You're crazy, Paul." "Who said I could paint, anyway?" "I said it, and still do. You have the genius of a great painter." "And if I hadn't been stupid enough to believe you, I wouldn't be wasting my time here." When Zola turned up the following Sunday, no one answered the door. No note, no word left with the concierge. So Paul had fled! Sadly, he returned to Rue Soufflot to stare stupidly at his great trilogy moldering on the table. Why didn't he run himself? His health and spirit were cracking and he was entering that blind tunnel where he had spent six weeks on his return from Aix; his face and body were erupting in rashes and he had recurrent fevers; he almost wished himself really ill so that others would have to take care of him. He had failed. Paul had failed. What had happened to their pledge to conquer Paris, their oath to stick together? Evaporated in contact with hard reality. He would forget the lot— Paul, Aérienne, The Weft of Life—and find a job. But paper and ink lured him back like some addict his absinthe or opium. Two weeks later, he was toiling at The Weft when his door burst open; candlelight played on Cézanne's sharp features now framed in a black beard. Cézanne went to tug back the curtains and snuff the candle. "Let some light in, Émeeloo," he bellowed, grabbing Zola's arm. "You've had enough of that epic of yours. Come and have a bock." He dragged Zola to the Closérie des Lilas and bought them several beers as though nothing had happened. What did it matter? Paul was back. Maybe the noisy, dusty Paris scene had done the damage. Zola took him into the countryside beyond the city ramparts. Several days a week they caught the train to Fontenay-les-Roses and walked through the forest to Sceaux; they would lie all day by a small pond, Zola reading and Cézanne sketching until dusk; they then backtracked through the fields to Aulnay and Robinson where they ate in the open to barrel-organ music and the laughter of couples who waltzed as though floating in the fluid light of oil lanterns. And the portrait sessions recommenced. Zola had a hundred faces, each one different, each reflecting the painter's mood. He squatted for hours keeping quite still until cramp knotted his limbs and being driven almost demented by the imbecile ditty Cézanne chanted as he worked: To paint in oil BOSON BOOKS

45

A Moment of Truth Is terrible toil But much more swell Than aquarelle. Yet, no artist that Zola had ever watched worked with Paul's concentration. He was afraid to twitch. Philippe Solari, his old schoolmate, who had come to Paris to try to make his name as a sculptor, sometimes dropped by and Paul would not even notice he had entered and sat down. Zola had to watch his conversation. Art was taboo since it invariably ended in a shouting-match. As he explained in a letter to Baille: "To prove something to Cézanne is like persuading the towers of Notre Dame to dance a quadrille. He may say Yes, but he won't move an inch...So there he is, thrown into life with certain ideas which he's unwilling to alter on any but his own judgment. All the same, he's the nicest chap in the world..." As the sessions continued, the doubts, frustrations, rages returned. "Look at it," Cézanne cried, brandishing a fist at the portrait. "I'm not fit for anything but a counting-house clerk." Zola studied the portrait. No one would dispute Paul's judgment. His face looked sick and old as though vomited on the canvas in plum reds and stipples of greenish-white. Didn't they say every artist remained true to his vision, despite himself? If so, Paul must have curious feelings about him. His mouth had a repugnant curl, his eyes a remote, fishy glare, his nose looked pinched with some bad smell. For a moment, Zola did not know how to react, what to say. "But Paul, another few sittings and it will turn out fine, you'll see," he got out. "Merde! They'll never accept that in the Salon." Salon! Did Paul really believe the Institute's Hanging Committee would even give this a serious glance? They'd think it a joke. But he was beginning to understand. Paul, the young rebel rapin who scoffed at the Beaux Arts graybeards, secretly pined for bourgeois medals. What could he say? He went back, pensively, to Rue Soufflot and wrote to Baille, who was arriving soon for the Polytechnique. "If you're dropping a note to Paul, try to speak of our reunion in the brightest terms. It's the only way to keep him here." Before Baille had time to write, Zola walked into Cézanne's studio to surprise him throwing clothing and panting gear into a trunk. "I'm leaving for Aix tomorrow," he said. Zola gripped his arm. "Paul, if you go now, it's the bank and a dead rut for life. Give it a few more months, say until September." "All right. For you, Émeeloo." But Zola realized Paul was merely counting the days. In the second Sunday of September, he knocked at the door of Rue d'Enfer. Cézanne's studio lay empty. He had not even said goodbye. He remembered what he had written to Baille. "Paul may have the genius of a great painter, he'll never have the genius to make himself one." He walked back to Rue Soufflot to pick up his manuscript, wondering if he, himself, would have the courage to break through on his own.

BOSON BOOKS

46

A Moment of Truth

VII With Cézanne gone he felt lost, friendless. Yet, the wrench forced him to take stock. For two years he had duped himself with dreams and illusions that had become nightmares. Poets and their muse did not thrive on empty bellies, in garrets so cold that their thoughts remained ice-bound and only their ink crystallized. Murger's Vie de Bohème was a stage libretto; it might sweeten the leisure hour of bourgeois ladies and gentry but it lied to people like himself who had drifted round the seamier corners of the Latin Quarter like some sewer-rat. Romantic novelists and poets poisoned minds that swallowed their perfumed, rose-hued inventions; they had deluded him into believing that hideous reality needed such verbal garnishing. Dumping The Weft, Aérienne and other poems in a corner, he went job-hunting, determined this time to accept anything that would earn him enough to feed and clothe himself. When he was despairing, one of his mother's friends introduced him to Louis Hachette, the publisher. In his office, Rue Pierre-Sarrazin, a kindly man with a cleft nose like his own, looked him over and asked if he could write legibly enough to wrap and address bundles of books to provincial booksellers. Zola nodded, and Hachette hired him at 200 francs a month as a dispatch clerk. At least there, he would rub shoulders with the literary lions of the Second Empire. And it seemed that through the glass-domed bookshop and publishing house, they all came and went, those literary lions. Émile Littré, school chum and friend of Hachette, was compiling his massive dictionary full of rationalist definitions inspired by his preceptor, Auguste Comte, founder of Positivism. Zola had to go and collect proofs from this little, clamp-jawed, quilted-faced man with the fixed look of someone who pored over books day and night. He met Charles-Augustin de Saint-Beuve, a paunchy figure in a tasseled beret, who acted as a literary weather vane for French writing, made and unmade authors with his newspaper criticism, and was one of the Forty Immortals of the Académie Française. He talked to Ernest Renan, who was emptying erudition from his massive head into a Life of Christ and a complete history of Christianity; there was Jules Janin, brilliant commentator, who seemed a mass of jibbling, overlapping flesh from his triple chin to his huge paunch; and Jules Michelet, silver hair enveloping his velvet coat-collar, who had written a history of France, books on natural history and that one on love which had cost Zola almost all his illusions. And finally Hyppolyte Taine, the philosopher who had so enraged his professor and contributed to his bachot failure, but who was changing the course of French thought with his scientific approach to literature and the arts; Taine, one of Zola's heroes, lectured at the Beaux Arts where he held a chair; he had just returned from England and was injecting materialism into French thinking and one dominating theme—that man was the product of his milieu and moment in time. Zola also made the acquaintance of Edmond Duranty, who had pioneered the realist novel and had founded a journal to propagate Realism, though he had failed himself to break through as a novelist. Through Duranty, who had also BOSON BOOKS

47

A Moment of Truth spent years in England, he learned about the Realist movement in painting, inspired by landscape artists like Constable and Turner and owing something to Delacroix. "Go and look closely at Courbet," he advised. "And watch the younger men like Manet," Duranty told him. At Hachette, Zola looked and learned. As he observed the great names pass through the publishing house another of his illusions volatilized; outside their bookish world they seemed the antithesis of heroes or supermen; each had his foibles and frailties, his petty vices and vanity; each seemed concerned only about his sales figures. Zola listened to their chitchat, losing no chance to pick up the tricks of the trade; he volunteered to fetch and carry their proofs, quizzing them about how they worked and how they created. Soon, he learned that the worst of authors often outsold the best by pushing themselves and their books, by shouting louder and even promoting scandal round their work. To Antony Valabregue, a budding poet in Aix-en-Provence, he wrote, "If you knew, my poor friend, how little talent it takes to succeed, you would drop pen and paper there and then and start studying literary life, the thousand petty dodges that open the door, the art of using other people's credit, the cruelty required to trample on dear colleagues." Publicity. If that made the difference between a best seller and a flop, he would acquire that art. In his spare time, he wrote articles for provincial journals extolling Hachette authors, meaning to impress the name, Émile Zola on these authors and on Louis Hachette. Soon, he had become publicity manager with another hundred francs a month in salary. By working at nights and during week-ends, he had also finished three long poems called The Amorous Comedy, which owed something to Dante, to his own dreams, to Cézanne, to Louise Solari, his Aérienne. Knowing that Louis Hachette filled his weekend reading manuscripts, he deposited the bulky script on his desk one Friday evening. On Monday, his hands and legs shaking, he answered Hachette's summons. "I've read this, Zola," Louis Hachette said. "It's not bad." He shook his head. "But poetry. No money in it." Tugging at his side-whiskers, he pushed the manuscript across the desk. "You have talent, Zola. If you want to make a name and grow rich, write novels." That night he stuffed more than five thousand lines of verse into his trunk and began to revise the tales he had written to Ninon, his Provençal paramour. Again, Louis Hachette read them and shrugged. "They're good, but they'll offend our Catholic readers. You'll find another publisher for them. He did. Lacroix bought the tales which won praise from some critics who liked his poetic imagery, his symbolism and who even caught their satirical echo; but they caused no stir in the bookshops. With that book, he turned his back on poetry, on fairy stories, on dreams. Those Romantics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Musset had written their confessions. He would write his. Only this one would tell of his conversion from Romanticism to Realism, from Deism to Determinism, from Idealism to Materialism, from the youth who daydreamed to the man who dared. BOSON BOOKS

48

A Moment of Truth Did Cézanne and Baille, his schoolfellows and a million others, know exactly how grim were the garrets of Paris; how sordid the thing exalted by the name of love; how base the thing called life; how the poets and word-spinners had fooled them all? Well, he would tell them how his ethereal Aérienne had come down to earth as Berthe, the streetwalker; he would treat them to the painful revelation of his own story and Berthe's.

BOSON BOOKS

49

A Moment of Truth

BOOK 2

BOSON BOOKS

50

A Moment of Truth

I In one of the twelve exhibition rooms, a crowd pressed round a painting to hiss, jeer and even spit its disgust. With Cézanne at his side, Zola forced a passage to scrutinize the canvas which had provoked such a scene at the Palais de l'Industrie on the Champs Élysées. On the face of it, what did they have to rant and rave about? Two men in boulevard costumes of velour jacket, white shirt, silk cravat and drainpipe trousers were lounging in a forest glade with a nude woman sitting beside them while a second woman, in a sodden, clinging slip emerged from the pool behind them. Édouard Manet, the artist, had called his picture Le Bain (The Dip). But Zola perceived why critics had dubbed it, ironically, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (The Picnic). Not because of the half-eaten lunch in the foreground—but the sexual meal the painting implied. Was that why it had aroused such antipathy? But as Cézanne pointed out, the source of Manet's inspiration hung in the Louvre—Giorgione's Concert Champêtre. If Manet had put his subjects into renaissance garb, the fine-arts jury might have treated his canvas with less contempt; but they would still have spurned it for an even greater crime. Manet had flouted every academic principle; he had dared paint his figures and landscape in slabs of strident color with a loaded brush and none of the nuances which every classical teacher demanded. Why, his picture even gave the appearance of having been painted outside the studio—from nature! Such transgressions had landed Manet in the annexe of the Official Salon with more than a thousand rapins whom the official jury had rejected with their 4,000 paintings. This ruthless selection had caused so much uproar among artists and the more progressive critics that Emperor Napoleon III himself had ordained a special Salon des Refusés to hang the rejected works. Even there, Manet's canvas had shocked not only the purists but also the puritan art-lovers. They could gaze shamelessly on antique and mythical nudes. But Parisian bourgeois and their whores! That was obscene! Two of Cézanne's artist friends joined them. Camille Pissarro, a Jew of Portuguese descent, was starving for his avant-garde art, and Antoine Guillemet, son of a rich Parisian wine-merchant, was studying under a master in an orthodox studio. As they dissected Manet's picture and his art, their jargon passed over Zola's head; it meant little that Manet was striving for greater naturalism by analyzing tone, color and the play of light; he only dimly understood their talk about primary and complimentary colors and picture planes, how to draw with the brush and heighten and enliven the shadows. Duranty, he recalled, had used the same sort of jargon. But one thing did impress Zola: Manet had stolen the show by seizing on an old theme and restating it in bold, unequivocal, contemporary colors. What better formula for the budding writer! He noticed something else—how much space and BOSON BOOKS

51

A Moment of Truth influence the Salon critics commanded in the Press and how the public reacted to their opinions. A young journalist could carve out a reputation with a few trenchant phrases about the official exhibition; he could make an even bigger stir by backing somebody condemned by the jury. Like Édouard Manet, for example... Cézanne had returned to Paris, determined this time to break into the Salon or stage a painting revolution that would destroy the state monopoly of art. Through him, Zola met the group calling themselves the Intransigents. Two of them, Frédéric Bazille and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, shared a studio in Rue Vaugirard only a step or two away. Bazille came from a wealthy, winegrowing family in Montpellier while Renoir had saved enough by painting porcelain vases and missionary scrolls to pay his way through Charles Gleyre's studio. Two others had joined them: Claude Monet, a forthright and confident young man who refused to learn the new painting from old masters and old teachers, and Alfred Sisley, a quiet, Paris-born Englishman who specialized in landscapes. Pissarro lent his wisdom and authority to the rebels who looked on Manet as the precursor of the new art. Guiillemet had a foot in both schools, aiming at the Official Salon but with a few touches of Manet and his younger disciples. Zola listened, absorbed and reflected. Between stints on Claude's Confession, he filled an exercise book with notes and quotes about this bizarre bunch of painters who had the stuff of a novel in them. He did not even have to imagine its hero: his friend, Paul Cézanne, the most eccentric of them all. Out of his Hachette salary of 300 francs a month, he could afford to feed this gang of hungry painters in his rooms at Rue des Feuillantines once a week. Every Thursday they came with his Aix friends, Philippe Solari, and a part-time painter, Numa Coste, who was doing his military service, and Baille, now at the Polytechnique. Buttressed by cheap white wine and tea, the Intransigents argued far into the night about art and literature. Cézanne turned up regularly, flaunting a red belt like a cummerbund, and wearing his long, shabby jacket, half-mast trousers and down-at-heel boots, all mottled and flecked with oil paint. He cursed Manet, made only a slight bow to the painting of Courbet and considered only Delacroix worthy of his respect; he disputed art with Renoir, Monet and Bazille and only deferred to Pissarro from time to time. In the summer and autumn of 1864, he missed several Thursdays in a row, and Zola failed to find him at weekends in his studio. Finally, he went to Guiillemet who painted with him in Montmartre and in the country around Paris. "What's happened to Paul?" he asked. "Didn't you know?" Guillemet answered. "He's fallen in love." "Paul! I don't believe it. He wouldn't have the nerve, and anyway he'd be too scared whoever she was would get her hooks into him." Guillemet nodded, grinning. He explained they had met the girl when they were painting in Montmartre; she sold flowers for her aunt in Place Clichy; he had chatted her up and persuaded her to sit for him. Paul had taken over where he left off. He did not have to spell things out for Zola.

BOSON BOOKS

52

A Moment of Truth "Her name's Gabrielle Meley—trade name, Coco," Guillemet said. "Pretty, too, if you like them well-built, you know, the way Titian and Rubens did." "I'd like to meet her," Zola said. "And so you shall when she makes a serious bid for our friend, Paul, and he sees her hooks and doesn't stop running until he reaches the Jas de Bouffan, that mansion his father has acquired in Aix, and slams the door behind him." Guillemet kept him informed about the liaison, chuckling that Cézanne had shaved off his beard at the request of Mademoiselle Meley. Intrigued, Zola had to carry out his own investigation; for weeks he tried Paul's studio until finally the door opened and they stood face to face. Casting an eye round the walls, he recognized most of the paintings; but one which had scarcely dried stood out, a head-and-shoulders portrait of a young woman with a strong, determined face, a pile of dark hair, dark eyes and with a shawl thrown over her frilly corsage. Paul had signed the canvas, a thing he rarely did, and only if he felt satisfied with his work. "Who is she?" Zola asked, casually. "A model," Cézanne said. "Doesn't look like your usual models," Zola said, knowing Cézanne would only pay for the worst of hags from the agencies. "If I didn't know you, Paul, I'd say you've fallen for some girl and you've been hiding her." “Bah!" You know what I think of them all—scheming bitches who want to get their hooks into me." As though to scotch Zola's suggestion and prove the portrait and its subject meant nothing to him, he went and unhooked it and handed it over to Zola. "It's yours," he said. Hardly knowing why, Zola accepted the gift and carried the portrait with him when he took his leave. Three months later, Guillemet whispered that Cézanne had fled back to Provence to escape the clutches of Miss Meley. "Still want to meet her?" He asked, and Zola nodded. That Thursday, Guillemet turned up with Gabrielle-Alexandrine Meley, or Coco to her friends. Zola looked at her. She was much prettier than her portrait. She must have felt the same way about that portrait as he did when Paul painted him; he seemed to have searched for every flaw in her features and emphasized them all; but he had caught the resolution in her face, and its character. She had an almost masculine strength and gravity and her deep brown eyes seemed to drill holes in him. No wonder Paul had taken to the maquis. He speculated about her relations with Guillemet. A flower girl who sat for a young artist...But he knew he could go on wondering, for all she would ever reveal. Even about herself, she remained close-mouthed. It took him weeks to discover that her mother had died leaving her, aged ten, with an aunt. That aunt, who had a flower stall, had brought her up. She hardly mentioned her father except to say his name was Edmond-Jacques Meley and he had left her mother not long after her birth. Zola liked her on sight. She might have the rough tongue of someone who had grown up in the working-class district around Place Clichy and near the red-light area of Pigalle; but she had innate intelligence, shrewd common sense and solid

BOSON BOOKS

53

A Moment of Truth self-reliance. She looked nothing like Aérienne, the girl of his dreams. But what had such fantasies brought him but misery and remorse? Perhaps he needed this type of girl who would keep her feet on the ground— and his—while he made his name. He presented her with a copy of his Tales to Ninon and she praised them, gravely, though he doubted if their message and their symbolism pierced her brittle, practical mentality; she listened to him read the manuscript of Claude's Confession without blushing at the rawest passages, though raising her eyebrows at the scene where Claude (Zola) tried to redeem Laurent (Berthe) through pure love and hard, honest work. Zola realized he would never fool her; for Claude she read Émile; for Laurent, she read some left-bank pro who had thrown herself at him and exploited his innocence. But she admitted that his story had a certain pathos and a muscular style. However, she wondered about someone who bared his heart like this on paper and confided such ideas as these to his friends, Cézanne and Baille, and even read them to her with his slight, hesitant lisp. Like this passage: Then I spoke to you of women: I would have liked her to be born like wild flowers, in the wind, in the dew, to be a water-plant with heart and flesh washed by an eternal current. I swore to you that I would love only a virgin, a virgin child whiter than the snow, clearer than the spring water, deeper and of a more immense purity than the sky and the sea. But Coco listened without comment. She applauded his idea of breaking into journalism by writing book reviews for the Petit Journal and the Salut Public of Lyons; she backed his suggestion of using journalism as a lever to promote himself and his real writing. In many ways, he reminded her of his droll friend, Cézanne. At first, she had thought Cézanne a hirsute savage who ranted and raved mindlessly about taking Paris by storm and setting the Louvre ablaze with his paintings which looked to her like daubs; but she soon realized his loud-mouthed Provençal barking overlaid a timidity, a strong sense of inferiority and self-doubt, but also intelligence. This friend, Zola, also bragged about the literary juggernaut he would set rolling through Paris and how he would shake the bourgeois from their shiny toppers to their spatted shoes with pure Realism. Claude's Confession was only a curtain raiser. Beneath this bravado, Coco could discern the same shyness, the same unworldly romanticism that he was trying to combat and had put into those fairy stories. Hardly the ideal lover or marriage partner that she had envisaged for herself. Yet, this young man with the downy beard, cleft nose and virginal innocence really believed in his destiny. From a pile of dog-eared papers, he extruded another script, which he vowed to publish next year. Its title flared across the flyleaf: MY HATREDS. Its sub-title also caught and halted her eye: IF YOU ASK ME WHAT I'VE COME TO DO IN THIS WORLD, I AS AN ARTIST SHALL REPLY; 'I'VE COME TO LIVE LIFE TO THE FULL.' That lured her eye to the first page where she read the opening lines: BOSON BOOKS

54

A Moment of Truth

Hate is saintly. It is the indignation of valiant and powerful hearts, the militant disdain of those angered by the foolish and the mediocre. To hate is to love, it is to have a warm and generous soul, it is to thrive on the scorn of shameful and stupid things. Hate is soothing, hate does one justice, hate increases the stature. I have always felt younger and more courageous after each of my revolts against the platitudes of my age. Coco handed back the manuscript. Exuberant and exaggerated. And for someone who hated so much he looked fairly harmless. But she could sense that this grave young man had the talent and will power to transform those boasts and slogans and dreams into reality. He had come to live life to the full. He looked more interesting and exciting than the dozens of faceless young men she had met until then. Why shouldn’t she go along with him on his crusade? Coco bided her moment; she had more native wit than to force things with someone as inhibited as Émile Zola. On Christmas Even 1865, they celebrated the publication of La Confession de Claude with a dinner in a hotel along the Seine at Mantes-la-Jolie. As an aperitif, they drank champagne, then white wine with oysters and red wine with the jugged hare and more with the cheese, then coffee and brandy; neither heard the whistle of the last train for Paris, but the landlord gave them a room for the night; and there, they became lover and mistress. Solemnly, Zola presented her with a copy of his book. To mark the event, he had inscribed on the flyleaf: A ma chère Gabrièlle, en souvenir du 24 décembre 1865. Coco had only one other obstacle—a mother who doted on her only son and spoiled him outrageously. No matter how subtly she maneuvered, how artfully she cultivated Émilie Zola, it took four months before she could move in with both mother and son to a new apartment that she found in Rue Vaugirard. And still, Madame Zola did not accept her. Yet, she had triumphed. She made no mention of marriage; a freethinker and Realist like Zola did not believe in such meaningless rituals, and a wedding for her meant an economic rather than a religious union. Something to think about later. No sooner had they settled in than they heard the Imperial police had been making enquiries at every one of Zola's many addresses, and had even gone to Le Travail, a newspaper edited by the radical Georges Clemenceau which had published Zola's first poem, to gather information about him. Certain gentlemen of the Imperial Court had deemed Claude's Confession obscene and the Minister of Justice had called for a report on the book and its author. Coco lived in terror and could not understand why Meemeel was enjoying the drama, declaring that prison did not scare him; on the contrary, it would make his name and sell a few thousand more copies of his book. Through friends, he learned that Monsieur Baroche, the Imperial Procurator-General himself, had read the book and written a sententious verdict deciding against prosecution— though only just.

BOSON BOOKS

55

A Moment of Truth Complying with the tendency of the Realist school, the author has too complacently analyzed shameful passion in certain pages. He has forgotten that it is not in contaminating the imagination of young people that one seeks to purify their hearts, and that a book which announces a moral intention must abjure all that might make it look like a bad book. However, the idea of the work is not immoral...I do not think, Monsieur the Keeper of the Seals, that the work entitled La Confession de Claude should be pursued as contrary to public morals. Coco breathed again, but Zola felt disappointed that they had deprived him of the sort of trial that Flaubert had faced with Madame Bovary eight years before, and which had boosted the public interest and sales of the book. But Claude's Confession did change the direction of his career; for the police had made enquiries at Hachette; his protector, Louis Hachette, had died in 1864 and his successors viewed Zola as a literary arriviste whom they could do without. In any case, Zola had decided he and the publishing house had done as much as they could for each other. After making arrangements to do some part-time editing for them, he thanked the firm and departed. Henceforth, he would earn all his money with his pen. Claude's Confession sold 1,500 copies and brought in 450 francs. With the money, he and Coco equipped their flat. Coco treated herself to a tulle bonnet for eight francs; but always practical, she took Meemeel along to the Belle Jardinière in Rue du Pont Neuf and kitted him out with two off-the-peg suits, two shirts, shoes and a new umbrella. It would help to open new doors, she said.

BOSON BOOKS

56

A Moment of Truth

II Like anyone who had ever written a line of journalism or literature, Zola knew the legend of Hyppolyte de Villemessant. One-time chorister, commercial traveler, insurance agent, part-time poacher and theatre bit player, Villemessant had now cast himself in the rôle of the first French press tycoon. He appeared to launch—or kill—a new paper or magazine every other week and his name had become synonymous with sensation. To this burly giant with the megaphone voice, no printer's ink seemed black enough to wash the soiled linen of Paris, no type big enough to trumpet boulevard gossip and scandal to the capital and the provinces. His journalists he paid like trapeze artists—those who lasted long enough to collect their first month's pay and did not mind performing without a safety net. With his pointed humor, Villemessant gave each of his rejects a walking stick. In his new Belle Jardinière suit and with a novel idea, Zola went to see Villemessant at his office in Rue Rossini; he would write a column on forthcoming books and their authors for Villemessant's latest creation, L’Événement; he would even milk manuscripts and run extracts. Publishers like Hachette, his own publisher, Lacroix, and Hetzel, had agreed to co-operate. Villemessant bit on the idea, but left Zola under no illusion when he announced the new column in the paper. "If my new star succeeds, well and good," he wrote. "If he flops, nothing simpler. He tells me himself that in this case he will cancel his engagement and I shall strike him off my roll. “I have spoken." Zola's articles not only pleased Villemessant and brought in advertising revenue, they flattered Zola’s idols like Taine and Michelet, and the leading novelists like Flaubert and the Goncourt Brothers and made them his friends. In the offices of L'Événement and Le Figaro, another of Villemessant's papers, he met the brilliant commentators as well as the young firebrands and muckrakers of the Paris press. Men like Aurélien Scholl and Jules Claretie, Henri Rochefort and Louis Ulbach. He struck up a friendship with a young man who had chestnut hair, wistful brown eyes, a poet's face, who wrote whimsical and fanciful tales of his native Provence and turned out verse dramas when idling away his days as secretary to Napoleon III's half-brother, the Duc de Morny. Figaro had already published some of Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin, Provençal sketches which enchanted Zola with their humor and originality. At the end of the first month, he had heard nothing from Villemessant and was wondering if one of the famous walking sticks had his nametag on it, when Daudet whispered to him, "Go and see the dragon at the cash desk." Zola returned, beaming, with 500 francs in his hand. But fame, not money, was the name of his game. Book critics and columnists did well. But what impact did they have? He recalled that vicious slanging-match between Manet and the Salon critics and he knew the official jury had just tossed Cézanne's two latest offerings back at him—and several thousand more at rapins like him. Now, if Émile Zola could stir up that wasp's nest around the ears of BOSON BOOKS

57

A Moment of Truth Napoleon and Nieuwerkerke...

his

fine-arts

superintendent,

Count

Alfred-Émilien

When he entered the studio, Cézanne was painting over the huge red R (for rejected) on the back of his two canvases and cursing the bunch of eunuchs on the jury. He had submitted his portrait of their friend, Antony Valabregue; Zola stared at it, well understanding why that budding poet had written him saying plaintively that Paul seemed to take out secret grudges on his friends by emphasizing their worst traits. Valabregue had a winebibber's vermilion nose and his face, slabbed in ocherous colors with a loaded brush, had a frozen constipated look. Even a tolerant jury would have thrown that out. Yet, Paul had also sent a still life of a wine-jug, a bottle and several apples which were good and proved he had both talent and temperament. "Don't worry, Paul," he said. "You'll break through next year." "Hmm. When Count Nieuwerkerke and his jury are roasting in hell, you mean." Cézanne seized a grubby piece of paper from his littered table and handed it to Zola who read the letter he had written to Nieuwerkerke. In bald language, he rejected the jury that had rejected his work, insisting that his two pictures be hung in public and demanding the revival of the Salon des Réfusés. "And the rat hasn't even had the guts to reply," Cézanne growled. He took the copy of the letter and was making to tear it up when Zola stopped him. "Leave that with me. Maybe I can make Monsieur le Comte reply and stir up your gentlemen of the Beaux Arts." "If you could do that, Émeeloo..." Back in his flat, Zola sat down to consider his plan of action. Somehow, he must persuade Villemessant to give him a new column to cover the Salon of 1866. But he knew Villemessant wanted scandal, sensation, not art criticism. Yet the other day, hadn't he read about a young rapin who had collected his two rejects at the Palais de l'Industrie, gone home and killed himself in despair? He remembered, too, that macabre poem by Manet's friend, Charles Baudelaire, about the painter's young assistant, Alexandre, who had hanged himself in the studio. La Corde (The Rope) wasn't it? On April 18, he knocked on Villemessant's door. His chief looked up from a late breakfast of champagne, oysters and croissants and flicked his egg timer over with a finger, watching the sand begin to fill the bottom phial. "Whatever it is, Zola, it can't be more important than my breakfast," he said. "You have three minutes." "I want to do the Salon." "You mean, you want to kill off this paper," Villemessant growled. "If I put the word SHIT in 72-point type in the Salon articles nobody would complain because they wouldn't notice it." He turned his egg timer back. "You have about thirty seconds." Fumbling in his pocket for several sheets of paper, Zola thrust them between the champagne bottle and oyster dish. "I'm going to expose this scandal, and the scandal of a jury that treats art and great artists like scum," he said. BOSON BOOKS

58

A Moment of Truth Villemessant ran a napkin over his moustache as he read the script. A young Alsatian, Jules Hozapfel, had scribbled a note—"The jury refused me...I have no talent...I must die!"—and had blown his brains out. As the newspaper proprietor scanned the sheets, the sand in his egg timer ran out. He kept reading. "On the right lies the bed, low and shapeless. It is there he was found, his head hanging and crushed as though he were sleeping...I saw four or five canvases hung on the walls, but not with the jury's eye...on an easel I noticed a bare canvas with an entire study penciled in. That was, without doubt, his last composition. The painter killed himself before this unfinished picture." "So, you've been along to his studio," Villemessant grunted not without a certain respect. "It wasn't funny," Zola said. "But I got in and interviewed his landlady and the maid who found him." "Fine and dandy. Put a bit more blood and guts into it and let me have it for tomorrow's sheet." "Do I get the Salon?" Villemessant grinned at the sad-sack face with its quivering cleft nose supporting pince-nez. "All right, you have it. Try and knock the scab off it and give us the dirt underneath. Take the jury apart but not too much arty-crafty stuff...more about the painters than their daubs...and keep it short and bright." He sprayed an oyster with pepper sauce and washed it over his throat with champagne. "I have spoken," he growled. Zola helped Cézanne to draft a second letter to Count Nieuwerkerke, which would reach him on April 19, the day his first Salon article would appear in L'Événement. This letter said: Monsieur, I recently had the honor of writing to you about two canvases which the jury has just rejected. Since you have not yet replied, I feel that I should emphasize the reason which obliged me to write to you. As you have certainly received my letter I do not need to repeat here the arguments which I felt I should put before you. I shall merely say again that I cannot accept the spurious judgment of colleagues to whom I have not myself given the right to judge me. Thus, I write to you to insist on my request. I wish to appeal to the public and to be exhibited just the same. My wish does not appear to me in any way exorbitant and, if you asked all the painters in my situation, they should all reply that they repudiate the jury and wish to participate one way or another in an exhibition which must be completely open to every serious worker. The Salon des Réfusés should be re-established. Even if I were to appear in it alone, I earnestly desire that the public should at least know that I have no more wish to be confused with those gentlemen of the jury than they have to be confused with me.

BOSON BOOKS

59

A Moment of Truth I trust, Monsieur, that you will not wish to remain silent. It seems to me that every courteous letter deserves a reply. —Paul Cézanne. Zola's article about Jules Holzapfel's suicide enraged leading jurymen like Alexandre Cabanel and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Who was this Italian upstart to blame them for some nameless dauber's death? His first critical article inflamed the jury even more; there, he named them one by one, accusing them of truncating French art with their anemic, classical copies, of excluding great artists like Delacroix, recently dead, Courbet, the realist, Manet the rebel. "The jury,” he wrote, “is not named by universal suffrage, but by a restricted vote in which only artists exempted from all judgment by previous awards can take part. What therefore are the guarantees for those who have no medals to show?...With their almighty authority, the jury chooses only a third or a quarter of the truth; they amputate art and display its mutilated corpse to the public." Zola pointed to the empty and gloomy galleries. "They accept mediocrities. They cover the walls with honest and meaningless canvases. From ceiling to floor, from wall to wall you can look; not a picture that shocks, not a picture that attracts. They have cleaned the face of art, have combed its hair. It is a good bourgeois in slippers and white shirt." In his third and fourth articles, he rubbed home the insult by praising Courbet and Manet. "Our parents laughed at Courbet and now we stand in ecstasy before his art; we laugh at Manet and our sons will go in raptures before his canvases." Manet! In the ears of classical artists and academicians, that name rang like a revolutionary clarion. And here was some foreign whippersnapper lauding him as the Messiah of the new renaissance in French art! Manet and his gang were barricade creatures who would burn the Institute, the Beaux-Arts, and the Louvre if they let them. Zola had the same idea—until Guillemet and Edmond Duranty took him to the artist's studio in Rue Guyot. He had expected somebody in the Courbet mould, a boisterous, beer-swilling satrap as colorful as his palette, blunt as his pictorial message, strident as his brushwork. But no! Manet seemed, looked and acted the antithesis of his art; his revolution he was creating almost by default. Zola hardly believed this was the Édouard Manet that Baudelaire, critic of genius now speechless with syphilis, had praised, that Duranty, Monet, Renoir, Bazille—yes, even Paul—had acclaimed. Their admiration quashed some of his doubts; another look at the canvases converted him completely to Manet; he saw Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, Olympia, the Venus that had attracted so much critical vitriol, the Fife-player that this year's Salon had tossed on its rejects heap. Back he went to say in his fourth article: You know what effect Monsieur Manet's canvases produce in the Salon. They quite simply knock holes in the walls. All round them are displayed the confections of the fashionable sweet-makers—sugar-candy trees and piecrust houses, gingerbread men and vanilla-cream women...Don't look at the pictures nearby. Look at the living people in the room. Study the BOSON BOOKS

60

A Moment of Truth way their bodies contrast with the floor and the walls. Then look at Monsieur Manet's canvases; you will see that there, is truth and force... Monsieur Manet's place is reserved in the Louvre. That last sentence did it. As Zola's next article appeared, protests choked the postal room of Villemessant's paper. Some readers urged deportation, others that Zola should be locked up in the Charenton asylum, and most raged about the half-breed Italian who had the impertinence to teach France about art. Villemessant shrugged. He thrived on controversy. But soon he changed tack when Zola's articles began to affect the paper's circulation and readers threatened desertion by hundreds. "Zola, I give you three more articles, and then—" Villemessant made a chopping motion with his ham hand. "But we agreed eighteen articles." "Three more. And Pelloquet will do three at the same time to correct the impression you've given the few readers you've left me that only your friend, Manet, can paint." Zola groaned. Théodore Pelloquet, the regular art critic, considered Cabanel and Gérôme direct descendants of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael and would lickspittle them in his contributions. For himself, Zola made full use of his final three columns. Claude Monet he singled out for his portrait of his mistress, Camille Doncieux; he applauded the art of Courbet, Millet, Corot and Daubigny; he seized the chance to boost a Pissarro landscape. These paintings responded to his own artistic ethic which he stated for the first time: "The definition of a work of art cannot be other than this: A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament." He would adopt it as his own literary motto. To the readers of L’Événement he wrote these parting words: "I have proved cruel, stupid, ignorant. I have been guilty of sacrilege and heresy because I was tired of mendacity and mediocrity and looked for men in a crowd of eunuchs. And that is why I am condemned." After all that strife, he needed to escape from the vitiated boulevard atmosphere, to ventilate his mind by breathing fresh air, by contemplating nature, by plunging into living water. While he was wondering where to go, Cézanne wrote from Gloton, a village an hour and a half by train along the Seine in Rouen direction. Paul said he had run out of the miserly allowance his father threw at him. Could Émile send him fifty or a hundred francs? Zola did better, carrying the money himself to his friend. When he crossed the clanking ferry to hand Paul the money, he had found his haven. Gloton and Bennecourt, a few steps downriver, had hardly ever clapped eyes on a Parisian or any other form of stranger; their flint stone houses and barns and smithy might have been a million miles and years away. Back he came with Coco to put up in Mère Gigou's primitive inn where chickens prowled through the rooms and they had to mount a ladder to reach the vast double bed. He had only one qualm: How would Paul react on seeing his best friend and his old flame sharing a bed as man and wife? Cézanne merely laughed at BOSON BOOKS

61

A Moment of Truth Émeeloo's embarrassment, reminding him of the way he had handed him Gabrièlle's portrait—almost symbolic of handing over the subject herself. However, Zola felt relieved that Paul did not mind, that he remained his best friend, indeed his only true friend. Soon, the Aix gang discovered their hideaway and descended in force on the village. Solari brought his mistress, Thérèse Strempel, then Valabregue and Baille arrived and finally Guillemet, looking more than ever like one of the Emperor's dragoons. With him, for whom she had first sat, Coco laughed and joked—through never with Cézanne whom she had obviously not forgiven for his defection. As a party, they rowed on the river, swam, sunbathed, ate and drank well and argued art and literature far into the night. Zola had emerged as their hero. Hadn't he caused an earthquake in the art world with his campaign? Then, his volume called My Hatreds had appeared and provoked press comment. He was writing an episodic novel, the Mysteries of Marseilles, for the newspaper, Messager de Provence. He had prepared a pamphlet on Manet for the one-man show the painter was planning if they rejected his work during the Universal Exhibition the following year; Manet had responded to Zola's backing of his painting by starting a portrait of the writer which he would submit for the 1868 Salon. They even wrote ditties about both men which were sung in the dance-halls, the café-concerts and bistrots. When Zola returned to Paris, he heard a new one penned by some satirical journalist which was making the rounds of the boulevards: Monsieur Manet, Monsieur Zola Greet each other with a grin. Which one is the bigger giggler, Monsieur Manet? Monsieur Zola? Nobody's ever known, but hola! What a brush and what a pen! Monsieur Manet, Monsieur Zola Greet each other with a grin. Zola did not complain. His defense of Manet and his attack on the artistic institutions of the Second Empire might have failed. But who in Paris and the bigger provincial towns had not heard the name—Émile Zola?

BOSON BOOKS

62

A Moment of Truth

III Early in 1867, Zola moved his family across the Seine to the northern Batignolles district and a house in the Rue de la Condamine. There, he had a walled garden where he dug and planted a vegetable patch against the day he might have to starve for his art; he made a flowerbed to take his mind off that grim thought; he acquired Bertrand, a Newfoundland, and Caroline, a Pomeranian who ran demented after the five cats he fed. For the first time he had a study which looked on to the garden and there he could sit and contemplate the novels with which he meant to conquer Paris. A few minutes away lay Manet's studio where he was sitting for his portrait. When the light faded, they would sometimes stroll down the Avenue de Clichy to the Café Guerbois where the artist drank with his friends and disciples. Sickened and humiliated by the attacks on him and his art, Manet had long ago abandoned chic boulevard cafés like Le Riche and Le Bade for this working-class district and a spit-and-sawdust bistrot where they catered for those who drank absinthe and gros rouge (rough red wine). Sardonic critics dubbed him and his followers the Batignolles School. An incongruous figure in top hat, silk gloves, cape and carrying a gold-knobbed cane, Manet sat with his friends, Henri Fantin-Latour and Duranty. A disgruntled, acid-tongued but brilliant artist called Edgar Degas joined them, then Pissarro, Monet, Renoir and Bazille also foregathered to discuss art. Cézanne sometimes materialized at these gatherings, baggy jacket and halfmast trousers stippled like his palette-board. He refused Manet's hand, saying he had not washed his own, and Zola felt slightly ashamed of him, though he remembered the don't-touch-me phobia from Paul's youth. Manet wouldn't influence Paul, if he could help it, Zola realized. They invariably argued about the merits of open-air painting which Manet and Degas opposed and Pissarro and the others upheld. Monet and the younger school contended that local color as taught in the studios did not exist, that every color modified all the others, that no shadow was black but had its own color spectrum, that only outdoor painting could reveal these thing truly. "Nobody can paint properly outdoors," Manet said. "Then you have to fake reality in your studio," Pissarro came back. "Reality on canvas is always faked," Degas put in. Pissarro held to his view, shaking his head. On the tabletop, he drew a triangle showing the primary colors, red, blue yellow and the complementaries which the primaries cast in their shadows. "Take a natural scene, any scene," he said. "Break its features down into color and tone and analyze the play of light on every surface, then reassemble it touch upon touch with the primary colors and their complementaries and you'll get as near visual realism as you can." "Science, not art," Degas scoffed. Duranty placed a manicured hand on Zola's arm and whispered through his well-trimmed beard, "Don't you think that's as good a description of how to write a novel as you've heard for a long time?" BOSON BOOKS

63

A Moment of Truth Zola nodded assent. Duranty had not broken through with his own novels, but few people understood Realism in art and writing as he did; in this bistrot under the glass awning, he looked as much a displaced person as Manet, with his London suits and slight English intonation; they rumored that he was the natural son of Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen, by some court lady. Duranty had praised Claude's Confession and urged Zola to concentrate on realism like Flaubert and the Goncourt Brothers. "Have you seen this?" he said. Over the marble table he thrust the café copy of that day's Figaro, pointing to the novel they were serializing. Zola looked at it. La Vénus de Gordes by Alphonse Daudet's brother, Ernest, and his collaborator, Alphonse Belot. He had already seen parts of the serial, based on a true story of two lovers in the south of France who had murdered the wife's former husband, landed up in the assizes and gone to the guillotine. A sordid tale. Duranty was sliding Le Petit Journal at him, his finger on a news item that repeated almost word for word the drama narrated in the serial. Zola shrugged. "It happens all the time," he said. "That's what Flaubert said when his friend, Louis Bouilhet read him the newspaper story about the doctor's wife who became Emma Bovary," Duranty murmured in his drawling voice. "You mean, take these characters apart and put them together in the way Flaubert did Madame Bovary?" "Just like a surgeon cutting up a body and brain in the autopsy room." "Yes, the way the Goncourts told the story of their maid who went to the bad, Germinie Lacerteux?" Zola mused, his mind already seized with the idea, muting the humming voices and clicking billiard balls and the shouting and scuffling of waiters to focus on those two lovers who had let brute passion dictate their destiny. Duranty was right. Pick two such creatures and dissect them, fiber by fiber, showing how lust took root in their nerves and blood cells; probe for the chemistry and physiology of their thoughts and actions. Hadn't Taine, his chosen philosopher, constructed a whole pattern of history around the central theme of the MAN, the MILIEU and the MOMENT? And hadn't he said, "Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar?" He would write the book and he might even use Taine's phrase as the flyleaf epigram. When he thought about it, he had already met his main characters—that rake of a farmer's son from Gloton, and the raven-haired, voluptuous girl from the haberdasher's in Vernon, the other side of the Seine; he had his milieu, that spine-chilling, glazed arcade between Rue Mazarine and Rue de Seine; and what better moment than this frenzied Second Empire with its orgiastic society, its cynical politics and bogus morality breeding soulless passion and sordid crimes? Coming up from the river at the end of the Rue Guénégaud, you find the Passage du Pont-Neuf, a kind of narrow, dark corridor connecting Rue Mazarine and Rue de Seine. At night, the arcade is lit by three gas jets in solid, square lanterns...Then the arcade assumes the sinister look of a real cut-throat alley; long shadows creep along the flagstones and damp draughts blow in

BOSON BOOKS

64

A Moment of Truth from the street until it seems like a subterranean gallery dimly lighted by three funereal lamps. "Think about it," Duranty said as they quit the Guérbois. Zola nodded. He was already composing. Oblivious of the din from the caféconcerts and cabarets or the gyrations of the Montmartre windmills on his right, he walked homeward along the Avenue Clichy; in vivid, mental flashes, he pictured the story he would call, ironically, A Love Match, also its characters. His orphan heroine, Thérèse Raquin, would marry her inept, impotent cousin, Camille, to please her aunt and protector; in the drab enclave of their haberdasher's shop in the baleful arcade comes his best friend, Laurent, a farmer's son with artistic pretensions, who soon notices Thérèse's sexual deprivation and hunger. She had stayed there, crouching, looking vaguely before her. She seemed to be waiting, tense. Laurent hesitated, his eye on the canvas, playing with his brushes. Time was short. Camille might return, he might never have another chance. Suddenly, he turned round and faced Thérèse. They gazed at each other for several seconds. Then with a violent movement, Laurent bent down, seized the young woman and held her against his breast. He pushed her head back, crushing her lips beneath his own. She made one wild, instinctive effort to resist and then surrendered, slipping down on to the floor. Not a single word was exchanged. The act was silent and brutal. Whoever stole somebody's wife would take a life, Zola thought. From that animal act of adultery they would inevitably graduate to murder. As he strode on, ahead of him glowed the gas lamps of Saint-Ouen with its farms and vineyards and its islands in the Seine where he and Coco punted on Sundays, where Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir painted those riverside bistrots full of scullers and their Parisian grisettes. He had it! They would drown the husband...he could pick the exact spot...between those narrow islands where he had grounded one Sunday. Meanwhile, Laurent was still tugging at Camille, one hand closed round his throat. He finally wrenched him clear of the boat with his other hand and held him poised like a child in his powerful, outstretched arms. As Laurent's head was arched back, leaving his neck exposed, his terror-crazed victim twisted round, lunged forward and sank his teeth into it. The murderer stifled a yell of pain and hurled Camille into the river; but the teeth ripped off a fragment of flesh. Camille fell with a shriek. He came to the surface two or three times, but his cries were fainter each time. Daudet and Belot had sent their two murderers to the guillotine. He would not make that mistake. A quick death was too slight a retribution. He would show their tortured nerves and their curdled blood as they relived the nightmare of finding Camille's decomposed body in the morgue, of feeling his presence

BOSON BOOKS

65

A Moment of Truth between wherever they went together, of watching his final, desperate act in the throbbing bite scar on Laurent’s neck. Their love sours into hate and they blurt out their secret to Madame Requin, the victim's mother, who cannot betray them since she is paralyzed in everything but her mind. Finally, they detest and distrust each other so much that each plans the other's murder, Thérèse with a knife and Laurent with prussic acid. They find out and know that only death will bring them peace. They drink the poison. The bodies lay all night on the dining room floor, contorted, sprawling in the yellowish light glimmering over them from the shaded lamp. And for nearly twelve hours until about noon next day, Madame Requin, mute and silent, contemplated them at her feet, unable to feast her eyes enough, crushing them with baleful looks. For months, he labored over the novel, writing and revising, matching the word to the mood and action, trying to manipulate his characters without turning them into marionettes or intruding himself into the narrative. When he had finished A Love Match, he sold it as a serial to the journal, L'Artiste. However, its editor, Arsène Houssaye, toned down the ending which he deemed too grim and too immoral. Furious, Zola not only reinstated his own ending but changed the title to the name of its squalid heroine, Thérèse Raquin. On its publication at the end of 1867, Louis Ulbach, literary critic of Figaro savaged it under the heading of Putrid Literature. He wrote: “My curiosity has slipped recently in a puddle of mud and blood called Thérèse Raquin whose author, Monsieur Zola, is supposed to be a young man of talent. I know at least he has his eye on making his name...He sees Woman as Monsieur Manet paints her, mud-colored with pink make-up. I don't systematically blame the strident notes, the violet and violent brushwork; I complain because they are there alone and without variety. Vulgar monotony is the worst of monotonies.” Despite himself, Ulbach had boosted the book which sold out its first edition in four months. Zola welcomed the scandal and, for the second edition, wrote a preface full of irony, tongue-in-cheek morality and indignation. Aware that nothing sent book sales soaring faster than the epithet “dirty,” he carefully echoed every insult and gave the impression that only those with robust nerves should read Thérèse Raquin: “I am delighted to note that my colleagues have the sensitive nerves of young ladies...In Thérèse Raquin I wanted to study temperaments and not characters. This is the whole essence of the book. I have chosen people completely dominated by their nerves and blood, lacking free will, drawn into each action of their lives by the inexorable laws of their physical nature. Thérèse and Laurent are human animals, nothing more...Amid the chorus which cried, 'The author of Thérèse Raquin is a miserable hysteric who likes pornographic displays', I have waited vainly for one voice to reply, 'No, this writer is simply an analyst who might have become engrossed in human corruption but who has done so just as a doctor might in a dissecting-room.'”

BOSON BOOKS

66

A Moment of Truth Some people did discern the merits of the book. None other than Saint-Beuve, doyen of literary critics, regarded the novel as a remarkable work that could become a landmark in contemporary fiction. Better than any of his critics or detractors, Zola knew that with Thérèse Raquin he had come of age as a novelist. He had taken a case history and turned it into a powerful drama. What prevented him from applying the same method to other characters and situations? Or even to society as a whole? As he said in the preface, "The group of Naturalist writers to which I have the honor to belong, has enough courage and energy to produce forceful works in their own defense." But he needed something more than a Naturalist tag. He needed a philosophy. And he needed a big theme.

BOSON BOOKS

67

A Moment of Truth

IV Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt and his brother, Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt, hardly knew what to make of their bullnecked young lunch guest who plied his silver fish knife and fork on his grilled sole like some peasant turning over the sod, who looked like a well-dressed gorilla in his ready-made suit, and who laid down a smoke screen over his shyness with outbursts of rancor and indignation. Against the Second Empire. Against the Emperor and his flock of new courtiers. Against the bourgeoisie. Against the Press, that whore from which he had to pimp a living. Against religion and its fake priests. Against Romantics like Hugo and Musset, who cheated people with their fairy tales. Against the critics who never understood. Against himself, the misunderstood. Amused and intrigued, the brothers flashed their eyebrows at each other as their maid brought in the canard-aux-olives. So this was Zola, who had praised Germinie Lacerteux then appropriated THEIR technique to write HIS Thérèse Raquin. He looked nothing like the elegant portrait Manet had managed to get hung in the 1868 Salon; FantinLatour had caught him better in that group with Manet and those moderns, Renoir, Monet and Bazille. A neurotic, restless type. Yet, they saw something powerful in that face, its brow defined by a black line of close-cropped hair, its round contours fudged by a black beard and whiskers. And if he ranted and lisped against everything under the sun, he did throw out some penetrating notions about literature, art and the decadent Second Empire society. Also, Thérèse Raquin did reveal an original, almost primordial talent. In the close atmosphere, Zola sweated and felt a pulse fretting in his temple. He realized that these precious brothers were observing every move, noting every remark in the way they fitted together the bits of the art histories and novels they wrote. A quaint pair, Edmond and Jules. Their elegant house gave on to the ramparts at Auteuil, two minutes' walk from the racecourse. When he stepped through the door, Zola fancied he had somersaulted backwards through some time barrier into the eighteenth century. Whether France or Japan he could not guess. French porcelain and sculpture lay scattered elegantly on marquetry tables while the narrow staircase had its well covered with eighteenth-century French miniatures and woodcuts by the Japanese artists, Hokusai and Outamaro; all though the house, he had seen Japanese prints which had become a vogue in Paris largely because of the Goncourts. They had also filled the house with Japanese lacquer furniture and screens. In Zola's view, this distinguished bric-a-brac reflected the peculiar character of the novels by the Brothers Goncourt, their quest for novelty, for the missing links of recorded history and the kaleidoscopic quality of their writing. They wrote as Claude Monet painted, pitching sensations on to paper in blotches of crude, verbal color to heighten the emotional component of their work, then toiling for years to refine this raw material. In fact, they had shown BOSON BOOKS

68

A Moment of Truth him bundles of exquisite watercolors done by both brothers as mnemonics for the characters and descriptions of their books. Indeed, those Goncourt novels had taught him much. From Flaubert, he had learned how to build dramatic unity out of a mosaic of detail, how to weigh words for their color as well as their content; from these literary dandies in velour jackets, he had borrowed the idea of the novel as a human document based on minute scientific observation. Through his pince-nez, he studied the brothers as they sipped a Burgundy with a bouquet that turned his head. How he envied moneyed sybarites who could don quilted jackets with tasseled belts, fix their eyes firmly on posterity and chisel and polish their fine literature for months without worry or stress! Edmond raised his glass to announce that three days away, on December 17, Jules would enter his thirty-ninth year. They toasted that while Zola observed the younger brother. With that alum skin, puffy flesh and the twitching right eye behind the monocle, he would have reckoned him older than Edmond, who was forty-six. As nervous as a monkey on a stick, he had got up and down half a dozen times to open or close a window, and the chink of cutlery or crockery seemed to set his teeth on edge. Of the pair, Jules handled the style while Edmond worked out the plots. From Jules's behavior, Zola could understand why those novels had that streaky, frenetic tone. They said Flaubert spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out; judging by what he had heard about Jules Goncourt, he couldn't even decide where to put the comma in the first place. From the anxious glances Edmond shot at his brother from time to time, Zola could guess something was ailing Jules. "Yes, we both thought Thérèse Raquin a remarkable novel, a sort of mental autopsy of a murder," Edmond murmured. "Powerful, the morgue scenes...powerful," Jules put in, and Zola recalled the younger Goncourt had a mania for scavenging literary background in places like that morgue behind Nôtre Dame and even in abattoirs. "I liked that frisson of terror you got into the writing, Zola," he added. "It would be much better if I hadn't to earn money cobbling together journalistic trash for La Tribune," Zola moaned. "You've no idea the idiots I have to mix with and the opinions I have to write. Ah! if I didn't have to earn my bread..." "But you've done much better than we ever did with our first novels," Edmond remarked. "Didn't even burn well," Jules grinned, explaining they had made a pyre of almost the whole of their first novel. "Yes, but to do what I want to do, I need money," Zola said. "If only I could persuade some publisher to pay me 30,00 francs, enough to keep me for six years." "Six years? But even our friend, Flaubert, didn't take six years to write Madame Bovary," Edmond said. "Who said one book? I'd write ten in that time." "Ten!" the brothers sang in unison.

BOSON BOOKS

69

A Moment of Truth Zola nodded. "The history of a whole family through three generations," he muttered, helping himself liberally from the cheese-board. "So, it's Balzac you want to outdo," Jules giggled. "The Human Comedy and all that." "Not at all. Balzac had his kings and Catholic princes and his professional types like doctors and lawyers, and with them he thought he was painting the whole of society..." "Wasn't he?" Edmond put in. "Why, he packed three thousand characters into nearly ninety novels." And killed himself doing it," Jules added. "How many peasants and workers?" Zola asked, stretching the fingers of one hand. "If he ever knew anybody from the working-class, he didn't think them worth a line in his Human Comedy." "So you want to become our working-class Balzac," Edmond said, a ring of scorn in his voice. Zola shook his head. "No, I'll take one family and look at the whole of society through their actions. I'll tackle everything—priests and peasants, painters and prostitutes, bankers and politicians, petty criminals and murderers." "It's a pretty colossal task,” Edmond said. "I'm twenty-eight. I have time." "And your characters? I suppose you have them all in your head," Jules said with that curious grin of his. "Enough for five years at two books a year." "But to portray all the types you mention, won't you need the insight of genius?" Edmond demanded. "Why? People behave like animals," Zola replied. "The nature of our characters is largely determined by our genital organs as well as our genes and environment. Isn't that the lesson of Darwin and the Naturalists?" By the way Edmond's blue eyes flinched, he could see he had shocked him; but Jules guffawed loudly. Zola wondered if at least one of these exquisite gentlemen knew anything about sex as it concerned ordinary men and women. "It's a novel approach," Edmond said, finally. "Well, Flaubert has done the analysis of feeling and you two gentlemen have dissected people and their environment. All that's left for us young writers are the big things—a sort of mass production of books and characters." From his positive manner, the brothers did not doubt his courage, his will power and stamina, though they wondered if he had the talent to carry through his project. "If all the young writers work as hard as you, I wouldn't like to have Posterity's job of picking and choosing among your works," Jules grinned. Zola gazed myopically at him. He noted that his monocle had slipped and dangled in his coffee cup, and his cigarette was burning his fingers. Jules seemed oblivious of both facts. For these two dilettantes, Posterity had a meaning. For Émile Zola it signified something like failure. What good explaining to these litterateurs that for him Posterity be damned, he intended to build his reputation while he was young enough to enjoy what it earned him.

BOSON BOOKS

70

A Moment of Truth His serial novel was no hollow boast. Indeed, when he reflected, he was merely recasting his great and unfinished epic poem, The Weft of Life, as ten realistic novels. Nobody except Coco and himself believed he could do it; Cézanne had almost sneered at Bennecourt when he had outlined his scheme, even naming those Aix-en-Provence families who would spawn the dozens of major characters for the novels. He would prove them all wrong. Starting with only three people, he'd construct an immense fresco of the vices and virtues (if any) of the Second Empire; he'd section and expose the dry-rot in its society; he'd rip aside the tinsel and silk camouflage to lay bare the cynical and licentious brood who ruled France, from the painted Emperor Napoleon III, his courtiers and courtesans, down to those greasy bourgeois-on-the-make, their mistresses and their maisons-closes; he'd create a history with the style of fiction and the substance of life; he'd venture into territory which Balzac and Hugo had ignored or spurned, into slum ghettos that he knew well from Rue Soufflot, with the sordid hedonism of their squalid bistrots and knocking-shops; he'd take the art world of Paul and Manet apart and depict the real battle of the moderns against the classical diehards; he'd deal a sideswipe at Monsieur Offenbach who twisted Greek myths like Orpheus and Helen of Troy out of shape and wrote tinny ditties for that whore, Hortense Schneider, to yodel to the bourgeois; he'd paint the underworld of caféconcerts, cabarets and bal-tabarins in all their strident colors and that new palace of French culture, the Halles food market symbolizing bourgeois gluttony... If he wanted to cram everything into his cyclic novel, he must operate like one of the new microbe-hunters studying the effect of parasites and bacteria on the human cell; or an anatomist performing autopsies in the morgue. Above all, he must research everything and leave nothing to his own imagination, must jettison every shred of poetic aspiration. To build this fictional universe, to weld all its components together, he needed a firm base. What had Taine said? There's no great novelist without his philosophy. Balzac had crude scientific Determinism, Stendhal his psychology of love, Flaubert his meticulous realism and a style to match. He would opt for SCIENCE, which permeated everything. He had read enough of Charles Darwin, the English naturalist, to concur that primordial man owed more to reptile and ape than to Adam and Eve; his own left-bank odyssey had convinced him that people had not left their bestial instincts in the slime and jungle. Man fancied himself divine when he was no more than a clever animal. What other scientific ideas were changing society. Positivism, of course. Auguste Comte's philosophy that man must move away from myth, religion and metaphysics into the era where experimental science alone could establish and verify the essence of things and frame universal laws for their behavior. Zola remembered collecting Littré's dictionary proofs and standing astonished at the little man's Positivist definition of imagination: Faculty that we have to recall vividly, to see somehow the objects that are not before our eyes. If Comte's disciples defined imagination that way, he would exclude it from his concept of the novel and use nothing that science could not measure.

BOSON BOOKS

71

A Moment of Truth Among the cognoscenti they were talking about the medical scientist, Claude Bernard, who had flouted the notion of medicine as a pure art and had opened a laboratory for experimental medicine in the Collège de France to apply scientific principles to the functions of the body. Substitute the word Novel for Medicine and Bernard's physiological principles would serve the writer and his characters as they did the doctor and his patients. Hyppolyte Taine would, of course, act as his mentor for the whole series of novels. He had sent the philosopher copies of Thérèse Raquin and a later novel, Madeleine Férrat. Although Taine liked the novels, he qualified his praise of them with a sound piece of advice: Portray the masses and not individuals, and look for types rather than bizarre case histories. Zola mopped up the whole of Taine, halting at this passage in his Introduction to English Literature: Whether facts are physical or moral isn't important, they always have causes; ambition, courage, truthfulness have causes like those of digestion, muscular effort, animal warmth. Vice and virtue are products like sugar and vitriol, and every complex fact stems from an encounter with other simpler facts on which it depends. Let us therefore seek the simple facts for moral qualities as we week them for physical qualities. With Darwin, Comte, Bernard and Taine as his guides he felt at home. He would make science his deity. At Bourbon College he had chosen it because people did not contaminate the subject, and himself; now he could use it to create his own universe of characters and things without having to mix directly with them, without involving their minds and emotions—or more important, his own emotions. With scientific data, he could keep his characters at arm's length. He had his philosophical basis for his cyclic novel. In those books, he would depict physiological man, animal man as no one before had ever done; he would create an art and literature of his own to rival Hugo and Balzac. But he would not make Balzac's error of working from hand to mouth, pursued by creditors; he would plan everything, down to titles, characters, situations; he would outline the whole series and sell it to a publisher for enough money to keep his mother, Coco and himself from want. While he wrote for the provincial press and launched a new book column in Le Gaulois, he spent several hours a day at the Imperial Library; it meant rising early and marching a mile across the city to pore over books, to scribe kilometers of notes, to sketch scenes and add offshoots to the original family tree. Through winter and spring and early summer of 1869, he toiled over his dossier of what he had come to call the Rougon-Macquart novels. He began by categorizing the world into four groups: 1) People: workers and soldiers. 2) Tradesmen: speculators on demolition, industry and high finance. 3) Bourgeois: sons of upstarts. 4) World of fashion and the beau monde; civil servants, politicians. In a special category he listed prostitutes, murderers, priests (religion), artists (art). BOSON BOOKS

72

A Moment of Truth As he worked, his ideas crystallized about locale and characters. He would make Aix-en-Provence and Paris the twin poles of his literary creation. Aix, that sultry somnolent town with grass thrusting through its cobbled streets, would provide the original characters, though their offspring would move to Paris and other towns as the action dictated. Aix had the right size and shape; its 15,000 inhabitants still clung to their prejudices in a polarized society of aristocrats, princes and priests of the Roman church, professional men like lawyers and doctors, flap-jowled bourgeois and parvenus like Cézanne's father, and tradesmen in mediaeval brotherhoods in their back streets. He would enjoy throwing a few clods of muck back at the town that had killed his father and given his mother and him such a hard time. That bigoted, snobridden lot would contrast vividly with Paris where everything coalesced and cutpurses mixed with cutthroats and courtiers with courtesans. He would start by transposing Louis Napoleon's December Revolution of 1851 from Paris to Aix and show how it made the fortune of the scheming Rougon family. Into his dossier went a map of Aix, hand-drawn as he remembered it, though he re-baptized the town Plassans and changed some of the street names. His whole cycle would begin and end within a radius of three hundred meters; his mind's eye sited the starting and finishing points; that old piece of waste ground between his first Aix home at 35 Cours Sainte-Anne and the new cemetery would provide the backdrop for the first book; and the eighteenth-century villa among the pines and cypresses above the new railways station would make the final setting when the Rougon-Macquart saga had looped through Paris and other towns and areas and encompassed several hundred characters and ten or more novels. His characters gave him much more bother. Happy the Greeks and Romans who flung Fate or some deus ex machina into the plot when they ran out of inspiration; but for a whole series of characters tied by blood, he had to find something better. For the Fates and Furies, he would substitute genes, the heredity units discovered recently by the Austrian biologist, Gregor Mendel. Heredity and environment would mould his characters. Taine had mentioned the published work of Dr Prosper Lucas on natural heredity; Zola blew the Imperial Library dust off both tomes and looked, goggleeyed, at the title almost a page long: Philosophical and physiological treatise of natural heredity in states of health and sickness of the nervous system, with methodical application of the laws of procreation in the general treatment of disease...a work where the question is considered in its relationship with primordial ideas, theories of generation, determining causes of sexuality, acquired modification of the original nature of beings and diverse forms of neuropathy and mental alienation. "What a mouthful! But what a goldmine of characters of all shapes and sizes he could dredge out of Lucas's theories and examples! Cerebral and physical cripples, drunks and sexual perverts, mad and bad types in every walk of life. Out of such a book he could create a family tree for twenty novels. And from two or three types, suitably chosen, he could spawn whatever characters he liked.

BOSON BOOKS

73

A Moment of Truth His reading of Lucas convinced him that heredity, while a science, left enough leeway for him to breed fictional beings authentic enough to escape criticism. And if he lapsed, he could always plead environmental change! Lucas's principles did not strain the intellect: his children took after one parent or another, or they might inherit the dominant or weak characteristics of both parents; or the parents' genes might combine to form new types. Already, he had his matriarch, progenitress of his clan. Adélaîde Fouque (Tante Dide), last of a line of rich and influential peasants, orphaned when her father went mad and died. She would marry Rougon, her gardener, and bear him one child, Pierre, before he died. She would then turn to Macquart, a drunken smuggler, and have two children by him, Antoine and Ursule, before he dies at the hands of a customs gendarme. Those two unions would give him three distinct types of descendant: from the Rougons, the legitimate branch, he would fashion the politicians and the powerful bourgeois, all of them inheriting the cunning, greed and graft of their peasant progenitor, all of them obsessed with money, power and social position. At the other extreme, the bastard progeny of Macquart would carry his evil brand which would outcrop as drunkenness, prostitution and crime, including rape and murder; those in whom the Rougon and Macquart genes fused would turn out priests or tradesmen, some of them successful while others would bear the taint of Tante Dide's madness or her lover's debauched and criminal makeup. In eight months of reading, he filled several fat files with reams of notes for his saga. On certain pages, he held a dialogue with himself about his aims: My novel would have been impossible before the French Revolutions. I base it upon the truth of these times: the scrum of ambitions and appetites. I am studying the ambitions and appetites of a family thrown into the modern world, making superhuman efforts, not succeeding because of its own nature and certain influences, grasping at success to fall again...the time is troubled. It is the trouble of the moment that I portray. His research had thrown up dozens of characters and now he felt ready to begin his Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire. With all these fictional creations he had to set the stage for their entry. His first title, The Origins, he discarded for another—The Fortune of the Rougons. In this first novel he would set Tante Dide and her children in motion against the background of the 1851 coup d'état that crushed the young republic and virtually created Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's Second Empire. His Pierre Rougon would have something of Cain's ruthlessness and Jacob's cunning; he would steal his stepbrother's birthright then he and his scheming wife, Félicité would help stifle the republican rebellion and hand the town over to the Bonapartists. As a boy, Zola remembered those days when Aix had sat behind its closed gates and high ramparts quarantining itself against democratic contamination. This December putsch gave the Rougons their start, turning them into the carpetbaggers of the Second Empire, rich and ready to strike at Paris and high politics. BOSON BOOKS

74

A Moment of Truth His hero and heroine, Silvère Mouret and Miette Chantegreil, he did not have to invent. Into the dossier went this entry: “Silvère...a Philippe Solari in appearance but less hollow-cheeked...Miette...(Louise Solari).” In Silvère he put something of himself, his halcyon youth by the Arc and in the garrigue, his pure, platonic love for Aérienne, his high ideals. But Silvère and Miette represented something more than pure love; they were the People and the Republic. Miette falls with a bullet through her heart and the Rougons with their gendarmes crush Silvère as they crushed the democrats. To heighten this symbolism, he would make them star-crossed lovers, their passion never consummated, their youth as doomed as the abandoned cemetery they chose for their trysting place. As a boy, he had stood, mesmerized, watching tumbrils carry bones and detritus from Nôtre Dame cemetery to the new burial ground; now it appealed to his poetic impulse. Death and Love! Silvère and Miette would plight their troth and live part of their idyll there; Silvère would hide his firearm and end his days there. Throughout the summer and winter of 1869, he labored over the book, distilling the notes he had taken and his own memories into three or four pages of manuscript each day. Still superstitious, he decided on seven chapters, but they came oh! so slowly. For all his planning, he found it brain-teasing work cramming together an army of characters who would appear as heroes and heroines in later novels; he had to sacrifice narrative to this family history, also the character development of Miette, Silvère, Pierre Rougon, Félicité, his wife, and Antoine Macquart. For his basic villains, Rougon and Macquart, he did not need Lucas or any other documentary source; they loomed life-sized in his mind, the good Aix bourgeois who had done his family down and picked their bones clean. Those same people stole the Republican birthright of Silvère and Miette and sold it to the new dictator, Napoleon. To achieve this, they scared the townspeople into believing the republican insurgents were threatening to sack Plassans (Aix) and slaughter its inhabitants. When they know that Napoleon has won his gamble in Paris, they stage-manage a minor fracas and seize power over the bodies of a few misled citizens and their own idealist nephew, Silvère, executed by a gendarme whom he had accidentally blinded in one eye. Silvère, closing his eyes, heard the dead of long ago calling to him furiously. In the dark, he saw only Miette under the trees, covered with the flag, her eyes staring upwards. Then the one-eyed man fired and it was all over; the skull of the boy burst open like a ripe pomegranate; his face fell down on the block, his lips caressing the place worn by Miette's feet, on that soft spot where the lover had left a little of her body. And at the Rougons' house that evening during the dessert, laughter mingled with the odors of the table, warm still with the debris of dinner. At last they were tasting the pleasures of the rich! Their appetites, honed by thirty years of frustrated desire, showed in their ferocious teeth. These insatiable creatures, these hungry wolves just let loose to have their fill, acclaimed the birth of the Empire, the reign of spoils for everyone. As it had redeemed the fortunes of the Bonapartes, the coup d'état had founded the fortune of the Rougons. BOSON BOOKS

75

A Moment of Truth

Before he had finished the novel, an opposition paper, Le Siècle, agreed to serialize it. His publisher, Lacroix, had promised to bring it out at the beginning of 1870. But the newspaper postponed its serial, political events overtook publication of the book and forced Zola to reappraise the whole project—and his way of life.

BOSON BOOKS

76

A Moment of Truth

V Life in Rue de la Condamine hardly ever varied; it revolved round him and his novels; Coco and his mother kept out of his way until one o'clock when they ate in the small dining room; in the afternoon when he had prepared his work for the next day, finished his articles for the provincial press and answered his correspondence, he pottered in the small vegetable garden or trimmed the lawn while Coco tidied his study and filed his papers; his mother fed the rabbits and chickens that she raised for the pot; Coco alone had the courage to assassinate them, and only when Zola was looking the other way, for he would have refused to eat any animal that he had known. Sometimes they had a three-handed game of dominoes before going to bed. One thing marred his tranquility; Coco and his mother could never see eye to eye on anything; they quarreled over the running of the house, his food, his welfare. A clash of temperaments, he thought, unwilling to concede that jealousy lay behind their antagonism. His mother's anemic and pasty look worried him; she complained of insomnia and vertigo—and she complained about Coco. What could he do? So often in the past four years he had wondered how he would get along without Gabrielle. Not only did she take care of his needs, she adjudged his work and defended him—sometimes with her flower-girl vocabulary—when critics like Louis Ulbach or Jules Clarétie attacked him and his books. She made no demands on his emotions or sexual prowess for she seemed, intuitively, to understand that writing called for monastic discipline, that sexual energy went to fuel and fire his art. Flaubert, he knew, felt the same way. And Cézanne believed that women and art did not mix and pointed to the legion of painters who had witnessed their inspiration founder in the arms of their models and mistresses. Maybe Paul had something there. When they had argued about it in his studio one day, he made a note about Coco for the art novel he meant to write: He (Zola) needed someone to ensure his peace of mind, someone to surround him with a tenderness in which he could lose himself, so that he might devote his whole life to the enormous work that he carried about in his head. And he added (to Paul) that everything depended on the choice; he believed he had found the one he sought, an orphan, the modest daughter of small and poor traders, but beautiful, intelligent...He had just installed his mother in a little house in the Batignolles where the ménage-a-trois suited him, two women to love him and himself with a solid enough back to feed them all. He had heard that Paul had again disgraced himself with his submissions for the 1870 Salon; it seemed he had done a bizarre portrait of his artist friend, Achille Emperaire, a dwarf from Aix; Paul had painted him, dressed in long drawers and exaggerated his crippled and stunted body by sitting him in a huge chair which some critics affirmed was a toilet commode; he had also shocked the jury with a nude whose upper and lower limbs pointed in different directions. BOSON BOOKS

77

A Moment of Truth Stock, the caricaturist, had lampooned Cézanne in one of the satirical papers, and Zola wondered what Papa Cézanne and the people on the Cours Mirabeau would say when they saw the vicious caricature and the vitriolic article. Duranty had returned from a visit to Paul's atelier muttering that he had never clapped eyes upon such a crazy artist and such mad painting. Zola kept his head down on the second of his Rougon-Macquart cycle, La Curée (The Spoils). In rare meetings with journalist friends, he heard whispers about Prussia and war; it recalled the day three years earlier when he had stood before the new Krupp cannon which had dominated the Prussian pavilion at the Universal Exhibition. He realized Bismarck was waiting for the chance to make Germany a nation at the expense of the rickety Second Empire; Zola noted other straws in the wind; Paris had grumbled in its streets during the funeral of Victor Noir, the socialist extremist assassinated by Prince Pierre Bonaparte and several anarchist groups were inciting the mob to overthrow the Empire; after a witch-hunt against republicans, the government had jailed Henri Rochefort for sedition and banned the International Workers' Association. Zola warned Coco about the war threats, telling her to say nothing to his mother. Coco, who had never flinched at anything up to now, astonished him by how badly she took the news. She even cried, saying, "But they'll take you among the first, Meemeel." "Me? Nonsense! With my eyesight, I'd be more dangerous with a rifle against our men than against the enemy. Anyway, I have a widowed mother." "They'll still take you because you've written so much against the government." "All right. So they enlist me." "But me? If you don't come back, what do I do?" Zola laughed. "You sell The Fortune of the Rougons and all my notes for the rest of the series to the highest bidder." Coco did not share his amusement. "But I couldn't sell those things, or anything else of yours," she said. "Why not?" "Because I have no right in law. I am not your wife." Zola looked at her moist eyes. In the four years they had lived together never once had she mentioned marriage; both had agreed that civil and religious rites meant nothing to two people who had decided to share their lives. However, neither had envisaged or considered death; nor could they anticipate how the law would treat a concubine, even if he made a will leaving her his possessions and copyrights. Legally, his mother stood to inherit everything; perhaps this worried Coco more than anything else. "I'm sorry, Chérie, I should have thought of that." "We should do it quickly." "I shall go to the Mairie and give formal notice tomorrow." "At Sainte-Marie's church." "In a church!" "Yes, a church."

BOSON BOOKS

78

A Moment of Truth Zola shrugged. Apart from collecting material for his fifth Rougon-Macquart novel, he had not set foot in a church since his boyhood in Aix. But he knew better than contest the bourgeois whims of a strong-willed woman like Gabrielle. Cézanne guffawed when asked to turn up at Sainte-Marie-des Batignolles on May 31. "I knew she'd get her hooks into you, Émeeloo," he grunted. "They all do. Calculating cows!" In floral hat and gray, full-length silk dress with a bustle, Coco looked elegant, almost beautiful for the civil and religious ceremonies. All the Aix gang had reported in top hats, dress coats and drainpipe trousers; even those two Bohemians, Solari and Cézanne, had pulled their Sunday best out of mothballs for the occasion. But neither his mother nor any of Coco's family or relatives came to the wedding. Another young man from Aix arrived at the church. Paul Alexis had previously visited Zola with Valabregue to profess his admiration and read some of his own poems; he had run away from home to earn a living in Paris with his pen. Zola repeated the advice Louis Hachette had given him: Forget poetry and write novels and stories. Since that meeting, Alexis had become the most fervent of Zola's disciples. Cézanne was painting them as the writers worked together in the study overlooking the garden of Rue de la Condamine. Yet, that vibrant, glowing summer of 1870 smelled of doom. In June, a letter arrived from Edmond de Goncourt. Jules was dead. Killed by overwork and public indifference. Goncourt thanked Zola for his articles on their book, Madame Gervaisais, for they had relieved his brother's last, bitter days; Jules had begged Edmond to befriend Zola and, with old-world elegance, he wrote: "The gratitude that I hold for you will become friendship if you so wish." Even on that summer day, Zola shivered and thrust the manuscript of The Spoils across his desk as though it was his last will. Dead at thirty-nine! Written out. Unrecognized. And himself turned thirty with nothing achieved. When he had sat staring mindlessly at his roses for several minutes, he dragged his ream of paper nearer his paunch and set to work again, his bonehandled pen racing to keep pace with his thoughts. Nine years left and a literary universe to construct! Anyway, who was thinking of literature that summer? Not Lacroix, who had postponed publication of the first Rougon-Macquart book. Not the Government or the politicians, who were following the new press-agency tapes which racketed louder every day with threat and counter-threat between Paris and Berlin over the German proposal to put a Hohenzollern prince on the Spanish throne. Not the public, who read only special editions of the newspapers and were shouting for their Emperor to teach the Prussians a bloody lesson. With his Empress egging him on, Napoleon had to pick up the insult that Bismarck had fabricated and flung in his face. On July 19, he declared war on Prussia. Zola could not believe it. Did Napoleon, the Painted Emperor, think the French army, even with his famous new machine-gun, could match the Prussians who had humiliated Denmark and crushed the Austrians in a matter of weeks? Who had skilled generals? Who had the Krupp cannon? BOSON BOOKS

79

A Moment of Truth Yet, his own mind said one thing, his heart another; he wanted to see Napoleon le Petit and his clique ousted, even by Bismarck, and a republic proclaimed; but he did not want France herself to founder if the Germans smashed the Second Empire. At the beginning of August, he sat down and wrote an article for the oppositions newspaper, La Cloche, knowing he was preaching sedition: At this hour, on the banks of the Rhine there are 50,000 soldiers who have said No to the Empire. They want no more war, no more standing armies, no more of this terrible power which puts into the hands of one man alone the fortune and life of a nation...The Republic is yonder on the banks of the Rhine...it numbers 50,000 heroes...it will be victorious. And us? We acclaim them because they will certainly be among the bravest. In return, they say to us: "It's done. France is no longer menaced by the Prussians, deliver us now from its other enemies." This article appeared while the Second Empire and France were fighting desperately for their existence; two days before, the Prussians had won two important battles, swinging the war their way. Little wonder that the Imperial Procurator and the Minister of Justice contended the article breathed sedition if not treason; however, they decided to prosecute Zola on a lesser charge of “exciting defiance and hatred of the government and provoking disobedience of the law.” At that moment, if Bismarck's cavalry not caught and destroyed Marshal Mac Mahon's army at Wörth then wheeled north to besiege Marshal Bazaine's army in Metz, Zola would certainly have spent the war in jail. But news from the eastern front caused such chaos in the capital that Zola and his article were forgotten. Having escaped imprisonment, he then did something that scared Coco even more; he presented himself at the nearest recruiting center to enlist. There, they stared at his paunch, his pince-nez and his remote, myopic look and hunted him. Not even the National Guard, which had taken Manet, Degas and even epileptics like Flaubert, would pass him fit for light duties. In any case, he would have arrived too late. At Sedan, the Prussians had again overwhelmed Mac Mahon's regrouped army, and on September 2, Napoleon handed over his sword symbolizing the end of the Second Empire; several days later, Paris proclaimed a republic with Georges Clemenceau and Léon Gambetta as two of its moving spirits. Gambetta flew out in a balloon to organize resistance in the provinces while the capital prepared to hold out against the Prussian armies pivoting westward. Zola and his mother voted to remain in Paris. But not Coco. Terrified of what might happen when Bismarck's troops invaded the capital, she pleaded to leave before they sealed off the city. "But leave for where?" "I don't know...as far away as possible." Zola reflected for a while before remembering that small house Paul's mother owned in a fishing village just north of Marseilles. Running Cézanne to earth in BOSON BOOKS

80

A Moment of Truth an attic studio in Rue Nôtre Dame des Champs, he found him painting a pastoral scene showing himself taking his ease in the midst of three buxom nudes. Sedan and the Second Empire might never have happened. Zola's eye lighted on the huge portrait of Empereur. No wonder the jury had flung it back. Paul had made him look even more pathetically grotesque than in real life. He certainly believed in taking his feelings out on friends who sat for him. His studio seemed tidier than Zola had ever seen it and he was asking himself why when he noticed the woman's garments hanging behind a screen. He said nothing. "I came to ask if you were thinking of leaving Paris," he said. "Leaving?...No, I hadn't thought. Why?" "Paris will be under siege in a week or two, Paul, and I'm pulling out with Coco and my mother." "Cézanne put down his brush and turned, his eyes troubled. "It's that bad...I didn't realize, Émeeloo...I suppose I can go to Aix." Zola shook his head. "I wouldn't do that if you don't want them to stick you in the National Guard." Cézanne listened, droop-jawed, while he explained that Aix had tossed the Emperor's effigy into the Rotonde Fountain, proclaiming the republic and even electing his own father town treasurer. Baille, Valabregue and Victor Leydet, another schoolfellow, had become councilors. "Where was it your mother had her cottage by the sea?" "L'Estaque, you mean?" "That's the place. Why don't you head for that?" Cézanne hesitated. "Well...you see, Émeeloo, it's like this. I have this girl..." He pointed to the makeshift wardrobe. "She has no family here and she posed for me once or twice and...well...you know how it is." He smacked a fist into his palm. "She hasn't tried to get her hooks into me...anyway, she means nothing to me...nothing!" "I know that, Paul," Zola said, thinking his friend was protesting too loudly. "But if she's alone in Paris and she's scared, take her with you." "You know what my old man is. He'd cut me off if he found out, and I couldn't paint any more." "Then don't tell him. I'm sure your mother won't let on." "Where are you going, Émeeloo?" "Your fishing village, if there's room. It's near Marseilles and Aix and we have friends there. After the tumult of Paris, the little Mediterranean port of L'Estaque seemed idyllic; they ignored the war and Zola gorged himself on mussels, oysters, bouillabaisse, ratatouille and spicy Provençal dishes; he clambered over limestone rocks to watch Cézanne stare mindlessly at a blank canvas for days before daring to put one touch of color on it, then fuming and fretting for weeks over the same landscape—the tile factory and the small islands in Marseilles bay. But something always went wrong and his canvas finished savaged and ripped apart. An unconsidered spot of color ruined his conception of the painting; he chased, vainly, after the right contours of the tile factory and the Frioul islands; he ranted and raved at the clouds, the breeze and even the sun that wouldn't BOSON BOOKS

81

A Moment of Truth leave his bay the same color for two minutes; he juggled with the picture planes, trying to give his scene perspective without blurring the distant horizon. Zola spectated, recalling those tussles with Gibert in the Granet Museum and the rages in his Paris studio; he wondered if Paul would ever paint a picture to satisfy himself let alone the Salon worthies. For weeks he wandered round, poking inside the old Roman tower, exploring the Estaque Range and sitting contemplating the shifting surface of the Mediterranean which at times looked jet-black under the intense sun; sometimes, his eye drifted to the smoke plumes of Marseilles factories and this carried his thoughts back to the war. For even here, they read the bleak news from the front where Bazaine had surrendered the whole of his Metz army to the Prussians and lost all chance of honorable peace terms; in Paris, they had reacted by proclaiming the Commune and arming the National Guard to defend the people against Bonapartists, monarchists and even bourgeois republicans. All this made Zola feel restless. Another problem prompted him to act. Paul's mistress. To him, Hortense Fiquet appeared a gentle, shy and somewhat plain girl. A good match for Paul, who might have picked up any whore or prostitute among the models who patrolled the Paris studios. Coco thought otherwise. She could hardly bear the sight of Hortense. An adventuress, a slut with an eye on one thing only—Old Cézanne's fortune. Otherwise, she would have found better than a wild painter who'd never grown up. What background or breeding did she have—a girl who'd stitched books together for a living? And only a crazy fellow like Cézanne would have looked twice at her. Zola's ears burned with these endless tirades. Did Coco still blame Paul for running out on her? Did she resent Hortense for succeeding where she had failed? Zola could only speculate. Anyway, who understood womanly logic, and especially Coco’s. They had only to change their status from mistress to wife to scorn everybody else's mistress. And when she lifted her nose and sniffed at this girl's humble origins, Coco was forgetting her own. When he announced he was leaving for Marseilles, Cézanne scarcely looked up from his canvas. What did Coco and her animosity mean to him? Or the doomed Second Empire and the fall of France? Or the fact that over the hill they had staged a minor revolution on the Cours Mirabeau? He had graver things on his mind: how to manipulate his picture planes so that he could fuse the rocky foreground with the sea, the sky and the distant Marseilles promontory, and still retain the purity and richness of color. Zola installed Coco and his mother in Marseilles. For a couple of months he tried to start a republican newspaper with Marius Roux, his old school chum, but conscription whittled away his staff; he thought, idly, of maneuvering himself into the vacant sub-prefect's job in Aix, but someone else got there first. Finally, he left the two women in Marseilles and took the train through snowbound France to Bordeaux where he found a job as secretary to Alexandre GlaisBizoine, a former journalistic colleague and now a minister in the provisional government. Soon, the two women and their dog, Bertrand, joined him and they

BOSON BOOKS

82

A Moment of Truth sat out that terrible winter until Adolphe Thiers had agreed a shameful armistice with Bismarck and they could return to Paris. He had feared for his house and his small garden, but everything had survived, even his climbing roses and vine; he had also heard that the manuscript of La Fortune des Rougons had disappeared, but that turned up on the proofreader's table where the man had dropped it to flee from the advancing Germans. Paris still simmered with rebellion against the organized government and shells flew over Zola's house as Mac Mahon's regular army and the Communards fought for the capital and the right to govern the country. To Zola, it seemed the Second Empire had reaped the just results of two licentious and hedonistic decades and had foundered in a welter of blood and pain. He took up his old bone-handled pen and began The Spoils where he had left off. He had qualms about writing of a past era, but when he reflected, the FrancoPrussian War had given him a splendid climax to his vast fresco of the Second Empire. To Cézanne and Alexis, he wrote: "It is as I have often repeated to you—our day has dawned."

BOSON BOOKS

83

A Moment of Truth

VI The Fortune of the Rougons hardly set the Seine alight when it appeared in October 1871. But what had he expected? It had to serve as a source book for the whole series and this had meant packing the pages with characters who contributed nothing to the drama but would appear in later volumes. Yet, he knew himself he had written some fine pages and captured the squalid decadence and petty-minded intrigues of Aix-en-Provence. The critics, his friends among them, ignored him and his book. Even republican rebellions scarcely appealed to a country still paranoiac after its defeat and disgrace. However, the book found one admirer, someone who counted more than all the silent or hostile critics—Gustave Flaubert. "You have a proud talent and you're a splendid fellow," Flaubert wrote him on reading the book. Who would have dreamed that Flaubert, a boyhood literary hero, would become a friend; earlier, the great man had written to thank him for praising several of his books in the press. Zola had called at Rue Murillo, Flaubert's Paris flat, to pay personal homage. His adulation only just survived that first meeting. Flaubert overpowered him, crushing his hand in a huge fist and looking down from his six-foot seven inches to boom a welcome. His tasseled silk dressing gown over Turkish trousers and floppy silk bonnet dissolved Zola's preconceived notions of an austere, monkish creature. "I've always wanted to meet the author of Madame Bovary," he stammered. "Madame Bovary! Madame Bovary is so much shit," Flaubert snorted. "They'll finish me with talk about that book and I've even thought of taking it out of circulation." "But you couldn't do that...with that book you killed off Romanticism...it's our bible...the first realist novel." "Realism!" Flaubert cried. "I wrote that book to put my finger in the eye of the realists." "It's still realism." "I wasn't concerned with realism, but with good writing. Logic and style—the right word in the right place." "I don't care, it's the most truthful book I've ever read." "Truth's a joke." Flaubert boomed. "Listen, young man, one good phrase turned to perfection and you will achieve immortality, d'you hear?" He seized a volume of Victor Hugo's poems from his writing-table and brandished it. "I'll tell you something true, I'd give the whole of Madame Bovary for a phrase from this or Chateaubriand." Zola had heard enough. He fled from this torrent of self-criticism which burned like blasphemy (or worse, Romanticism) in his ears. But something drew him again and again to Rue Murillo to meet Flaubert and his friends: Edmond de Goncourt, Ivan Turgenev, the Russian writer who stood as tall as Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, more dreamily wistful than ever, and a young bull of a man who wrote poetry as Guy de Valmont but was called de Maupassant. He had become Flaubert's disciple and protégé. BOSON BOOKS

84

A Moment of Truth Flaubert took to Zola, the rebel who wanted, like himself, to shock and enrage narrow middle-class mentality. He recognized the grit and determination of the younger novelist who even shared his views that the creative artist must remain sexually continent and only spill and sublimate his emotion on the printed page. Zola also amused him with his endless questions. "When you went to the Court at Compiègne, what did the Emperor wear? "How did Empress Eugénie and the ladies dress?" "How often did they change?" "How many cigarettes did Louis Napoleon smoke?" "How did he walk? And dance?" "Did you meet Offenbach there? What did you think of him?" "And the Duc de Morny—was he the villain they said he was?" Flaubert answered him patiently; to please the younger writer, he would don his court garb, or even dress the part of a Turkish or Egyptian dignitary and mime some of the scenes at the summer court in Compiègne Castle. On one thing they violently disagreed. Love. Both men had begun as Romantics and both had suppressed this part of their artistic personality to write realist novels; Yet Flaubert still had the soul of a Romantic and the grace to admit it. "But love doesn't exist," Zola cried. "It's an animal thing, I tell you. An animal thing." "There's a bit of that," Flaubert retorted. "There's nothing but that. Love's no more than an animal thing." "Yes," Flaubert chuckled, "there's a bit of that, too." "Show me the component of love that isn't animal," Zola insisted. "Zola, you protest too much." He turned his blue eyes on Zola then slapped him on the back and grinned. "You're a splendid Romantic and that's why I like and admire you." He also took his literary problems to Flaubert. Before The Fortune of the Rougons had appeared, he had run into trouble with the Republican Procurator over the second of the series, The Spoils. Hardly had the first newspaper serials been published than the state magistrate summoned Zola and pushed a pile of letters across his desk from readers of La Cloche; they all accused him of immorality, obscenity, even pornography. If the serialization continued, the state might have no alternative but to prosecute for obscenity. Flaubert was sitting with his great friend, Turgenev, dressed in the striped zouave trousers he wore for comfort, when Zola burst in on them; both writers were puffing clouds of fragrant Turkish tobacco at each other like two steam kettles as they listened to his complaint. "You've both read La Curée," he said. "Do you think it's obscene?" Both men shook their heads. "It's Madame Bovary with a touch of Dante’s Inferno," Turgenev said. "But obscene?—not at all." "My friend, Louis Ulbach, says it's obscene and the procurator is thinking of prosecuting if I don't stop the serialization." Flaubert hoisted himself up to walk across and gaze out of the French window at the tapestry of exotic plants, yellowing trees, ponds and pathways of the Parc BOSON BOOKS

85

A Moment of Truth Monceau. In fact, Zola had set much of his tale in a palace in the park, built out of corrupt property speculation at the beginning of the Second Empire; but he had also personified bourgeois perversion in the gross sexual appetites of his heroine, Renée, and her love for her stepson, Maxime. Flaubert's own book, Madame Bovary, which had inspired much of La Curée, had landed him in the dock accused of outraging public morals and religion when the authorities were really attacking the politics of the journal that was serializing the book. If the prosecution failed, it had nonetheless focused public attention on Madame Bovary for what Flaubert always considered the wrong reasons. No one saw the style and the novelist's craft he had built into that story; no one saw the mot juste for seeking the dirty words cited by the prosecutor. Zola might suffer the same fate. "Don't let them judge your book in the courts, Zola," he said. "You mean, withdraw the serialization?" Flaubert nodded as he went to answer a ring at the door and escort Edmond de Goncourt and Alphonse Daudet into the flat. They listened to the argument and Zola put the question to them. Daudet agreed with Flaubert, but Edmond de Goncourt urged Zola to continue the serial and defy the censors. "You're right," Zola said. "A truthful, well-written page has its own morality." "We'll come and see you in prison," Daudet said, a grin on his boyish face. "Yes, but they'll damn your serial and the publishers will take fright about your book," Turgenev put in. "Anyway, who but writers really care about style or the logic of truth and language?" Flaubert said. "We cared, Jules and myself," Goncourt said, quietly. "My brother had an absolute dedication to words, and that's what killed him." He took a deep breath. "You know what the doctor said—an hour of moral emotion could tell on a man as much as ten years of physical excess." Zola's problem sank without trace in the silence that fell over the small gathering; Flaubert and Turgenev puffed on their pipes and Daudet lit a cigarette and ran thin fingers through his long tresses; it seemed the mention of Jules de Goncourt had ended all discussion. Finally, when Edmond rose and left, Flaubert and Turgenev looked at Zola, then at each other. "Shall we tell him, Ivan?" The Russian nodded, and Flaubert paused for a moment before saying: "Jules de Goncourt didn't die of moral emotion or overwork. He died of syphilis." Zola flushed then shivered. His beard prickled. Now he realized why Jules had darted around like a trapped bluebottle that day during lunch, why he had almost swallowed his monocle and burned his fingers on his cigarette. He had mistaken for artistic temperament the ravaging symptoms of tertiary syphilis. And of course, Edmond, whom his friends dubbed, The Widow, had to invent and believe the story that Jules had sacrificed himself for his art. Soon he forgot La Curée and the fact that he had yielded and suppressed the newspaper version to avoid prosecution—not only at Flaubert's instance but at BOSON BOOKS

86

A Moment of Truth Coco's. She dreaded the thought of him in jail. And the scandal! Anyway, a new novel had him in its toils, one that had lain in his mind since his days at the customs house when he passed the embryonic tracery of Baltard's great steeland-glass palace to house the Paris markets. Accompanied by Cézanne, who was seeking still life material, he explored the long pavilions of Les Halles with their web of steel girders; in the small hours when the market came to life, he wandered round making notes in the flaring gaslight, quizzing stallholders among piles of fish, meat, vegetables, fruit and cheese. Suppressing his fear of heights, he followed a guide up steel rungs to the glass roof from which street people looked like ants and he had a panorama of the whole of Paris; his old claustrophobia gripped his guts as they lit their way through the vast cellars beneath the market. But what a picture! Already he had found his title: Le Ventre de Paris (The Belly of Paris). Here began the great orgies of the Second Empire; here, the bourgeois and Napoleon's new aristocracy fattened and feasted themselves at the expense of the rabble; here they fuelled their sexual lusts and their moneygrubbing manias. Yes, why not compare Les Halles to the bloated belly of a bourgeois? Why not personify it? Make it as much a living thing as the human maws that it fed? Let it symbolize the eternal conflict between the fat and the thin? Didn't man adapt to his milieu and moment as Taine proposed? So, his characters would reflect their métier: as round and wholesome as their meat puddings; as slimy as eels and smelly as stinking fish; as vacuous as pumpkins; as ruthless as the butchers who dismembered the thousands of carcasses that passed through their hands. He would create an intricate counterpoint between the people and the great pavilions with metaphoric overtones about the food: There, beside the pounds of butter spread in beet leaves lay a giant Cantal cheese as though split with an axe; then came a golden-hued Cheddar, a Gruyère looking like a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot, Dutch cheeses as round as decapitated heads smeared with dried blood, their hardness of empty skulls giving them the name of death's-heads...Three Brie cheeses on round boards had the sad expression of dead moons; two very dry ones were waxing full; the third in its second quarter leaked a white, creamy lake which burst the thin wooden slats with which one had vainly tried to contain it…The Roqueforts, they, too, under bell jars assumed princely looks with marbled and jowly faces veined in blue and yellow as if attacked by a shameful illness of rich folk who have eaten too many truffles; while in a nearby dish, goat cheese as thick as a child's fist, hard and grayish, recalled the pebbles that billy goats, leading their herd, set rolling on stony paths... Into this cornucopian scene steps Florent, unjustly deported to Devil's Island for opposing Napoleon's takeover and now a fugitive who seeks refuge with his brother, a pork butcher, and his wife, Lisa Quenu, born a Macquart. But Florent, one of the world's thin men, can neither adapt his appetites nor his ideals to a place where sensual, pink-fleshed women like his sister-in-law are all-devouring BOSON BOOKS

87

A Moment of Truth like the market itself; a perennial victim, his political notions find no echo among the smug, full-bellied creatures who serve the even grosser gluttony of their masters. Florent's naive attempts at conspiracy are denounced—by his sister-in-law among others—and once more he takes the road to Devil's Island leaving the good people of Les Halles as he had found them, concerned with their own and other people's bellies. The Belly of Paris made little hit with the public when serialized in the newspaper, L'État; however, it did win admirers among those who recognized its symbolism and message. One of them, Joris-Karl Huysmans, a budding novelist, wrote to Zola exulting over the descriptions; and Flaubert's disciple, Guy de Maupassant, praised the Cheese Symphony and other sections of the book. But two editions did not pay his rent for six months nor compensate him for the vast effort he had expended on the research and writing. Those critics who had attacked his earlier works still considered him a pornographer on the make. They greeted his book with their most contemptuous and effective weapon: Silence. Such tidbits of criticism that he read and heard did nothing for the book: Monsieur Zola has given us a Venus of the pork-shop and a marvelous still life—and that includes his characters. Le Ventre de Paris has got its priorities all wrong—it is full of live sausage-meat and lifeless people. Undeterred, he ploughed onward. His original editor, Lacroix, had gone bankrupt but another man, Georges Charpentier, had taken over the contract for the Rougon-Macquart cycle, which assured him of his small income. But he needed a break from work. He felt jaded, fatigued, almost word-blind as he assembled his weekly articles about the French social and literary scene, and the two French provincial papers for the Russian newspaper, Le Messager de L'Europe. That summer of 1873, a thundery haze hung over Paris and frayed his nerves and seemed to exacerbate the friction between the two women; electric storms drove him inside from the small, walled garden and his terror of lightning compelled him to draw the curtains, blindfold his eyes and sit counting the intervals between the lightning flashes and the thunder peals. If only he could escape from these frenzied Paris streets and plunge into the Arc or his father's reservoir to cool his feverish nerves! Since he could not go to Provence in body, he would go in spirit. His fourth Rougon-Macquart novel would deal with the way in which the Bonapartists used a sly, scheming priest to infiltrate the politics of Plassans (Aix) and finally to win the town for Louis Napoleon and his clique. Zola had no bulky dossier to construct; he merely had to shut his eyes and picture things in his mind; he could smell the scent of rosemary, thyme, pine resin and marjoram in the garrigue where he and Cézanne had spent their best hours. He had his priest, Abbé Faujas, who believed that only the celibate were strong; him he could choose among dozens of cassocked rogues who prowled the BOSON BOOKS

88

A Moment of Truth Quartier Mazarine in Aix; for his operational base, he would transpose into town that big barrack of a house, the Jas de Bouffan, which Cézanne's father had bought with his usurer's profits. And who better than Old Cézanne himself to play Mouret, the miser whose wife dies after falling under the priest's spell, who loses everything, who finally goes mad and turns his house into a funeral pyre for Abbé Faujas and his gang? It still took him six months, day in day out, to complete the book with a pen that seemed so heavy it gave him writer's cramp, and ink looking like black treacle; his story, too, had a leaden rhythm. He wondered if Paul, to whom he send a dedicated copy of each book, would connect the description of the moneygrubbing martinet with a twitching left eye and rough-tongued humor, with his own father. Paul he had scarcely seen since their parting at L'Estaque during the war. From Alexis and Solari, he learned that his mistress, Hortense Fiquet, had borne him a son and they had gone to Auvers-sur-Oise on the advice of a Dr Gachet, an admirer of the new painting, for the boy's health. It also allowed Paul to paint alongside Pissarro, who was changing his ideas on painting. It seemed Paul was still at odds with himself, still fumbling for that magic formula which would prove his genius and dazzle the fine-arts jury, the critics and the public. Duranty had reported seeing him at the Nouvelle-Athènes, the Pigalle café that had taken over from the Guerbois; he had caused a sensation in paint-spattered trousers, his broad red belt, black beard and straw hat. Zola could well imagine it. By now, Manet had broken away from the avant-garde group led by Pissarro and Degas, which also included Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and now Cézanne. These artists had decided to boycott the official Salon and hold their own exhibition in Nadar's old photographic studio in the Boulevard des Capucines. It would open on April 15, 1874, for a month. From its catalogue, Zola noted that Paul had three of his Auvers paintings on show—The Hanged-man's House, Modern Olympia, and Panorama of Auvers. During the six years that he had been preparing and writing his RougonMacquart cycle, Zola had kept silent on art; while his friends campaigned for their new painting, he stayed aloof from their quarrel with the Salon officials and jury, and rarely appeared at the Nouvelle-Athènes. He had vowed with Paul to mount the barricades, but he was building his own barricade of books. Break a lance for Paul and his friends and he would expose himself to even more abuse. All the same, he still had a soft spot for Paul. Especially when he read the satirical journal, Charivari, in which Louis Leroy, the humorist, had done a skit on what he ironically called Exhibition of Impressionists. He had taken along a phantom Salon painter, Joseph Vincent, to comment on the new art. When he had savaged Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, the critic and his mentor stopped before Monet's canvas of Le Havre port. "Ah! There he is...What does this canvas represent?" asked Monsieur Vincent. "Look at the booklet." "IMPRESSION; Soleil Levant."

BOSON BOOKS

89

A Moment of Truth "Impression—I knew it. I thought as much since I was impressed so there must be an impression there...and what freedom, what light technique! I've seen better pictures in a pulp factory when they're making colored paper." Suddenly, he uttered a loud cry on seeing The Hanged-Man's House by Monsieur Paul Cézanne. The thick paint on this little gem finished the work begun by the Boulevard des Capucines (Monet). Papa Vincent began to rave. "Tell me about the Modern Olympia,'" he said. "Alas! Go and see it, that one. A woman doubled up with a negress removing her last veil to offer her to a swarthy puppet. Remember Monsieur Manet's Olympia? Well, it was a polished, precise and well-drawn masterpiece compared with Monsieur Cézanne's picture." Zola had to visit the exhibition to study what Paul and his friends had done as well as gather material for his future art novel. Paying his franc, he pushed through top-hatted, frock-coated men and steered round crinolines and bustles in the huge second-floor gallery vibrating beneath the weight of the crowd. Pissarro and Monet had done some eye-searing landscapes, and Degas several fine specimens of laundresses and ballet-girls; Renoir's portraits and nudes had a certain fleshy allure. But Paul! With Modern Olympia, he had tried to take off Manet but had produced an almost obscene nude in a vulgar and degrading posture. Would he ever come to terms with women, in or out of his studio? When he moved to The Hanged-Man's House, he gazed astonished at the word VENDU written under it—a rare caption at that exhibition. When he inquired who had bought the picture he was even more surprised to be told it was Count Armand Doria, the art collector. What, he wondered, did a connoisseur see in a couple of tipsy cottages at the end of a cart-track slabbed together in thick paint? Paul had a long, long way to go. Zola trudged up Rue de la Chausée D'Antin into Rue de Clichy and then home to sit down to the fifth novel of his series, La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret (Father Mouret's Transgression). For years he had wanted to write about a priest torn between two passions, religion and carnal love. He had set the story near Aix in that old mansion, the Château de Galice, he, Cézanne and Baille had stumbled on coming back from the aqueduct as boys. His priest, Serge Mouret, has suffered a brainstorm through prayer and purging his flesh; his uncle, Pascal Rougon, sends him to convalesce in the mansion, Le Paradou, where a wild but innocent girl, Albine, nurses him through his mental turmoil. Zola had blueprinted the story from the second and third chapters of Genesis, with Serge's confessor, Father Archangias, playing God, Albine's misanthropic uncle Satan and that primeval garden, Paradise. Then Albine and Serge instinctively lifted their heads. Before them they saw an enormous mass of greenery; and as they paused for a moment, a roe gazed at them with its soft, liquid eyes then bounded into the thicket. "It is there," said Albine.

BOSON BOOKS

90

A Moment of Truth She led the way, turning again to look at Serge whom she drew with her and they vanished among the quivering leaves and all was silent once more. They were entering into delicious peace. In the center stood a tree covered with such dense foliage that one could not tell its species. Of giant girth, its trunk seemed to breathe like some living animal, its spreading boughs embraced it like protecting arms...it was the king of the garden, the father of the forest... They had given themselves up to the garden; in complete calmness they waited for the bidding of that tree of life...It wrapped them in such an ecstasy of love that the whole clearing appeared to vanish from their sight and leave them isolated in an aura of perfume. To flesh out the story, he had steeped himself in the bible and devotional literature, even slipping into nearby Sainte-Marie-des Batignolles church, missal in hand, to watch the priest perform his office; he had even traced and interviewed a defrocked priest to gather material on Catholic seminaries and their neophytes; his chela, Alexis, had helped him construct his latter-day Garden of Eden by bringing armfuls of gardening books and catalogues; he himself had attended horticultural shows. When Father Achangias hunts Serge from the enchanted garden, Albine finally resolves to kill herself with the flowers and plants they had both loved: She collected the scented greenery, the southernwood, the mint, the verbena, the balm and the fennel. She crushed and twisted them and made wedges that she used to seal every hole and cranny above the window and door. Then she drew the crude, white calico curtain and without even a sigh, lay down on the bed of flowering hyacinths and tuberoses...And then a final rapture was hers. With her eyes wide open, she smiled at the room. Ah! How she had loved there! And how happily she was going to die there! It should have written itself, the rest of the story, but suddenly he had hit quicksand. Normally when he faltered, he needed only to grab a fresh sheet of paper and copy what he had written and, so it seemed, his manual or mental reflexes carried him through the obstacle. Why had he stuck this time? Perhaps it had something to do with that old mansion, the Château de Galice, between Aix and Les Milles. Maybe Albine had too much of Louise Solari and Serge too much of himself and his own sexual yearnings; maybe Father Archangias had too much of his own stern father. Those memories stirred emotions that seemed to block his writing hand. Some things he could not put into words. Anyway, what did books amount to? A poor substitute for life and living. Yet, he injected all his energy into these books, and even got a sexual thrill out of writing about forsaken characters and forbidden love. Sounds of arguing came from next door as the two women prepared their evening meal. It reminded him of his growing paunch from eating too much, another substitute for unfulfilled appetites. What did Gabrielle get out of their relationship? Their lives revolved round the pile of paper under his hand, the BOSON BOOKS

91

A Moment of Truth half-liter of ink on the table and the pen, which had become impotent in his fingers. Gabrielle was always ailing, his mother complained. She might have felt better if he hadn't sold himself to books that were getting him nowhere. Paul might not have produced great pictures, he had at least produced a child while he had nothing but ten spurned volumes to his name. Angrily, he threw down his pen and went to sit and brood until twilight darkened his own garden—a long, long way from the Eden he was trying to create on paper.

BOSON BOOKS

92

A Moment of Truth

VII In the steamy, clammy heat the laundress looked up from her ironing board to peer at the bearded figure who leaned on a silver-knobbed cane. He wore a top hat, well-cut coat over his full belly, tight trousers and spatted shoes. A writer, he said, though he asked as many questions as a copper. "Yeah, they're very good to us," she said, wearily, wiping the sweat off her brow. "We get three francs fifty a day and they throw in two cups of coffee at midday and half a bottle of red biddy at four o'clock. And by that time we need something to pep us up, I can tell you." She steered the goffering iron through the shirt pleats while answering his questions mechanically. Was that calico covering the ironing board? How much does bleach cost? And you say you don't use chlorine because of the fumes? What do you use? Potassium and bicarbonate. How long does the steam press take to do a suit? For several minutes he fell silent, watching her separate the ruffs with a fingernail, iron them then flip the shirt over on the other side. "You always throw them over like that?" he asked. She gave him an arch look. "Can't have a gent taking his lady out with his shirt-back all wrinkled, can we, ducks? Might have to take off his jacket, and then what would she say?" She guffawed while Zola noted both the remark and the technique in his jotter. He quizzed her about the price of sheets (40 centimes), plain shirts (35), towels (35), flannel waistcoat (15), handkerchiefs (5), women's nightdress (15). "And how much to press that?" he said, pointing to the ruffed shirt. "Depends on who's inside it, m'dear," the laundress replied and her laugh followed Zola as he blushed and escaped from the laundry, zigzagging over the cobbled street with its central drain. At a corner, he paused to make more notes: Stench of dirty linen, reflecting stench of slum humanity. Degradation of those who soil their hands. Acrid tang of bleach. Special stove to heat dozen irons." As he passed the huge communal washhouse in the Rue de la Goutte d'Or, he poked his head inside. Their skirts bunched between their thighs, dozens of women were scalding, beating, bleaching, rinsing their clothes while others had halted to munch their stick loaves and slices of sausage, washing this down with sour wine. Spotting him, several of them lifted long skirts to show a bare leg. "Cock a snook at that, duckie." "Yeh, have a dekko, Peeping Tom." "Ahee! Don't say Creeping Jesus is doing his rounds again." "Piss off...dirty old man." "Yah! Skedaddle, bloody gigolo." Zola retreated before this assault. A rough lot to choose a heroine among, these women in the district between the Gare du Nord and Montmartre; though no worse than those in the Rue Soufflot; they either took him for a satyr, a policeman, an informer, a nark, a gigolo, or a pimp who wanted to live off their bodies. BOSON BOOKS

93

A Moment of Truth But Edgar Degas told him they'd treated him the same way when he was sizing up laundry-women to paint those portraits for the Impressionist exhibition. What a district! Full of rickety, crumbling tenements which stank of ordure and urine. Where families huddled together in one room and children learned the sordid facts of life before they could speak or write their names. Where women accosted him in broad daylight selling themselves for a franc to buy food. Where men filled the bistrots to gulp down absinthe or some other rotgut and flopped, staggering drunk along the streets before midday. Where children ran wild and stole to appease their hunger, and had shown him their bruised and blue-black bodies where their parents had beaten them. He jotted down another note—bruisers, cruisers, boozers—in a book already bloated with facts and observations about this square kilometer which he knew as well as his own back-garden. He had listed its drinking-dens, bistrots, dance halls, café-concerts, cabarets. Places like Le Bal Robert, le Grand Parisien, Au Grand Salon de la Folie, and he had visited them all. As he strode towards the Boulevard de Clichy, he halted to make another note: A lot of bareheaded women, some in bonnets, a good many in hairnets, jackets, aprons, full straight skirts. A stampede of snotty-nosed kids, some clean, many dirty. Women sitting down with their children in their arms in a row... A pub with the word SPIRITS in flaring blue over its dingy entrance lured him inside where knots of men stood at the zinc counter drinking glasses of potent brandy like water. Already, some showed the wear-and-tear of the drunkard; they had that transparent, tracing paper complexion or red, pebble-dash skin where liquor had erupted their blood vessels; some had swollen, dropsical bellies. Their older cronies he had encountered by the dozen in the terminal ward of the Lariboisière Hospital a hundred yards away; liver cirrhosis and attendant malnutrition had transformed them into bleached skeletons; in another ward, absinthe addicts lay sightless, their optic nerves destroyed by the crude spirit; he had followed a few cases to the Sainte-Anne Hospital on the south side of Paris and stared, mesmerized, at delirium tremens sending them into a death dance like demented marionettes, or into strait-jackets. He had also spent weeks talking to tradesmen like zinc-workers, chainmakers, forge men about their work and lives; he had stood for hours watching them, memorizing their techniques and skills. And laundresses! What he didn't know about them wouldn't cover a shirt-button. Coco had helped, for the aunt who had brought her up, once worked in a laundry. In fact, a laundry-woman would become the heroine of his story called The Simple Life of Gervaise Macquart. A daughter of the old drunk, Antoine, from Plassans (Aix), she would turn up in Paris, abandoned by her lover, Lantier, with their two children. She would struggle to provide for them before consenting against her good sense to marry Coupeau, a roofer—one of the types that he, Zola, was rubbing

BOSON BOOKS

94

A Moment of Truth shoulders with in this bistrot. Gervaise, with a congenital limp, has a simple philosophy, which she outlines to Coupeau when he pesters her to marry him: My aim would be to work away quietly, always have a crust of bread to eat and a clean sort of corner to sleep in—you know, a bed, a table and a couple of chairs, that's all...Oh, and I'd like to bring my kids up right, turn them into ordinary honest folk if I could. And there's one more thing—not to be beaten up if I took up with anybody again; no, I shouldn’t like to be beaten. That's all, really, that's all. After toiling and moiling all my life, I'd be glad to die at home in my own bed. Gervaise gets her wish; she even has her own laundry and lives high for several years. But gradually the poison seeps into her as it does into everybody in this sleazy district. Coupeau falls and breaks a leg, take to drink and ruins her business; her lover, Lantier, returns to repossess Gervaise and drive Coupeau to DTs and the asylum; Gervaise herself succumbs to drink and the futility of living; her daughter, Nana, takes to the streets; finally, she longs for death which finds her, not in her own bed, but starving in a grubby corner of the tenement. So ran the plot—something anybody in this sordid pub might have spat out in the time they took to swallow their dram. For they had all witnessed such stories. But Zola left nothing to imagination. Besides patrolling the district and filling notebooks, he had read dozens of studies of social conditions in districts like La Chapelle; Denis Poulot's book on working-class Paris, Le Sublime, had deepened his insight into the minds of his characters; Delvau's slang dictionary helped him dialogue the book with the bawdy argot that washerwomen and stonemasons used when chaffing him. His ear still picked up phrases as he sipped his blackcurrant juice then strolled to the back of the bistrot where IT sat. IT looked like some strange deity beneath its glass dome. If these rabbit-warren slums and filthy streets and low wages and broods of famished kids created the problem, IT stood for the symbol. The still with its oddly shaped vessels and endless coils of tubing had a somber look; no steam issued from it; but there was a scarcely audible interior breathing, a subterranean snore. It was like some dark and midnight deed being performed in full daylight by some dour but powerful and silent worker...Secretly, without a flame, without a smile in the dim reflections of its copper boiler, the still kept going, dripping its alcoholic sweat like a slow, stubborn spring which must in time invade the room, overspill on to the outer boulevards and flood the immense hollow of Paris... These people in the bistrot, men and women, worshipped this object, mistaking it for some escape apparatus only to find, too late, that it landed them in a terminal ward or a padded cell. Zola left most of his cassis on the zinc counter and emerged into the brilliant autumn sunshine. On the boulevard, he carefully stepped on pavement cracks, oblivious that his old superstitions clung to him. His thoughts were converging

BOSON BOOKS

95

A Moment of Truth on other things—Gervaise, Coupeau, Lantier, Nana, Bibi-la-Grillade, and other characters. Suddenly, he became aware people were staring at him, that he was standing in the Place de Clichy, meeting-point of two boulevards and six streets, scribbling furiously. He had his title: L'ASSOMMOIR (THE BOOZER) Another notion struck him and stopped him in his tracks. Why not write the whole book in Paris argot? Not only envisage the story as they saw and lived it, but put in into their own words? After all, he did set himself up as a Naturalist novelist. This time he would let his characters and theme dictate everything. He would trim the story to its raw essentials. Few adjectives. No abstract words. No static verbs. Concrete nouns and active verbs. In this way, he could bring things alive so that his readers could see, feel, hear, smell and almost touch everything. In a few minutes he reached home and sat down at his desk. Already his mind invoked that big scene in the washhouse where Virginie comes to taunt Gervaise because her sister has stolen Lantier, her lover. They rip into each other like two tigresses. With superhuman strength, she caught Virginie by the waist, bent her double and rammed her face into the flagstones bringing her buttocks up into the air; in spite of her wriggling, she pulled her skirts right up. She wore knickers underneath. Gervaise pushed her hand into the opening, ripped them off and showed the lot, bare thighs, bare bottom. Then lifting her beater, she began beating as she did in the old days at Plassans on the banks of the Viorne when the woman she worked for did the garrison washing. The wood buried itself in the flesh with a dull thud and each blow left a red weal on the white skin "Cor!" muttered Charles, the attendant, thrilled to the core and goggle-eyed. But however strong-willed, people like Gervaise and Coupeau cannot live and work in filth without some of it contaminating them. One hot day when Gervaise feels almost overcome by the rank smell of dirty linen, Coupeau staggers, drunk, into the laundry and paws her in front of her staff. It is the beginning of the slow dissolution of their life. When Lantier returns, Gervaise tries to resist him until she finds Coupeau has vomited all over their bed. "Oh God, he's done me out of my own bed...I haven't got a bed of my own any longer...No, I can't, it's his fault." She was trembling all over and did not know what she was doing. And as Lantier escorted her into his room, Nana's face showed in a pane of the glass door to the slip-room. She had just wakened and climbed quietly out of bed in her nightdress, wan with sleep. She glanced at her father, wallowing in his own vomit then, her face stuck to the glass, she stood there with her eyes following her mother's petticoat disappearing into the other man's room opposite. She gave it all her attention and her child's vicious eyes, gaping wide, were fired with a lewd curiosity.

BOSON BOOKS

96

A Moment of Truth From that moment, Gervaise and Coupeau are lost; he has surrendered to the bottle and she has succumbed to the flesh; Lantier maneuvers them out of their laundry and installs her old rival and new mistress, Virginie; now, Gervaise, Coupeau and Nana have to cram into one grim tenement room; Nana runs away with a middle-aged man then cruises the boulevards like a common prostitute; Gervaise, reduced to skivvying for Lantier and Virginie, appeals to Bazouge, the undertaker's man symbolizing Death, to come and take her, then repents and decides to give life another chance; but nobody wants her, not even when Coupeau dies of drink and she takes to the streets to offer herself; she sinks into idiocy, the butt of the tenement, spending her few coppers on drink and forced to live in a niche below the stairs. Only by the smell of her decomposing body do the neighbors discover her death. Of course it was Old Bazouge who arrived, carrying the pauper's box under his arm, to pack her off. As usual, he was fairly drunk that day, but as good a bloke as ever and chipper as a lark. When he recognized the customer he had to cope with, he came out with a few philosophical thoughts as he made his preparations. "Well now, we all go the same way home...no need to heave and shove, lots of room for us all...Here's one as didn't want to go then she changed her mind. But then she had to wait...Ah well, there it is and she's got what she was after...Now then, up-we-go." As he gripped Gervaise in his big black hands, he had a fit of tenderness and gently lifted this woman who had wanted him for so long. As he lowered her into her coffin like a loving father, he rambled on between hiccups: "Listen ducks...you know...it's me, Bibi-la-Gaité known as the ladies' comforter...There, then, you're all right now. Night-night, my beauty." "I don't think it's brilliant," Zola commented to Georges Charpentier when he handed him the manuscript of L'Assommoir. Already he had sold the book in serial form to the newspaper, Le Bien Public for 10,000 francs (abut £3,000), a tidy sum. But when the paper began publication in April 1876, protests swamped its mail department from readers crying, "Obscenity." At the thought of government prosecution, the editor took fright and cancelled the series in June. However, Catulle Mendès, poet and editor of La République des Lettres, snapped up the rest of the book for 1,000 francs and when the republican prosecutor hinted he would seize the paper if they continued the serial, Mendès shrugged and threatened to publish in Belgium and distribute in France. He had his way. Yet, when L'Assommoir appeared as a book in February 1877, the critics agreed with Mac Mahon's bourgeois government. Jules Clarétie trumpeted his disgust. "A smell of bestiality exudes from all his work," he said. "It is morbid priapism." Figaro commented: "This isn't realism, it's filth; this isn't crudity, its pornography." Even Victor Hugo, who had once praised Zola's work, deemed it a bad book on moral grounds, even if it breathed truth. "You haven't the right...you haven't the right to lay misfortune bare. I wasn't afraid to show the pain and shame of Les Misérables. As characters, I took a convict and a street girl, but I BOSON BOOKS

97

A Moment of Truth wrote this book with the constant thought of raising them from their abject state..." From every side, critics assailed him...Not because they objected to Virginie's bare buttocks, the boozing and the gluttony, the promiscuity and violence, Gervaise's adultery and Nana’s prostitution. No. Like good French litterateurs, they took exception to his crude style and vulgar language; even Flaubert fulminated in the background about the amalgam of argot and formal prose, about the absence of the mot juste. So they had given him the treatment meted out to Manet for his Déjeuner sur l'Herbe with its garish colors and summary brushwork. Some pundits couldn't see the substance for the style. What did he care? On the imperial seats of horse-drawn buses, he noted that good bourgeois were hanging on with one hand while flipping over the pages of the mustard-yellow volume with the other; showgirls and workmen were lipreading their way through the book, and he even saw cambric and lace handkerchiefs catch tears tracking over powdered and painted cheeks. Those bourgeois who would have banned the book, still devoured it like their high-toned ladies. Hundreds of volumes were flaunted along the boulevards in grubby or manicured hands. Georges Charpentier whispered he had sold thirty-six editions within days of publication and was aiming at 100,000 copies; Zola had saved his publishing house from going under and in gratitude, Charpentier tore up the original contract allotting him a lump sum for each book and gave the writer a royalty of fifty centimes a volume. Yet, he felt more elated at proving his Naturalist system, at demonstrating that no author need to go to the myths of Ancient Athens, Rome or Renaissance Florence for tragedy when it lay all round in the sordid slums of La Chapelle or the barge docks of La Villette. And from this day on, none of the critics who had formed a silent conspiracy around the first six of his Rougon-Macquart novels could afford to ignore him. It was a long hop from the dram shop of L'Assommoir to the Café Riche on the Boulevard des Italiens; but there, Flaubert, Turgenev, Goncourt, Daudet and Zola foregathered once a month to dine and celebrate the fact that at least one of their plays had got the bird. For these Booed-Playwright Dinners, Monsieur Bignon, the proprietor, gave them a well-upholstered private room, knowing their talk could grow stormy and Flaubert's foghorn voice could drown the boulevard racket and resonate from the basement to the fifth floor of the building. As Zola entered after the publication of his book, the others stood up to acknowledge his success. Daudet, his curly tresses and beard longer than ever, shook his hand. Ambivalent about Zola's book, he had never forgotten how his friend had threatened to quit Le Gaulois if his article on Daudet did not appear at a time when they both needed the money. A good mime, Daudet sang in a droll combination of Provençal and Parisian accents one of the café-concert ditties:

BOSON BOOKS

98

A Moment of Truth Depuis que tu m'as quitté, Gervaise, Je ne suis plus retourné à L'Assommoir. Maupassant, who had joined the company for the occasion, took up the chant: L'Assommoir where in his honky-tonk Coupeau gets real roaring drunk And women scrap with pails of water And masons work with real good plaster And soaks get soaked on real red plonk. Zola had to sign each of them a leather-bound copy of the book then Bignon brought in a photographer who nearly set the room ablaze with flash-powder taking a picture of Daudet, Flaubert, Turgenev and Zola squeezed round the table. They waited for Edmond de Goncourt to arrive before sitting down to eat. "Ah, so realism has come of age at last," Goncourt murmured sardonically as he caught sight of the pile of books. After seven years' mourning for his brother, he had just published La Fille Élisa, a minute analysis of a girl gone to the bad; but beside L'Assommoir the book had fallen flat and Goncourt reproached Zola for stealing both his idea and his thunder. "You mean Naturalism's come of age, " Paul Alexis corrected as he entered. "Naturalism!" Flaubert bellowed. "What's that and what the devil does it mean?" He rounded on Zola. "Look out young man that your system doesn't lose you." He snorted through his moustache, "You'll begin to think there are Positivist and Determinist words when there are only words." "But I had to call it something so that the public would think it was new and read me," Zola said, defensively. "Just as long as you don't believe it too deeply yourself," Flaubert said. "I thought the book was a turning-point in literature," Maupassant said, lifting his head from the foie gras then shooting his godfather, Flaubert, a malicious look. "And you do, too. Didn't you say it was a masterpiece compared with La Fille Élisa?" "And I meant it," Flaubert boomed, regardless of Goncourt, who bristled and reddened. "When our friend, Zola, forgets his five pages a day and his systems of science and philosophy, he'll outdo us all." "I'm flattered, but it's nonsense," Zola countered, then added with a grin, "Anyway, our critics don't think much of L'Assommoir. The socialist critics contend I wrote the book to damn the working class and deny it the vote. And those Mac Mahon ministers who aren't reactionary enough to agree that slumdwellers shouldn't have the vote, condemn me for painting too black a picture of social conditions. For the first crowd I'm a snooty bourgeois and for the second a revolutionary who uses gutter morals and gutter speech to sell his books. And the newspapers attack me as a republican pornographer." "That you can hardly deny, Zola, can you?" Goncourt murmured. "No more than the critics can deny that their newspapers print more horrifying stories than I could ever invent." But yours is fiction, imagined and created by you." BOSON BOOKS

99

A Moment of Truth "Is it any less true? And tell me, where's the obscenity in truth, and where's the pornography in good literature. And I aim at both." "A splendid ideal, at least," said Goncourt with mordant irony. "And he's achieved it in L'Assommoir," Maupassant put in. "I wish I'd written it." He had just published a thin volume of poems under the name Guy de Valmont, but had also written a mountain of short stories that his literary mentor, Flaubert, had torn to pieces critically and physically, judging them not good enough. "If you stop pouring all your energy into sculling up and down the Seine and running after every skirt you see, you might write something worthwhile one day," Flaubert grunted. "Ah, but there's hope for me yet, maître," retorted Maupassant. "My superior at the Ministry of Public Instruction complained the other day that my memos didn't come up to the standard of jargon demanded by his Ministry. "A bourgeois," Flaubert roared, setting the glasses rattling on the table with his clenched fist. "What does he know about writing?" Maupassant grinned. Casting a glance round the table at the leaders of the Realist and Naturalist schools, he reflected that had he met any of these welldressed, well-fed, well-bred men in the boulevard outside—with the exception perhaps of Daudet—he would have mistaken them all for models of the bourgeois they purported to detest. As he and Zola accompanied Flaubert to his new flat in Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, they heard a new bit of doggerel echoing from a side-street bistrot. For Zola, man's an animal, A sort of alimentary canal Stuffed at both ends and in-between With anything that looks obscene; His mind's in either the groin or gut, Like Zola, it doesn't know what's what. Both Flaubert and Maupassant burst out laughing. Not Zola. He was already contemplating the book after the one he was now writing—a successor to L'Assommoir, the story of Gervaise's daughter, Nana, prostitute, sex goddess and high-priced courtesan. Now that, he thought, will really set the bistrots and cabarets humming and stop Paris in its tracks.

BOSON BOOKS

100

A Moment of Truth

VIII Now he had enough money to indulge himself. L'Assommoir would earn at least 30,000 francs—more than all the rest of his books together—and newspaper editors were squabbling for his next serial at between 20,000 and 30,000 francs. Overnight, he had become the author everyone was discussing, even literary critics. Whether for or against what did it matter? As long as they kept talking and kept reading. In his boyhood he had worshipped Hugo and Balzac; but even they had never experienced anything like his success. That gave him the biggest kick of all. Yet, he must carry on producing books, another thirteen Rougon-Macqart volumes, until he had written that family out of his system. First, he needed a new base. From the Batignolles, he moved across the Place Clichy to Rue de Boulogne in the more chic Saint-Georges district. Number 23, with a lucky three. In the vast, second-floor apartment he had ample space for himself, Coco, his mother, the two dogs, Bertrand and Raton, the Pomeranian; he foraged in junk-shops for bric-a-brac to fill his new study and found a huge Henry II table and a purple plinth for his bronze bust by Philippe Solari; for their bedroom, he acquired an imposing renaissance bed, a four-poster with a canopy worked in ancient tapestry. One of their first visitors, Flaubert, halted pop-eyed in the bedroom. "But it's Saint Julien l'Hospitalier's bedroom," he cried. (Flaubert had written the tale of Saint Julien). "Know something, Zola? I've always dreamed of sleeping in that sort of bed. But he also needed another writing-den, away from the din and distractions of Paris; L'Estaque, where he had spent the summer gorging himself on sea-food, tempted him, but Coco did not care for the hot, humid Midi; instead, they went house-hunting in a buggy along the meandering curves of the Seine after it quit the capital. Beyond Saint-Germain forest, where the river bent north and split round a long island, they caught sight of a For Sale board on a small, square house a hundred yards back from the river. For the house and its small garden they wanted nine thousand francs; at such a price, his mother tut-tutted, motive enough for Coco to urge Meemeel to buy. In fact, Zola had made up his own mind; his Médan house appealed to him, for it backed on to wooded hills and its main windows overlooked his favorite element, water. Not until they were camping there that summer and helping to improve and furnish the house did they realize what a racket the Paris-Normandy trains made punching through the bridge at the foot of their garden. However, they hardly disturbed Zola, who sat, fascinated by these snorting, clanking monsters; he imagined their driver and fireman as two black demons attending to the wants and caprices of some metal beast. One day he promised himself a run on the footplate. In August 1878, he wrote to Flaubert: "I have acquired a house, a rabbit-hutch between Poissy and Triel in a charming backwater...Literature has bought this BOSON BOOKS

101

A Moment of Truth modest country retreat; it has the advantage of being far from every station and of not counting a single bourgeois in its neighborhood." Yet, he had big ideas for his rabbit hutch. Drawing plans himself and removing his jacket to help the masons and joiners, he added a square tower on the left of the original eighteenth-century building; on its ground floor there was the kitchen and dining room, on the first floor a large bedroom and bathroom and its top floor became a spacious study with stained-glass windows more than twelve feet high and a chimney to roast an ox with a motto scrolled on its mantelpiece: Nulla dies sine linea—No day without lines. Crisscrossed beams spanned the ceiling and a ladder went up to an alcove library lit by another stained-glass window. It looked like some archbishop's office. No one had the heart to tell Zola how incongruous and ugly his turret had turned out. Here, the seigneur of Médan felt at home for the first time in his life; he bought another patch of ground to fill it with trees and planned outhouses to construct with his royalties; at the rear of the house, Coco and his mother had a farmyard of chickens and rabbits. And Zola got down to finishing Une Page d'Amour (Love Story) and thinking about Nana, the girl he had left parading her sex along the Paris boulevard at the end of L'Assommoir. Médan meant something else—a rendezvous for writers who would form a school round him and consolidate his literary system, Naturalism. Already he had one disciple, Paul Alexis; with success, others came knocking on his door. He had always desired and needed friends; even in his youth he had urged Baille and Cézanne to take a stand with him against everything and everyone; yet, throughout his boyhood and adult life could only think of a single loyal friend— Paul, the only person he addressed with the familiar tu (thou). Henry Céard merely knocked and presented his card in Paris. His Bercy address, monocle and boulevardier look convinced Zola he was a wine-merchant; he turned out to be a civil servant in the war ministry who had come to proclaim his admiration for Zola. Although he had done nothing more than collaborate in writing a one-act play, Zola conscripted him as a budding Naturalist. In his turn, Céard brought Joris-Karl Huysmans, who worked for the interior ministry and had already written to congratulate Zola on his first Rougon-Macquart novels; to his literary credit, Huysmans had published some short tales and a realist novel, Marthe, the story of a prostitute. Zola already knew Maupassant, who now attached himself to the group and began to think seriously about his writing; Alexis brought along the sixth member, Léon Hennique, who had also published a couple of short books without much impact. Hennique, born in Guadeloupe, had the allure of a colonial planter. Indeed, Zola wondered what sort of school he had formed. Céard did look like a wine-merchant and Huysmans could never had passed for anything but a highclass civil servant with his piped jacket and silk cravat; Maupassant had the appearance of a middleweight boxer. Only Alexis, with his crumpled jacket, baggy trousers and myopic eyes behind thick glasses, had the right Bohemian look.

BOSON BOOKS

102

A Moment of Truth To inaugurate the Médan Group, the five newcomers invited Flaubert, Zola and Goncourt to Trapp's restaurant in April 1877; thereafter they met at Zola's house in Rue de Boulogne or during weekends at Médan. Maupassant had done hardly anything in literature. For Flaubert, who searched for stylistic perfection, had converted his stories into confetti; he had worked for the Admiralty and now had a similar pen-pushing job in the education ministry; he had two passions, women and sculling. When he joined the Médan Group, he lived at Sartrouville, several miles upriver from Zola; but even after an orgiastic Saturday night, he would set out early and either come by skiff or yawl to the mooring point on the Seine at Médan; there, he fired a pistol to alert the Master of Médan who would descend from his turret writing-den to join him. Beside the athletic figure of Maupassant, in striped sailor's jersey, rolled-up trousers and espadrilles, Zola felt more than ever hypochondriac and he welcomed the arrival of the less red-blooded members of the school. Maupassant had found him a Norwegian duck-punt that he christened Nana after Gervaise's wayward daughter; in this, they crossed to the island after lunch and chatted about their literary projects. "Guy, where have you got to with that tale you told us about Adrienne What'sher-name?" "Legay—her trade name was Boule de Suif." "Good title," Huysmans commented. "Those three words are all I've got at the moment." "Well, get down and write it," Zola said. "We won't tear it up like the Old Man, and we're all waiting for you and Alexis" "I'll be another couple of weeks," Alexis grinned. "We'll double that and give you a month," Zola grunted. "I've never known you or any other Provençal to be on time." Zola was talking about Les Soirées de Médan, a book of short novels with the Franco-Prussian War as its theme which the Médan Group had conceived as its birth certificate; most of them already had a story written and even published elsewhere; Zola had done “The Attack on the Mill,” Huysmans contributed his “Sack on Back,” Céard “The Blood-letting,” Hennique, “The Attack on the Grand Sept.” Alexis, who wrote so slowly that his manuscript paper yellowed and began to molder under his hand, was laboring to finish “After the Battle.” Among them, only Maupassant had started from scratch, and only he had never previously published prose. When the autumn sun was setting behind the woods above Médan, Maupassant rowed them back across the Seine. "I've a confession to make," he said. "I've written ‘Boule de Suif.’" "You have," Zola cried. "Have you brought it with you?" Maupassant shook his head. "It's in my rooms at Rue Clauzel." He paused. "I should let the Old Man see it." "No, for God's sake don't do that," Zola exclaimed. Flaubert, he knew, would rip it to shreds because it didn't have his own high-flown style with every phrase chiseled. "Why don't you let us hear it first?" "Yes, why not?" Alexis repeated, and the others all encouraged Maupassant to bring his story with him next weekend. BOSON BOOKS

103

A Moment of Truth But Maupassant had another surprise for them. When they had dressed for dinner and were sipping aperitifs in the salon, he teased from his pocket a crumpled manuscript of the story, which was scribbled on paper bearing the letterhead of the Ministry of Education. "I find I do have a copy," he said. "Well, read it," they chorused. He read badly, his bull head bowed over the paper and his Norman drawl almost losing itself in his dark moustache. But his phrasing, diction, accent, intonation, characterization—nothing of this mattered to his audience of five men and a woman who listened in silence, spellbound by the narrative. They could all smell that Maupassant had fought in 1870 just as they could guess he had slept with Boule de Suif (Adrienne Legay, a twenty-two-year-old girl from his own Valmont district) and heard her story at first-hand; it was evident he had also met the originals of his characters—aristocrats, bourgeois and nuns who were fleeing occupied Rouen for Le Havre in one of the rare, available coaches. So scrupulously had he observed them that no one needed to imagine those good people and their wives, in that lumbering freezing vehicle on a snow-bound road, turning up their noses at the femme galante, Boule de Suif—until they feel famished and she invites them to share her hamper of food and drink. In their eyes, she has another defect: Patriotism. When the Germans detain them an inn, their officer refuses to release them unless Boule de Suif yields to him. Out of pride and disgust, she persistently rejects the Prussian officer; again, the good gentry have to stifle their qualms and conspire to persuade her to change her mind; their wives enjoy the plot, and even the nuns give her promiscuity their spiritual sanction. What is Boule de Suif to do? Finally, she surrenders and offers herself for the night to the Prussian officer. When they resume their journey the following day, no one speaks to her; she feels degraded by her contact with the enemy, despised by her own countrymen; for the rest of the trip she has to sit holding back her tears and trying to forget her hunger. For not one of the people who had asked her to sacrifice her honor and with whom she had shared her hamper, offer her a morsel of food. As Maupassant stuffed the manuscript sheets back into his pocket, the six people in the room with him burst into spontaneous applause. For the first time, Zola really scrutinized this young man with the aristocratic name, the physique of a vintner's drayman and the face and lowbrow of a peasant. Who'd have thought this ox had a story like that in him and could tell it with such artistry and power? And not a spot or smell of ink on him! "Guy, you've written a masterpiece," he cried, and the others echoed his verdict, all of them realizing that “Boule de Suif” was immeasurably better than the stories they had done. "We won't let anybody alter a word of it. Not a word. Not even the Old Man." "My canard aux olives...It'll be burned to ashes," Coco said, bringing them all back to earth. "I didn't think." "Never mind," Zola said. "We'll start by opening a couple of bottles of champagne and the cook can make us an omelet." BOSON BOOKS

104

A Moment of Truth "I'd like to have seen your other stories," Huysmans said. "What other stories?" "Those that Flaubert has torn up for the last seven years." "Oh, those! They were like my poetry—not worth a damn." When they had toasted Maupassant's first chef d'oeuvre they passed into the wainscoted dining room, tiled in Delft, where he regaled them with stories of Norman peasantry and gentry and minor nobility like himself; they urged him to put them down on paper, keep Flaubert's eye off them, and publish them; they sat listening to him until the last train had racketed under the bridge and the last barge had hooted along the Seine and Coco shepherded them all off to bed. Zola invariably had to turn and look over his shoulder when he spoke to Paul Alexis who kept a pace behind as though afraid to intrude on his thoughts or step out of his shadow; all the others had caught the early train back to Paris, but Alexis remained to finish his story and interrogate Zola about his life and work. For eight years, Alexis had acted as Zola's most loyal disciple and defender in the newspapers by which he earned his living. Now, he was putting all his admiration and affection for his master into a biography with the title, Émile Zola: Notes by a Friend. They crossed the bridge and rowed across the Seine, the Newfoundland swimming alongside the boat and Raton on Zola's lap. Alexis handled the oars, watching his friend who sat in the stern. In the past year, he had grown slightly pot-bellied and the tonsure in his thinning hair now looked like a five-franc piece with patches of gray hairs round it. Alexis was merely wondering how Zola sustained his immense output without cracking up physically and mentally. For years he had observed him lever his bulk into that Louis XIII chair with its gilt motto, If God Wills, I Will, and take up his manuscript almost in mid-sentence. How did he do it?—five pages a day like some inspired copy clerk! And with that unvarying routine he had built a whole edifice of books like a bricklayer! Now, Alexis listened while Zola outlined the eleven volumes of the RougonMacquart fresco he still had on the stocks after he had finished his sequel to L'Assommoir: Nana. He would do a bourgeois version of L'Assommoir, its hero a young provincial shopkeeper in Paris with a flair for making both money and women; he would then tackle the problem of the big stores squeezing out the small shopkeepers; then the strife between the miners and coal-owners attracted him as a theme; after that, the battle between the moderns and the classics in art; a farming epic would follow then a soldier's story of the Franco-Prussian War. He'd finish the cycle where it started, in Aix-en-Provence. They wandered along the island to the chalet Zola was having built as a quieter writing-den, then sat down on the Seine bank. From a pocket, Alexis conjured several sheets of dog-eared manuscript covered with his spidery hand. "I wonder if this will give some of our friends a bit of a turn when they read it," he mumbled. Zola took off his pince-nez and held the script close to his cleft nose to read it: A work which will give Zola less trouble to document is his projected novel on art. Here, he will only have to remember what he has seen and BOSON BOOKS

105

A Moment of Truth experienced in our circle. His leading character is ready-made; he is the painter, captivated by the ideal of modern beauty, who was glimpsed in Le Ventre de Paris; he is the same Claude Lantier of whom he said in the Rougon-Macquart family tree: 'Claude Lantier, born in 1842...moral and physical preponderance of the mother; inherited neurosis which is converted into genius. Painter.' I know that he (Zola) intends to study in Claude Lantier the terrifying psychology of artistic impotence. Around this central figure of genius, the sublime dreamer whose creative faculties are paralyzed by a flaw in his character, will move other artists, painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, a whole gang of ambitious young men all bent on conquering Paris; some fail, the others succeed in some measure. Naturally, in this book, Zola will be forced to draw on his friends, to seize on their personalities. As far as I'm concerned, if I form part of it and even if I'm not flattered, I promise not to bring an action against him. "Can I print it like that? "Why not?" Zola flicked a twig into the water and Bertrand splashed after it. "You mean, Paul might read it and imagine he's Lantier?" "Well, isn't he?" Alexis turned his remote, myopic stare on Zola, who shrugged. "He's as much Claude Lantier as that portrait he painted of me was me when he first came to Paris—you know, the one I showed you." "That's near enough you, don't you think?" Alexis commented. "As you say, even if he's not a genius, he acts like one and he's neurotic and very, very touchy." "Paul won't take umbrage. He'll understand as one artist to another." Zola hoisted his bulk up and started back for the boat. "You've seen him recently. How is he?" "Still ripping up canvases and still painting out the big R from the ones that come back from the official Salon." Zola shook his head sorrowfully. “I must have a word with Antoine Guillemet. He's next for a seat on the jury and can probably get Paul hung in the Salon." "Is it worth it?" “Friendship is worth everything," Zola snapped as though oblivious of the sacrifices Alexis had made out of loyalty and amity for him. "It's the only thing worth anything." "I only asked because he took most of the stick from the critics at the last Impressionist exhibition," Alexis countered. "I know," Zola said. Against his advice, Paul had exhibited with the so-called Impressionists in 1877, sending sixteen of what he judged the best of his work; Zola had slipped into the show in Rue le Peletier, though more to furbish his dossier on the Claude Lantier novel than to see what Paul and the Impressionists had done. Monet was showing a powerful series of pictures of the Gare Saint-Lazare that reminded Zola of his pledge to write that novel about the railways. Renoir had chosen portraits, including one of Georges Charpentier's wife and children, and an immense canvas of Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette where he had BOSON BOOKS

106

A Moment of Truth assembled a million separate fragments of raw color to give scintillating light and life to that scene. Paul had given them several of those crude studies of male and female bathers which so obsessed him, some L'Estaque landscapes and the portrait of an eccentric collector, Victor Choquet, a painting that critics had dubbed Billoir-enChocolat after the notorious criminal who had murdered and dissected his mistress. To boost Paul's morale and impress his parents, Zola had persuaded the Sémaphore de Marseille to run his article on the exhibition. He had written: "I shall now note Monsieur Paul Cézanne, who is certainly the finest colorist of the group. He is exhibiting Provençal landscapes of the greatest character. So strong and vital are the painter's canvases that they may make the bourgeois smile; they nevertheless display the elements of a very great painter. The day that Monsieur Paul Cézanne has mastered his art completely, he will produce quite superior work." But privately, Zola believed that none of these Impressionist painters could make his mark on the public without the cachet of the official Salon. Would Paul ever create anything worthy of the Salon even if the jurymen he had offended would condescend to hang his work? As they moored their punt, Zola looked at Alexis with a grin. "You're the best hand I know with a skirt. What are the fashionable knocking shops these days?" "Why...Don't say you're thinking of trying..." "Don't be idiotic. You know me. I think women outside the home are a waste of time. I just want to know." "Ah! Nana," Alexis said. Women and gambling had preyed heavily on Alexis's health and career; but few people knew the red-light districts, the underworld of cabarets, café-concerts, bordels and maisons-closes like him; they whispered that Madame Alexis had once acted as another kind of Madame, but poor Alexis neither recognized her nor realized the truth. His poor vision had become a sick joke. After a wild night along Pigalle or the Avenue de Clichy or the more modish inner boulevards, he would break surface in some brothel and even through bottle-lens spectacles would fail to connect the identity of his sexual partner with the night before. Alexis admitted that while he converted his sensuality into carnal love, his idol, Zola, sublimated his in his novels; in the eight years that he had walked in Zola's shadow, he had written no more than a one-act comedy and several short stories; however, Huysmans, most perceptive of the Médan Group, ranked these tales among the finest in the literature. But Alexis had seen his early poetic impulse run dry in Paris. Patiently, he answered Zola's queries, not even tickled by their innocence. Did he pay the Madame or the Pro? When? Before or after the act? Did he leave a tip? What sort of sexual tricks did they get up to, the street girls of Pigalle? You know...acrobatics, or tricks to make old men feel younger? Where do the Madames recruit the tarts for the knocking-shops and crummy hotels and maisons de passe? Which of the girls graduate into the high-class bordels around the Boulevard des Italiens and Capucines? How could someone set about getting BOSON BOOKS

107

A Moment of Truth into the private boudoir of one of the Queens of the Third Republic—someone like Cora Pearl or Valtesse de la Bigne? "Valtesse de la Bigne!" Alexis exclaimed, raising his eyebrows. He grinned. "That's flying high. I doubt if she'd see you. Know what she did when Dumas Fils—you know, who wrote La Dame Aux Camélias—was going into her bedroom? She stopped him and shut the door in his face and said, 'Cher Maître, you could never afford a night in that bed.'" "What's her bed like?" "Search me...and I doubt if those that have shared it will tell you." "She goes for painters," Zola grunted. "Isn't she called the Artists' Union? Guillemet knows her and can probably fix it." They had reached the second-floor study where Zola immediately scrawled his friend's replies on several sheets of paper and injected these into one of two bulky dossiers; Alexis had witnessed ten years of notes nourish these files. "How's Nana coming along?" he asked, excited to have made even a proxy contribution to the latest Rougon-Macquart volume. Everyone in Zola's circle was discussing Nana; Manet had even done a portrait, based on Zola's description at the end of L'Assommoir, and the face and figure of Henriette Hauser, a prostitute who seemed the best likeness of the character. "I've done most of the research and written half the book," Zola replied, pointing to a ream of manuscript pages. "But I still need a bit more on the sex trade." "Sounds as though you're going to shock everybody from the President down to the Paris sewer men," Alexis said, grinning. "Nana's a poem," Zola growled. "An epic and symbolic poem. All right, it's about sex and how it destroys the high-born as well as the low-born.” Rummaging in the file, he extracted several sheets of paper amounting to 1,500 words of text, his summing up of Nana's history from her childhood with Gervaise and Coupeau until her death. Alexis skimmed the solid handwriting, removing his pince-nez to demist them and raising his beetling eyebrows at Zola's language and audacity. NANA; Born in 1851. In 1867 (end of year, December) she is 17. But she is very big; people would take her for 20 at least…Odor of woman, very much a woman...Her character, above all good-natured. Obeys her nature but never does harm for harm's sake, and relates well to people...for all that, finishes by viewing man as a material to exploit, becomes a Force of Nature, a ferment of destruction though not intentionally, simply through her sex appeal and her strong female smell, destroying everything she approaches and curdling society just as women having a period turn milk sour. The female sex organ with all its power; the sex organ on an altar with all the men making sacrifices to it. The book must be the poem of the female sex organ and its moral will be the fact that it turns everything sour. As early as Chapter One I show the whole audience enthralled and worshipping; picture the women and men faced with that supreme apparition of sex. In addition to all this, Nana eats gold, swallows every sort of wealth; the most extravagant tastes and the most dreadful squandering...She devours everything; she consumes people's earnings in BOSON BOOKS

108

A Moment of Truth industry, on the stock exchange, in high positions, in everything that pays., And she leaves nothing but ashes. In a nutshell, a real whore. Don't show her as witty which would be a mistake; she is nothing but flesh, yet flesh in all its beauty. And I repeat, a good-natured girl...Ups and down. At the finish, she must die in the flower of her youth, at the height of her triumph. The heredity question in Nana. An extreme case of the Rougon-Macquarts. The product of Gervaise and the alcoholic Coupeau. "Yes, Maître, I can see it's going to be some poem," Alexis said, handing back the script with a knowing grin which irked Zola. "I can't wait to read it." Nor can I," Zola said. "I wish I could finish it." Nana had given him more trouble than any other of his novels; already he had toiled for a year and still had half the book to write. He rose to shut the huge mullioned windows of the study; he had a horror of intruders and locked all the windows and doors with special combinations that only he and Gabrielle knew. Alexis and everybody else would read Nana when he had written the final page and not before. Anyway, how could he explain to someone like Alexis that Nana fitted into the sweep and curve of his cyclic history? It had begun with sick people in a sick society, had dealt with politics, fraud, speculation, religion; it had moved through the slums and was now entering the gilt and glitter of a sham court where wanton courtesans called the tune. With Nana he would rip the tinsel and gauze off the demi-monde and expose corruption through sex in a way that no other writer had dared to do. He would show how sex as an object of lust and pleasure and commerce could destroy men and their institutions—like religion, marriage, banks, businesses. Yes, and even sap governments and empires and bring them down in a welter of blood and slime.

BOSON BOOKS

109

A Moment of Truth

IX Nana would also give him the chance to settle so many old scores. He would pay back the upper-crust establishment which had hounded and pilloried him. His first chapters he had pitched round one of their haunts, the Théâtre des Variétés and had written a skit on Offenbach's La Belle Hélène. How he detested that composer with his operettas! And he could never forgive that high-class whore, Hortense Schneider, who had slept with so many visiting monarchs, including England's Prince of Wales, that they nicknamed her Le Passage des Princes. He'd never forget that day Auguste Renoir and his brother, Edmond, had introduced him to the so-called diva in her dressing room at the Variétés. "Come on, Hortense, let's see if they're still paintable," Renoir quipped and the slut had whipped off her bodice and stuck her tits in their faces. He had fled with Renoir's guffawing laugh echoing after him. Ludovic Halévy, who had written some of the most successful libretti for Offenbach, took him round the Variétés where he watched actresses making up and quizzed them about their pomades and face-packs. Halévy also filled his ear with stories about Hortense Schneider, Anna Deslions, Cora Pearl, Blanche D'Antigny and other high-paid strumpets who passed for actresses during the Second Empire. "But Halévy, you don't say!...Blanche D'Antigny actually shut her bedroom door on Napoleon III!" "She did better than that. Told him she didn't like the cut of his jib." "To his face?" "To his face." Halévy had, in fact, witnessed the scene when the Prince of Wales went backstage to meet Hortense Schneider and recounted it to Zola in such a way that he could use it in Nana. An old friend of Flaubert, a burned out bon-vivant, gave him supper in a private room at the Café Anglais and regaled him with tales of how they wined and dined their paramours in his day. And, of course, Alexis, the night owl, titillated him with scandals about brothels and lesbian restaurants around the Rue des Martyrs. Henry Céard wrote reams of notes about whoremasters and whore-mistresses and even escorted him to Rue Monnier to meet Lucy Lévy, a notorious Madame. That bewildered lady watched him fill notebooks with facts and figures and feared he had come from the finance ministry. But Valtesse de la Bigne he decided he must meet. He bit the ears of Manet and Guillemet until they arranged an audience for him with the most famous courtesan of them all, a woman who had gobbled up statesmen, princes, painters, bankers and industrialists and queened it at 98 Boulevard des Malesherbes. That joker, Guillemet, must have poured some strong advance publicity into the lady's ear, Zola thought. When he entered, she almost curtsied and she was wearing some watery, diaphanous material that a man with a white stick could have seen through. He could have stood his umbrella upright in the cloying, violet-scented atmosphere. BOSON BOOKS

110

A Moment of Truth Were violets aphrodisiac? He must find out. "So you are the Monsieur Zola who writes such...er...earthy books," she murmured with admiration. Zola gazed at her. For his part, he could well understand why this harem had swallowed up several fortunes and ruined dozens of reputations, why this highclass harlot had turned the most intelligent heads in France while she picked their pockets. She was beautiful. Le mot juste. No other word for it. But she had something other than the face and body of a Venus. Had he encountered her on the boulevard or in the Batignolles, he would have wagered all he had on her virginity. Pure and sylphlike. Those men who didn't fall hopelessly in love with her would give everything to violate and corrupt and defile that innocence; and they, too, would wind up bewitched and bankrupt. He must give Nana some of that purity. "It is very good of you, Ma'am, to receive me like this," he murmured. She had prepared supper in her dining room, hung with tapestries and brocaded silks and furnished with Louis XV tables and chairs. He might have been in Marie Antoinette's rooms at Versailles. On the table, champagne and his favorite oysters. What had Guillemet told her? Did she mean to seduce him? They sipped their champagne slowly, eyeing each other like two chess masters, or perhaps the matador and the bull. They had sole fillets in wine sauce, a delicious cassoulet of veal, then Breton crêpes reeking of Grand Marnier; they chitchatted about painting, politics, literature, areas where Nana would never have lived with her for two sentences; she had read Thérèse Raquin and shivered, then L'Assommoir, which she adored, and his His Excellence Eugène Rougon, where she could even name the prototypes of Rougon, the swindler and minister. "You must be a man of vast experience, Monsieur Zola," she murmured in that flageolet voice. "I look round and I observe," he replied. "Not just a voyeur, Monsieur Zola, I hope." He shook his head. "I suppose you could call me a passionate virgin," he said, and her laugh resonated in the wineglasses. "Anyway, I hope you don't intend to put me in one of your books." "No, Ma'am, I wouldn't dream of it." Folding his napkin three ways for luck, he looked at her. "I'd like to see your bedroom," he said. "But of course." She smiled. An obvious request. What gentleman came to Boulevard Malesherbes without visiting her bedroom? She opened the double doors and Zola stood for a moment wondering if his pince-nez were playing tricks, so brightly did the bed glitter. And what a bed! Silver cupids on sculpted bouquets of gilded roses and violets formed an arch over a silver trellis above the mauve pillows and embroidered silk covers; gilded nudes on a bronze, flower-strewn background supported the bed and at its foot bloomed garlands of roses and other flowers; over all this floated a silk canopy from which hung heavy drapes to cocoon the bed and its occupants. No wonder Alexandre Dumas could not buy himself eight hours on a love couch like that! Valtesse kept glancing at him, flattered that her bed absorbed so much of his attention; Zola let his eye wander to the silk trappings, the heavy satin curtains, BOSON BOOKS

111

A Moment of Truth the gold candelabra and the giant chandeliers; he noted the pastel-shaded wall panels, the parquet floor with bear and tiger-skin rugs scattered elegantly about. With the courtesan trailing behind him, he wandered into the bathroom, all marble and silver and gilded mirrors, then into the anteroom where doubtless she kept her customers waiting. He toured the other five rooms of the apartment, sizing up everything down to the curtain tassels and door handles. As she tripped after him, Valtesse grew more and more puzzled. In the foyer by the fountain and stucco figures on marble plinths, he stopped and asked for his hat, coat and umbrella. "But Monsieur Zola, you mean...you mean, you don't want to stay?" "No thank you Ma'am. I've seen all I want to see." And shaking the astonished lady by the hand, he placed his top hat on his head and made his way downstairs. What did she expect?—that because he wrote muscular prose about high-class and low-class whores he was going to rape her, at least. He had not lied when he denied his intention of using her as Nana; she had too much intelligence, too much breeding for his scatterbrained sex symbol. He would stick to the original notes he had penned in the summer of 1878. "The philosophical subject is as follows," he had written, then, "A whole society hurling itself at the sex organ. A pack of hounds pursuing a bitch, not even on heat, who pokes fun at the hounds behind her. The poem of male desires, the great lever which sets the earth going. There is nothing apart from sex and religion." His Nana he would depict as the Golden Fly, bred and fattened in the slums, feasting on their putrefaction then alighting on the corrupt Second Empire, which had created her society, to infect and destroy it. His first page had set the tone: A murmur grew like a sigh swelling. Some people clapped hands; every pair of opera glasses focused on Venus. Gradually, Nana had captivated her audience and now every man was under her spell. Lust radiated from her as from a bitch on heat, spreading further and further until it filled the auditorium. Now her slightest movements fanned the desire and she set men's flesh prickling with a gesture of her little finger. Backs arched and quivered as if invisible bows had been drawn across their muscles; on the napes of necks, downy hair stirred in the panting breath of some women. Before him, Fauchery saw the truant schoolboy lifted clean out of his seat by passion...The whole house swayed and teetered as though dizzy with excitement and lassitude, in the grip of those midnight urges which set people fumbling in alcove beds. And Nana, confronting this swooning audience, these fifteen hundred beings huddled together and sinking under the nervous exhaustion which comes at the end of a performance, remained victorious with her marble flesh and her sex which was potent enough to destroy this whole crowd without itself being affected. From that moment, Nana can pick any man she likes, toy with him, suck him dry and spit him into the gutter which spawned her. Yet one man resists. Count Muffat de Beauville, Chamberlain to Empress Eugénie, religious bigot, scrupulous husband, an ascetic character who despises and detests everything BOSON BOOKS

112

A Moment of Truth Nana represents. Big enough game for any woman. Nana teases and taunts him until he finally surrenders. Bending back with one hip thrust out taut, she exhibited her solid loins and firm Amazon breasts, her powerful muscles playing beneath the satin texture of her skin. A delicate line, hardly curved by the shoulder and thigh, ran from one of her elbows to her foot. Muffat followed this tender profile, these fleshy, blonde contours vanishing in golden highlights, these curves on which candlelight conferred silken ripples of light. He thought of his old horror of women, the Beast of the bible, lewd, smelling of a jungle animal. Nana was covered with hair, a reddish down which turned her skin into velvet; while in her equine croup and flanks, in the fleshy swellings riven with deep folds which veiled her sex in troubling shadows, there was something of the Beast. She was the Golden Beast, unmindful as brute force and corrupting the world with her smell. Muffat kept on staring, obsessed, possessed to the extent that when he closed his eyes to shut her out, the Beast reappeared in the deep darkness, bigger, more terrible, exaggerating its posture. Now it would be there, before his eyes, in his flesh forever...Suddenly, his self-control went as though blown away by a great wind. He seized Nana round her waist in a burst of brutal emotion and threw her on the carpet. Men fight over Nana. One kills himself, another betrays his family; in her wake lie a hundred ruined and dishonored men, an army officer, a naval officer, a member of the old aristocracy, a banker. Count Muffat she finally degrades by forcing him to behave like an animal—a bear, a horse, a dog. She compels him to dress in his court chamberlain's uniform, humiliates him with kicks and tramples his uniform and decorations under foot. Yet, how can she blame herself? No, damn 'em, they can say what they like, it isn't my fault! Am I a bad type, me? I'm open-handed and I wouldn't hurt a fly...they're to blame…they're to blame...I didn't want to be mean to them. They grabbed at my skirts and now look at the way they kick the bucket and ask for handouts and cry their eyes dry...Was it me that egged them on? Weren't there always a dozen who fought amongst themselves to see who could invent the filthiest trick? They made me sick! I did my damnedest not to ape them, I was so scared. Hey! I'll tell you something, they all wanted to marry me. How's that for a fine idea? Yes, ducks, I could have been a countess or a baroness twenty times over if I'd said Yes. Well now, I said, No, because I was the decent sort. Ah! when I think of the dirty tricks and crimes I stopped them doing...They would have stolen, murdered, killed their fathers and mothers for me. I only had to say the word and I didn't. And now what do I get for it? She alone stayed upright amid the accumulated riches of her mansion with a host of stricken men at her feet. Like those antediluvian monsters in fearful lairs full of bones, she walked on human skulls...but she remained oblivious of the havoc she had sewn, still a good-natured girl. She was still big, still plump, healthy and cheerful.

BOSON BOOKS

113

A Moment of Truth Yet, Nana's reign is almost over. Returning from a trip abroad, she catches smallpox from her infant son. In the Grand Hotel, she lies dying while her former lovers and the men she had ruined foregather in the hotel foyer to hold a wake for her, and upstairs her rival courtesans watch her agony. Outside on the boulevards, crowds are giving voice to their support for Napoleon's declaration of war on Prussia, crying “To Berlin, To Berlin, To Berlin!” Nana was left alone, her face upturned in the candlelight. It was a charnel house, a mass of blood and pus, a shovelful of rotted flesh thrown there on a cushion. The whole face had been attacked by pustules, one touching the other; and withered and sunken, looking like grayish mud, they seemed already like some graveyard mould on that formless pulp where the features were no longer recognizable. One eye, the left eye, had completely sunk into the bubbling purulence; the other, half-open, was gaping like a black, decaying hole. The nose still suppurated. A big reddish scab starting from one cheek was invading the mouth, contorting it into a dreadful grin. And on this grotesque and horrible mask of doom, the hair, her beautiful hair, retained its sunlit flame and ran like a golden stream. Venus was rotting. It seemed as if the virus she had picked up in the gutters from wayside carcasses, this infection with which she had poisoned a whole people, had just risen to her face and had rotted it. The room was empty. A great sigh of despair rose from the boulevards billowing the curtains. À Berlin! À Berlin! À Berlin! On the morning of January 7, 1880, when he had scrawled the word END at the bottom of the manuscript, Zola felt so washed-out with the physical and emotional effort of writing Nana that he tottered downstairs and crawled into bed. For three whole days he slept, unaware of the clamor his book was creating in Paris and the provinces. Never again would he allow his characters to get under his skin and into his bloodstream to that extent. Long before he had finished the book, the newspaper Le Voltaire had seized on its earlier chapters and was serializing them. And with such a drumbeat of publicity that Paris had never experienced. Sandwich men paraded the boulevards with NANA emblazoned in flaring print and suggestive caricatures across their boards; hoardings magnified these pictures and ran the saucier snippets from earlier chapters; stickers shone on horse-drawn buses, on shop windows, and even gas-jet lighters in tobacconists flaunted NANA cards. In Paris salons they were wagering on whether Nana was Valtesse de la Bigne, Cora Pearl, Hortense Schneider, Blanche d'Antigny, Rose Mignon; when the book appeared, Nana and every other major character were identified by the literary pundits, each with his own favorite. Zola expected all this as well as the invective which burst from the Paris critics. They called him an ambitious impotent maddened by sensual visions; an author who sprinkled his work with obscenities to attract lewd old men and women of every age; he was the crapulous, perverted, putrid sewer man and pornocrat of literature; Nana would grace every prostitute's bedside table, both as a reference work and a bible. BOSON BOOKS

114

A Moment of Truth Ironically, one of the Nouvelle-Athènes coterie, the poet Jean Richepin, who had served a month in jail for obscenity in his book of poems, La Chanson des Gueux (The Beggars' Song), used Nana as a pretext for writing a diatribe about the Médan Group. What was Zola? A pin-minded, fat-bottomed literary bureaucrat with no ideas, no sensibility, no poetry. Because he had circumnavigated Nana's bottom and read a lot of scientific crap, he was proclaiming the discovery of a new world. He wrote as he looked—like a master pork butcher, a full moon of dripping behind the sausages and tripe. Of the Médan Group, only two mattered— Maupassant, a real naturalist and artist who had accidentally washed up at Médan, and Alexis, the only natural Naturalist. Let them bawl, Zola thought. The louder, the further his name carried. Flaubert's note made up for all the slurs. "I spent all yesterday until 11.30 in the evening reading Nana and didn't sleep a wink last night. The characters are marvelously true to life. Nana's death is Michelangelesque. An enormous book, my dear fellow." Flaubert alone had caught the real significance of the book when he added that Nana verged on the myth without ceasing to be real. Didn't they see that Nana was a myth on the same plane as Eve and the serpent and the forbidden fruit? Nobody realized that Nana had emerged from the dark side of his mind and nature, that part of him which condemned sex as the destroyer if practiced for pleasure alone. Women who exploited sex for anything else that motherhood became man-eaters like Nana. But who could expect Parisian scribes to play anything but charades with his book? Not one of the hints he had dropped seemed to have got home to them. Yet, he had the last laugh. In March, 55,000 copies of Nana were sold during the first day of publication and Charpentier had ordered ten more editions. Nobody in publishing history had done so well with a novel. It gave him the courage to contemplate the eleven volumes he still had to write.

BOSON BOOKS

115

A Moment of Truth

BOOK 3

BOSON BOOKS

116

A Moment of Truth

I Six weeks ago on Easter Sunday, he and other members of the group had spent the day with Flaubert at Croisset, his country house on the Seine banks near Rouen; they had quit him next day, full of enthusiasm to finish his novel Bouvard et Pécuchet. Zola had embraced him and caught the raucous whisper, "What a book, your Nana!" Now he was standing with Daudet waiting to fall into step with the horsedrawn hearse bearing Flaubert's coffin uphill to the church among the trees where Madame Bovary had gone to confession and where the tocsin now sounded. Both men shook hands with Goncourt, Georges Charpentier, their editor, and Maupassant as they slow-marched at the head of the procession. As they climbed, Maupassant whispered the details of Flaubert's death. He had finished his book and was preparing to leave for Paris next day when he had a slight epileptic turn in his study; he managed to swallow a little ether in water but complained to his old maid-servant that everything around him looked yellow; he lay down on the Turkish divan saying he felt better, then his servant saw him fall backwards, convulse and die without another word. "That's how I'd like to go," Zola muttered, shivering in the sultry day. "A sledgehammer blow crushing me like a giant hand crushing an ant." "Me, too," Daudet murmured. Not so long ago, when Turgenev had given them dinner on his departure for Russia, they had talked—Daudet, Goncourt and he—about their obsession with death. Turgenev saw it like a great brown stain on the wall during a nightmare. Goncourt described how it had threatened and haunted him for ten long years, since Jules had died. Zola confessed how he lived in dread of death, thinking he was suffocating, counting his heartbeats hammering in his chest and lying awake at night with his lights blazing like some talisman to ward off Death. And Daudet? He had said, "A week ago, I was full of life...I could have kissed even the trees...Then one night with no warning and no pain I felt something nasty and sticky in my mouth, and after this clot I bled three times from a lung hemorrhage." Goncourt, who could never keep secrets other than his own and committed everything to his private diary, had hissed in Zola's ear the reason for Daudet's hemorrhage. Syphilis! His doctors had condemned him to a painful and fearful illness and an early death. At the end of the service, he watched the porters, bowed by the vast size and weight of Flaubert's coffin, slide it back into the hearse. "I'm glad he saw your first published story," he whispered to Mausapssant. Les Soirées de Médan had appeared in book form only ten days before and Flaubert had hailed “Boule de Suif” as a chef-d'oeuvre by his young disciple. Critics and the public had confirmed this verdict. Maupassant had stolen all their glory and could now give up his civil-service job and live off his writing. BOSON BOOKS

117

A Moment of Truth Seven miles they slow-stepped behind the hearse through a Rouen ignorant of or indifferent to Flaubert's death, and up to the Monumental Cemetery. There, as they lowered the coffin into the family grave, it stuck. No amount of heaving or straining could force it into the narrow space or loosen it. Zola listened to the creaking wood and gazed at the taut cords and heard Flaubert's niece sobbing, "Enough! Enough! Leave it till later," he and others cried. He fled, the sight of Flaubert wedged in that hole bursting his heart. "Only when a man falls do we realize how tall he was," he said to himself. But not here. Not in his native Normandy. On the boulevards of Rouen, the bourgeois were sipping their aperitifs and supping by the Seine as though nothing had changed. "How melancholy the funerals of great men," Zola sighed. He returned to Médan full of gloom and foreboding. Early in April he had attended Edmond Duranty's funeral at Saint-Ouen, a long trek with a couple of true friends. But it always struck in threes, Death. Who next? As the months passed he was shrugging aside his fears when his mother fell ill. For two years she had lived by herself in a tiny apartment in Rue Ballu. Near her son, but far enough away from her daughter-in-law. She had visited a nephew in Lorraine and had collapsed on returning to her flat. No sooner had they installed her in her old room at Médan than her heart gave way and she died on October 17, 1880. For two days, Zola shut himself away, unable to believe his mother had gone, unable to think she and Gabrielle had never come to terms with each other before her death. She had protected him, encouraged him in his dark hours, copied his manuscripts; he was flesh of her flesh, with her sensitivity, her nervous temperament, her phobias. She had asked to lie beside her husband, so he made arrangements for the funeral at Aix, though he warned his friend, Numa Coste, he wanted no official receptions, no crowds. When they carried the coffin from the upstairs bedroom, the narrow, kinked staircase at Médan defeated the undertakers; finally, they levered it through an upstairs window and swung it to the ground. Remembering Flaubert, Zola turned his head away, horrified in case the heavy box would fall and burst open. On their return from Aix, he felt footloose and lost, incapable of settling to work; he roamed round Médan sensing Death at his shoulder so obsessively that he never quit a room without touching each object, never closed a book or made a note without imagining it his last action on earth. He swore never to start anything or take any major decision on the seventeenth of a month. "Émeeloo! Émeeloo." Zola looked down from his turret window and spied the lanky figure gesticulating on the bridge. Throwing down his pen and calling his dogs, he ran down the two flights of stairs and across the sunken garden. "Paul, you've come." For a moment they embraced then had a good look at each other. "You've put on a bit more weight," Cézanne commented. "And you've lost some more hair on top," Zola countered. "How did you get here?" "I walked across country from Pontoise and followed the railway line like you said." BOSON BOOKS

118

A Moment of Truth "But that's fifteen miles! You must be starving." Cézanne shook his head. "I had some garlic sausage and a bit of bread in my knapsack." He gazed at the house which now had a square turret on the left, an octagonal one on the right and the original building slung in the middle like a drunk between two gendarmes. "I'll set up my easel where it was two years ago on the other side." Zola nodded. "The island belongs to me and there's a chalet where you can put your gear and paint all day." He looked at Cézanne who had hair down to his shoulders under his floppy straw hat; he had streaks of gray in his beard and cross-hatching round his brown eyes. "How're things at Aix?" he asked. Cézanne mouthed an oath. "The tyrant is still doing his damnedest to find out about Hortense and the boy, but he hasn't got proof yet. So I still get my allowance." "Well, if you need any more money..." Cézanne put his arms round Zola affectionately. "Thanks Émeeloo. I was grateful for what you sent Hortense when the old miser stopped my money. We couldn't have lived without it." Zola waved his thanks aside. At forty-two, a year older than himself, Paul still lived in fear of the old banker and kept his mistress and child secret in case his small allowance was cut. Would he ever cast adrift from that family with its old martinet and Marie, that hellfire-and-brimstone spinster sister? He liked Paul's mother, a peasant with more heart than all the others put together. As though thought-reading, Cézanne stopped just beyond the bridge. "I was sorry about your mother, Émeeloo," he said. Zola turned and fixed his eyes on the shuttered window of the original building. "They had to push the coffin through there," he muttered, his eyes moistening. "I never look at it without wondering who's next." He turned to Cézanne. "You're my brother, Paul. I can tell you things I'd tell nobody else." He unburdened himself about Duranty and Flaubert, about his mother and his sorrow that she and Gabrielle had never grown to like each other. Her death had knocked a hole in his nihilism. "It's stupid, Paul." "No, I often have the same feelings." "Her death convinced me there's something beyond us all...something permanent, something divine." Cézanne gazed quizzically at him. Was he listening to Zola, leader of the Naturalist School, creator of animal man and woman with their blood fired by sex and criminal instincts? Zola, the self-styled atheist? For a second, he felt like loosing off some quip about the Determinist philosophy that pervaded every line of the Rougon-Macquart books; but he realized that Zola was now speaking as seriously as the boy on the banks of the Arc nearly thirty years ago. They had reached the riverside where a punt lay moored. "Maupassant rowed this all the way from Rouen and we broke six bottles of champagne over her at the christening." "What's she called?" "Nana. Did you read the copy I sent you?"

BOSON BOOKS

119

A Moment of Truth "I did, and I even did a painting based on it. Woman Triumphant. Nana lying spread-eagled in the nude surrounded by her victims. I was going to make you a present of it." Zola hesitated. He could well imagine what Paul had made of Nana; and he could well imagine how Coco would react to such a gift. She had never forgiven Paul; she disliked his art and she detested his habit of taking off his jacket at her table, drinking his soup out of his plate and, when he had swallowed a glass too many, reciting the more robust lines of his favorite poet, Baudelaire. Zola wondered if he set out to annoy Coco. "Manet has already done Nana," he said. "Bah! That's bourgeois stuff." Zola made no comment. Paul was talking about Manet as a rival in the way that he considered Victor Hugo; about the Manet who had finally won over the Salon jury with pictures like Le Bon Bock and had earned a medal which meant they had to hang his work; about the Manet who could command what prices he liked from the highest in the land, and next year (so they whispered) would get the Legion of Honor. Paul evidently did not know the other Manet, the one who limped around on a cane and twitched so much he often had to discard the brush for pastels, the one who had terminal syphilis and wouldn't enjoy his fame much longer. On the other side, he leapt out to tie up Nana then watched as Cézanne stalked the area and eventually pitched his easel in a precise spot. "Must it be the same place?" "See here, Émeelo, if I move my easel or my head one way or another, the whole picture changes." "An Impressionist worrying about that!" "An Impressionist wouldn't still be working on this," Cézanne muttered. "If only you'd keep the house as it was." "Your style has changed, too, Paul." Zola marveled at the immense labor Cézanne had wrought on that canvas. His house, trees, river and sky—everything seemed welded together in an ornate tapestry of greens, reddish-browns, violet, blue and gray. Thousands of times he had gazed at his Médan house from this spot, yet this canvas gave him the droll sensation that he was seeing it for the first time. Paul's painting appeared as solid as the turrets, as immemorial as the hills behind and the Seine before his house. He worked slower than ever, Zola observed. For minutes on end, his narrowed eyes looked stuck to the subject; he would then pause while he chose the exact color tint; another pause and he would decide where to place the stroke. Then the brush dipped in turpentine and wiped clean before the painful routine commenced again. And he still got as much paint on himself as on his canvas! But what a difference between the rapin who had tried to sling his temperament on to the canvas and the artist who now seemed submissive, even humble, before this subject. "You've come a long way from Impressionism, Paul." "Impressionism is only an eye,” Cézanne said. "You need something more than that—you need feeling." BOSON BOOKS

120

A Moment of Truth "Surely, all the Impressionist formula wants is a genius to put his stamp on it?" Like Naturalism, Cézanne almost said but stopped himself. "Émeeloo, you talk rot at times," he muttered. "Monet, Renoir and Pissarro are all geniuses but their Impressionism doesn't go far enough." "Oh! What's wrong with portraying nature faithfully? I do in my books and the public doesn't shun me." "Art has nothing to do with copying nature. Any artist worth his salt has to express nature through his own sensations." "But the line!" "Ah, the years I wasted on that! Nature doesn't have lines. You draw with color and the contours appear by themselves if you've found the right color harmonies and contrasts." Zola pointed to the canvas. "But you've got no light into your painting. Look at the Seine in greens and ochers and..." Cézanne threw his hands up in irritation, then pointed his brush at the sunlit river. "Try painting that and you get only reflections. You let light in with color, though without sacrificing the structure of things. So you build slowly by modulating your colors." "But Paul, that's all technique. Where does the art come in?" "Émeeloo that's the secret, the only secret. Temperament. If only I could put my sensations on canvas." He groaned. "I find a motif and start painting...I can see everything...colors, planes, contours drop into place...but I can't finish it...Maybe it's because I don't feel deeply enough that I can't realize my sensations...Émeeloo, I wonder sometimes if I shall ever paint a masterpiece." Impulsively, he threw down his brush, but after a few minutes picked it up with the dozen others he had used and went to wash them in the river. Zola helped him pack his gear then rowed them back across the Seine. Coco greeted them, holding out a hand to Cézanne who excused himself for not taking it. "I don't want to cover you in paint, Ma'am," he said, straight-faced. Undeceived, she shrugged and showed him to his room. Passing her linencupboard, she picked up an armful of rags. "I remembered to keep these for you, Paul," she said. "To clean your canvases." He thanked her. Zola spectated silently at these verbal fencing-matches. Coco stared at Cézanne's grubby knapsack. "Haven't you brought your dinner jacket?" she asked. "No, Ma'am...I wondered if I shouldn't get back to Pontoise." "But Paul, you promised to stay for a week at least," Zola expostulated. "We'll fit him up with one of mine, Gabrielle." She inclined her head. When Cézanne had washed and changed, he walked into the vast study to surprise Zola scribbling notes and thrusting these into a thick file. While waiting, he sketched the massive square head, its tonsure staring at him like some Cyclopean eye as Zola bent over his work. Émeeloo, it seemed, still composed his novels by filling these dossiers with reams of material on his characters, fitting them into his hereditary scheme and slotting all this into an environment. ("Assemble the dramatis personae, aim them on a collision course and the plot writes itself, Paul.") BOSON BOOKS

121

A Moment of Truth To Cézanne, it seemed as phony as the Provençal fireplace, the mediaeval stained-glass windows and the junk-shop treasures scattered through the study. Poor Émeeloo, still the chaste bookworm of Bourbon College. A volume lay on the desk and he picked it up. To his astonishment, he recognized Balzac's Philosophical Tales, his favorite reading. Indeed, one of these stories, “Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu” (The Unknown Masterpiece), had shaped his decision to become a painter. In those few pages, which haunted him whenever he lifted a brush, Balzac had summed up every real artist's Calvary. He flipped through the pages to the story. Balzac had seized on a moment at the beginning of the seventeenth century when young Nicolas Poussin goes to pay his respects to Porbus, court painter to Henry IV, and runs into the gnome, Frenhofer, a bizarre figure with puckish face, bulging brow, silver beard and sea-green eyes. Frenhofer rips Porbus's artistic philosophy and his pictures to pieces; no artist can satisfy himself to become a vile copyist; he is really a poet with a mission to express nature; he must abjure line and drawing which, anyway, do not exist for the painter, who must model as he paints; he must also avoid painting light which only defines the shape of things. Young Poussin listens to these apocalyptic utterances; he stares, amazed, as the homunculus grasps Porbus's brush and with a few deft strokes converts the artist's portrait into a masterpiece. When he has departed, Porbus explains that Frenhofer has meditated so long about line and color that he now doubts the objects themselves. He is as mad as he is a great painter. Yet, Poussin must see Frenhofer's own unfinished masterpiece even if it means allowing his young and beautiful mistress, Gillette, to pose in the nude for the finishing touches. Both he and Porbus enter Frenhofer's studio to find masterpieces covering its walls; but when they both look at the final masterpiece, they discern only an inchoate mass of confused color and strange lines. Frenhofer refuses to believe that it is not a masterpiece. They are jealous of it and him, he cries, and pushes them outside. That night he burns his paintings and next day he is found dead. Zola had covered this story with annotations and underlined Frenhofer's statements. "I didn't know you had read this, Émeeloo," Cézanne said, wondering if Zola had really understood the mystic significance of Balzac's tale. A guilty look crossed Zola's face. "Yes, I have," he admitted. "It's one of my favorite Balzac tales." "Mine too." "You know, while we were talking on the island, I could almost hear the overtones of Frenhofer expounding his theories to Porbus and Poussin." "I know," Cézanne muttered. "Frenhofer couldn't realize his sensations either." Frenhofer! Paul was talking as though Frenhofer existed outside the pages of Balzac. Zola looked sharply at him. "Nobody, not even Balzac, has ever really brought paintings and painters to life in a book," he said. "And you're going to, Émeeloo? From Ary Sheffer to Manet, is that it?" He guffawed. BOSON BOOKS

122

A Moment of Truth His joke held too much hidden irony for Zola to share it. How could he reveal that this dossier lying between them on his desk contained twenty years of notes about artists; that he had garnered all the evidence from those Thursday dinners with his Aix gang, with Manet, Pissarro, Renoir and Monet; that he had just jotted down their dialogue on the Grande Íle; that, finally, Paul himself would serve as the prototype of the tragic and demented hero of the novel which he was calling L'Oeuvre (The Work). Years go, he had intended to write the book as the fourth of the RougonMacquart series. In all those years only one thing had stayed his hand: What would Paul say? Would writing the truth as he had seen and lived it in such a book lose him the only person he had ever considered a true friend? His misgivings he had even confessed to Gabrielle, who had dismissed them. "Write it, Meemeel, whatever anyone says," she had urged him. Yes, but she had such a dislike of Paul, he thought. So he had procrastinated. One day he might have the courage to put it all down on paper. But not this year. Or next. As he heard the gong ring for lunch, he took the Balzac stories from Paul and led the way downstairs. "By the way, I've invited Guillemet for Sunday." "That oaf!" "I asked him for only one reason—he has the Legion of Honor and a jacket covered with Salon medals and he'll be a member of next year's jury. So he can get your painting hung." "Ah, if only I had half your savoir-faire, Émeeloo," Cézanne sighed. Zola wondered it was a compliment or a veiled insult.

BOSON BOOKS

123

A Moment of Truth

II In the manager's office, Zola donned his pit gear starting with the thick, woolen shirt then pulling on the blue dungarees and the miner's smock; he laced up his ankle boots, tied a cloth skullcap round his head to protect his thinning hair and jammed a leather cap on top of this. Accompanied by Engineer Dubus, his boyish guide, he walked across to the pithead where several maintenance men were queuing in the winding-shed for the cage to take them underground. As he watched them pack into the primitive vehicle, he experienced a sudden panic. What was he doing at forty-four challenging his claustrophobia by scrabbling down one of the deepest pits in France, setting his weak heart pounding his spine sweating and his fingers trembling so much that he could hardly hold his notebook? Why couldn't he have found a more congenial subject for his thirteenth book? Thirteen! Was that unlucky, or lucky because of his favorite three? He had no time for such fine arithomania; as the cage came up and banged against its chocks, he found himself thrust and wedged into it with the engineer and three other men; suddenly, he felt chilled as though the blood were draining from his limbs and they were plummeting downwards at 800 feet a minute. Before they reached the bottom he was soaked by water seeping then spewing from the shaft sides; gallery after gallery flashed past and he lost all notion of time when abruptly they banged against the bottom gallery. On quitting the cage, he heard a rumbling and a string of hutches hove into view with a small boy sitting on the first one chucking at the pony pulling the train. "Are you all right, Monsieur Zola?" Dubus asked. "Oui, ça va," he said, trying to keep the lisp and quaver out of his voice. He shouldn't have listened to his friend, Alfred Giard, the socialist member of parliament for Valenciennes when he had written to say he had a ready-made novel about the miners of his area, who had struck for a shorter week, better working conditions and nationalization of the mines. Zola had met Giard in Brittany during the holidays and the politician had mentioned how restive the miners on the Franco-Belgian border were growing. Now, 12,000 of them had gone on strike on February 19, 1884. Zola had not hesitated. Here, he had an obvious Naturalist novel; the dramatic unity or a great mine; a bizarre breed of miners herded together and shaped by their tight environment; and the two classes, miners and coal-owners on a head-on collision course. Four days after the strike began, he arrived and interviewed miners and their leaders and wrung permission from the Anzin Mining Company to go down the Renard Pit. Now, he stood in the entrails of this mine looking along the three galleries leading from the central area and the stables. Dubus showed him how to hook his Davy lamp round his coat button and led him along the widest of the galleries; Zola trudged in the sticky slime between the rails, his back bent, his beard dank with sweat and his breath coming in short gasps. Throughout his life, one nightmare had recurred in which he was running down an endless tunnel blocked at both ends. And he had to come here and relive BOSON BOOKS

124

A Moment of Truth his nightmare! Why? He didn't know. He just kept plodding behind Dubus, barking his elbows on the rock face and thanking Providence for the leather cap which saved his skull. From time to time, they had to flatten against the sides as hutches slid past. "What happened up there?" Zola asked, pointing to a gallery they had walled off. "A seam collapsed. The men didn't put in enough pit-props because it cost the mine-owners too much in piecework." By the light of his guttering Davy lamp, Zola wrote, "Timbering—cause of accidents, and death? Source of conflict between miners and bosses." As they trekked on, water dripped from the roof and streamed from the sides of the narrowing gallery. Dubus stopped and thumbed at his lamp. "See how it's burning blue," he said. "Firedamp." He ran his open hand over a bit of unworked coal-face. "You wanted to see a blower—there's one." Zola heard a slight, bubbling noise and felt a draught on the back of his hand. "It collects on the seam roof and we have to check that it isn't building up too quickly and might explode," Dubus explained. It took another half-hour to reach the coal-face where half a dozen nonstrikers were working; four lay on their sides or backs to attack the coal seam with short picks while others cleared and loaded the coal into hutches. Only the whites of their eyes and the sweat tracks on their faces and bare bodies reflected the weak, fluid light in which they toiled. "And you say that until ten years ago you had girls working as hauliers on those hutches," Zola queried. Dubus nodded. Squatting on his haunches, Zola squinted through misting pince-nez to record page after page of impressions since his descent. This scene enthralled him, even driving his fear of live burial out of his consciousness; he just had to wait until the miners finished their morning stint to watch them swig their cold coffee and munch bread and cheese. When Dubus suggested he might have had enough, he snorted, "No, I want to see everything." They slogged back to allow him to fill his notebook with details about the pit horses, the winding gear, the shaft with its cage and escape ladders. On the way to the surface, he stopped the cage at two of the four levels where water gushed from the shaft. "Where does that come from?" he asked. Dubus explained that when they sank these pits between Calais and Valenciennes, they hit underground lakes and rivers along the deeper valleys; this forced them to revet all the shafts with wood, caulked like a ship's timbers. Zola tapped the wooden sheathing which rang hollow. What happened to those men below if this really sprang a leak? He wondered and made a note and underlined it, heavily. Daylight had never appeared so brilliant or welcome when he stepped out of the cage. "Well, now you've seen it all, Monsieur Zola," Dubus said, grinning. "Eh, oui! I've seen the pit your bosses told you to show me," Zola said. "This afternoon we'll have to look at the one the miners say I should see—the one they call the Hell-hole." BOSON BOOKS

125

A Moment of Truth "It's a bit risky." "That's why I've got to go down and see it for myself." Already he had outlined his scheme for the book: This novel is the revolt by the workers, the jolt given to the mining company which yields for a moment; in a word, the battle between capital and labor. That's the important thing in this book, but I want to predict the future, asking the question which will be the most important of the twentieth century. So, to establish this tussle which will be the nub of the book, I must show on one hand the work, the miners in the mine, on the other hand, the Capital, the management, the bosses, anyway the top people. In eight frenzied days he had witnessed enough to write a dozen novels. Touring mining villages, known by numbers rather than names, he put hundreds of questions to pitmen, their wives and children; he catalogued their crude furniture, listed their daily meals, followed the men into their cramped pubs and bistrots to drink beer and listen to their gossip. In that bitter February when the River Scarpe froze over, he stood listening to Michel Rondet, a young miners' leader, harangue the strikers from the Anzin and Denain mines, urging them to stand firm for an eight-hour day, half an hour for coffee and briquet (chuck), the end of piecework, a sick and retirement fund, more safety measures with miners represented on accident boards and finally nationalization of the mines. Zola came to know that area like his own Médan village; it had a certain sinister allure with its dross-heaps like funereal pyramids floating on the windswept plain; he visited its hospitals where miners were coughing themselves to death with lung diseases; he drank tea and nibbled petit-fours with mine managers and their ladies and heard their version of the strike; he badgered technical men and accountants for facts and figures about coal production and wages and profits; he sat for hours in the small estaminet owned by Émile Basly, Secretary of the Northern Miniers' Union and a power among Anzin miners. At the end, he realized he had a big novel in the making. And what a Determinist theme! These miners seemed to have sprouted from the black earth in which they toiled, seemed bred and shaped and conditioned by the mine and coal they hewed, down to the aniline coal-dye marks on their faces and bodies. So, too, had the bourgeois mine managers adapted, appearing to merge with their tapestried and brocaded and upholstered homes, to have stepped from the gilt-framed canvases of their parents and grandparents hanging over their marble mantelpieces. And over both antagonists and their conflict brooded his pit, Le Voreux, a voracious black beast which would play the real villain of his drama, exacting revenge on both classes. For the rest of March 1884, he devoured everything he could trace on mines and miners, building a dossier of more than 950 pages. He would make his hero Étienne Lantier, son of Gervaise and stepbrother of Nana, who would land at Anzin looking for work. Étienne would serve as a pair of new eyes and set the scene for the drama that he himself would provoke as the strike leader. His BOSON BOOKS

126

A Moment of Truth baleful heredity (offspring of the tainted Macquarts and shiftless Lantiers) would also affect the tragedy. On April 2, the day the French government sent in soldiers to quell rioting strikers, Zola set to work on the book. It took a hundred and fifty pages, a quarter of the book, to describe Étienne's first day at the colliery, a panorama which embraced his shift underground, his contact with the miners and their families and a glimpse of the cosseted bosses. He spared none of the sordid truths. As a Naturalist novelist, why should he? To Étienne, everything in that underworld seems strange and bewildering: Movement recommenced at all nine levels and everywhere could be heard the regular calling of the boys and the snorting of the haulage girls as they arrived on the flat, steaming like overloaded mares. A shock-wave of animal lust ran through the mine, the sudden sexual urge of the male when a miner met one of these girls on all fours with her bottom in the air and her buttocks bursting out of her boy's breeches. On his visit to the mines, Zola had observed that packing whole families into one room bred a casual attitude to sex and even encouraged incest. And sexual appetites thrived on hunger and frustration. Like any other appetite. How many chits of girls in their early teens had he counted in the family way? A hundred paces further on, he (Étienne) came across more couples. He was arriving at Réquillart and there, around the old, disused mine all the Montsou girls prowled with their lovers. It was lovers' lane, the remote and lonely place where haulage girls got their first baby when they did not dare risk sex in the attic room at home...Every girl made herself at home, for there were hidingplaces for everybody and their boy-friends had them on beams, behind wooden piles or in hutches. They squeezed together without bothering about neighbors. It seemed as though, around this impotent machine, near this pit which had wearied of delivering its coal, the life force was exacting its revenge in free love which used the lash of instinct to plant infants in the bellies of those girls who were hardly more than infants themselves. Étienne develops a crush on Catherine, thirteen-year-old daughter of his shift foreman, Maheu, but she gives herself, unwillingly, to his rival, Chaval. However, Étienne throws in his lot with the miners; when the company pares their wages below the breadline by declaring a new pay structure forcing miners to timber and lose piecework money, he urges them to strike and becomes their leader. Inevitably, the day arrives when the starving and frustrated miners decide to march against their bosses, to sabotage the pits, to take their revenge on people like Maigrat, the oversexed storekeeper who had exacted payment in kind from most of the village women. A mob of thousands of men and women rampaged across the frozen plains, yelling threats as they passed the watching bosses: The women had come into view, nearly a thousand women with straggling, unkempt hair, disheveled by their tramp, their flesh showing through rags, the BOSON BOOKS

127

A Moment of Truth nakedness of women weary of bringing children into the world to starve to death. Some carried babies and held them aloft waving them like flags of mourning and vengeance. Younger ones, their bosoms thrust out like warriors, brandished staves; while the terrible old crones yelled so loudly that the sinews of their scrawny necks seemed about to snap. The men brought up the rear, two thousand raging men, potboys, colliers, repairers, a compact mass moving like a solid block, so tightly-bunched that their faded breeches and their ragged pullovers merged into the uniform landscape. Their eyes blazed and all that could be seen were the black holes of their mouths chanting La Marseillaise, its verses lost in a confused bellow accompanied by the drumming of clogs on the hard earth. Above their heads, among the bristling iron bars, an axe was raised and held aloft; and that single axe which was like the banner of the mob, had the sharp profile of a guillotine blade in the clear air... The main body had gone by, leaving only the stragglers, when La Mouquette appeared. She was dawdling, she was on the look-out for bourgeois at their garden gates or their windows; and when she discovered them, not being able to spit in their faces, she showed them what she considered the supreme act of her scorn. Obviously she spied one now, for she suddenly up with her skirt, braced her buttocks and cocked up her enormous bottom, its bareness glowing in the last sunlight. There was nothing obscene about this bottom and it made nobody laugh, so terrible it was... They had caught sight of Maigrat on the shed roof...All of a sudden both hands lost their hold, he rolled like a ball, bounced over the drainpipe and fell so awkwardly on the party-wall that he rebounded on to a kilometer stone and smashed open his skull. Out spurted his brains. He was dead. From an upper window his wife, pale and dim behind the panes, kept looking...But the women had other scores to settle with him. Like she-wolves they prowled round him, sniffing him, all of them seeking to relieve their feelings with some outrage, some savagery. Ma Brûlé's shrill voice was heard: "We must doctor him like a tomcat." "Oui, oui! Like a cat. Like a cat. He's used it too often, the bastard!" La Mouquette was already undoing his trousers, pulling them off while Levaque lifted his legs. And Ma Brûlé, with her withered old hands, shoved his bare thighs apart and grasped his dead virility. She grabbed the lot and pulled with such force that her skinny spine stretched like a bow and her long arms cracked. The soft skin resisted and she had to take another hold on it and finally she wrenched loose the tattered organ, a lump of hairy, bleeding flesh which she waved aloft with a triumphant snarl. "I have it, I have it." "Ah! You bugger, you won't stuff our daughters any more!" Then Ma Brûlé impaled the whole thing on the end of her stick; and carrying this in the air like a banner, she set off down the street followed by a stampede of screaming women. Drops of blood rained from this bit of pitiful flesh which hung like some scraggy waste meat on a butcher's stall... Behind the shutters, the ladies were craning their necks. They had not witnessed the scene, hidden by the wall, and they could see nothing clearly in the growing darkness. BOSON BOOKS

128

A Moment of Truth "What have they got at the end of that stick?" Cécile asked when she plucked up the courage to look. Lucie and Jeanne declared it must be a rabbit-skin. "No, no," murmured Madame Hennebeau, "They have looted the porkbutcher's. I'd say it was a bit of pork." Then she shuddered and shut up. Madame Grégoire had nudged her with her knee. Both their jaws dropped. The girls, pale as death, asked no more questions, but their eyes followed the red vision until it was lost in the darkness. Monsieur Hennebeau is standing by an upstairs window watching the enraged mob go by, listening to their shouts. "We want bread. We want bread!" "Imbeciles," repeated Monsieur Hennebeau. "Do you think I'm happy?" His anger boiled over against these people who did not understand. He would willingly have made them a gift of his fat salary to have their tough hides and the inconsequent ease with which they took their sexual pleasures. Let them sit at his table and stuff themselves with his pheasant while he was having it off behind the hedges, rolling girls over without giving a damn about who had rolled them over before him. He would have given everything, his learning, his well-being, his comfort, his manager's powers if he could be—just for a day—the meanest of these poor devils who took his orders, free with his own body, uncouth enough to beat his wife and take his pleasure with other men's wives. When the government sends in troops to protect the mines against wreckers and saboteurs, the miners defy the soldiers and provoke them into firing by stoning them. Maheu, La Mouquette, Ma Brûlé with eleven others, and twentyfive miners are wounded; Étienne now finds the whole mining community turning against him as the strike leader, but he still decides to resume work in the pit with Catherine; no one knows that Souvarine, the Russian pit mechanic and nihilist, has sabotaged the shaft-linings; the mine fills with water, trapping scores of men underground, including Étienne and Catherine; some men escape before the mine disintegrates and literally sinks into the ground. Étienne, Catherine and her husband, Chaval, manage to make their way through the flooded galleries to wait, waist-deep in water, for the rescue teams. Chaval and Étienne have a final quarrel, the Macquart blood lust overcomes Étienne who smashes his rival's head in with a stone; he then has to sit listening to Catherine's final delirious words. When they finally bring Étienne to the surface, after letting him get used to the lamplight and giving him some food, they see he is a skeleton with snowwhite hair, and they draw back, trembling at the sight of this old man. Zola faced a problem after all these crude and bloody scenes he had written, Should he end the story there, with Étienne, on a tragic note? For a long time, Zola deliberated this course; but he had called the book Germinal, a name symbolizing the revolt of starving workers during the French Revolution, but also the immemorial cycle of death and rebirth, the resurgence of Nature. He had brought Étienne Lantier into the story two months before, hungry and penniless, had walked with him through so many ordeals to his final defeat. How could he put him back on the road without hope in his heart?

BOSON BOOKS

129

A Moment of Truth Quitting the Vandame road, Étienne struck the cobbled highway. On his right lay Montsou losing itself in the valley. Before him he saw the ruins of Le Voreux, the accursed hole which three pumps were draining round the clock. Then he picked up other pits on the horizon, La Victoire, Saint-Thomas, FeutryCantel; while towards the north, the high columns of blast-furnaces and batteries of coke-ovens smoked in the limpid morning air. If he didn't want to miss the eight o'clock train he must hurry, for he had six kilometers to do. Deep underground, the stubborn hammering of picks went on. All his comrades were there, he could hear them keeping time to each step he took...The April sun hung high in the sky, pouring its rays on the fertile earth. Life burst from her womb, buds were coming into flower, and the fields quivered with growing grass. Everywhere, grains were swelling and lengthening, cracking open the plain in their thirst for heat and light. Sap overflowed and ran with whispering voices, life-germs burgeoned as though embracing with a kiss. On and on, clearer and clearer, his comrades were tapping as though they, too, were getting nearer the surface. In the fiery sunlight on this young morning, the whole land was pregnant with this sound. Men were springing up, a black host of avengers which germinated slowly in the furrows and grew to manhood for the harvest of the next century. And soon, their germination would crack open the earth. *** Germinal had already sold as a serial to Gil Blas which started publishing at the end of November 1884; as he read the installments, he wondered whether the book had merited all the conquered fears, the nervous tension, the sweat and labor he had injected into its pages. It had the smell of a social survey. "I wonder what sort of book I've written," he said on handing the definitive manuscript over to Georges Charpentier. Not so the critics. With few exceptions, they judged Germinal a masterpiece. He could not hope that right-wing critics like Ulbach, Henri Rochefort and Édouard Drumont would treat him gently; they castigated him for La Mouquette's vulgar bottom, for gelding Maigrat, for blackening an already bleak and sordid picture of the mines, for creating the disturbing figure of Souvarine, the soulless anarchist, for the macabre scenes in the flooded pit. A book with one living character—a pit—and dozens of others all stillborn, some critics sneered. But the majority discerned the poetry and symbolism. Jules Lemaitre wrote: "I know of no other novel where such masses of people are made to live and act...Monsieur Zola has magnificently rendered what is fatal, blind, impersonal, irresistible in a drama of this kind, the epidemic anger, the collective spirit of crowds easily roused to violence and fury." Maupassant wrote him a note saying, "You have set going such a sympathetic and brutal mass of humanity, probed so much pitiful stupidity and misery, stirred up such a terrible and desolate mob within an admirable setting that never has a book contained so much life and movement and such a cast of characters." That pleased him, the more so since Maupassant was cutting adrift from the Médan Group and even from many of his old friends. This time, socialists like BOSON BOOKS

130

A Moment of Truth Jules Guesde and radicals like Georges Clemenceau welcomed the book as doing more than all the speechmaking to bring home the tragic sequel of strikes created by the tussle between master and man, money and muscle. Germinal they looked on as a revolutionary book. Zola himself did not see it that way. Politics he left to other people. As a Determinist writer, he contented himself with painting things as they appeared to him. Well, perhaps a little bigger with poetic license. If Germinal set them arguing, so much the better. He wondered how they would argue about the book he had already begun, the one he had postponed for years and even now gave him some qualms. L'Oeuvre (The Work).

BOSON BOOKS

131

A Moment of Truth

III Four days after he had written the first lines of L'Oeuvre, a letter arrived from Cézanne, posted in Aix and dated May 14, 1885. Coming just as he was writing about his best friend, it was the sort of omen that disturbed Zola. He read the cryptic phrases in the tall, looping script, wondering what they meant. Paul had written: My dear Émile, I write to you hoping you will be good enough to reply. I should like you to do me several favors, nothing to you but of the greatest importance to me. This is to receive several letters for me and forward them to the address I shall give you later. Either I am mad or I am sane. Trahit sua quemque voluptas. I turn to you and implore your forgiveness. How happy are wise men! Do not refuse me this favor. I don't know where to turn.” Paul had scribbled a post-script: I am small and can do nothing for you, but since I shall depart before you, I shall intercede with the Almighty to keep you a good place. What was happening to Paul? A year or two ago he had made a will naming him executor. Half his money would go to his mother and half to his son. Nothing to Hortense, who had shared his life for sixteen years! Old Cézanne, it seemed, had gone gaga but not to the extent of parting with his fortune, and it seemed he had cached gold all over the Jas de Bouffan. He still terrified Paul who had never confessed about his mistress and son. Had he now dropped into the clutches of that desiccated sister, Marie? Alexis informed him that Paul now haunted Saint-Sauveur cathedral, reeked of sanctity and walked in dread of hellfire. Zola knew something about that religious mania, starting with the fear of life and ending with the fear of death. When he had managed to persuade Guillemet to use his pull as a juryman to get one of Paul's early portraits hung in the 1882 Salon, he had gone to have a look, thinking it might make a small scene in L'Oeuvre; it had taken an age to locate the painting, hung so high in such a shadowed corner of the Palais de l'Industrie it looked like a two-sous postage stamp. So, the Salon was still paying Paul back for all those insults. Zola felt for him. But exactly what did this letter mean? Trahit sua quemque voluptas—Each is led by his own desire. Had Paul fallen for some wench? That wouldn't surprise him, for he knew Paul had suppressed his explosive emotions during most of his life. Who understood better than himself, who had done likewise? Coco sniggered at the letter. "No doubt about it—somebody has finally got her hooks into him. I told you your friend, Paul, had never grown up." Without heeding her, Zola replied that he would perform any service Paul wanted. For a month nothing happened, then a letter from Auguste Renoir's BOSON BOOKS

132

A Moment of Truth address in La Roche-Guyon, a few miles across country. Paul asked him to forward letters from Aix to the poste-restante there. So it was a girl, and he had fallen in love! Dutifully, he sent on the letters, only to discover that Paul had forgotten his own instructions and failed to retrieve them for a whole week. In July, Cézanne wrote asking if he could stay with Zola in Paris or at Médan. At that thought, Coco went down with nervous prostration, but Zola promised to lodge Cézanne at Médan when they moved house there for the summer. A letter came back from Paul saying he had made up his mind to return to Aix but would call at Médan on the way. On July 22, Zola and Alexis drove to Triel station to meet him; he twitched all over, looked wild-eyed and haggard and wore clothes he might have slept rough in for a week. Zola could see he was dying to unburden himself, but not in front of Alexis. When they reached the house all three mounted to the study. "Émile, why don't you read us the first bit of L'Oeuvre?" Alexis suggested. "No," Zola snapped. "Paul's in no mood for the nonsense I've written about art and artists." "Go on. See if he can spot our friends." "Yes, Émeeloo, I'd like to hear it." Reluctantly, Zola opened the manuscript and began to read, wondering how Paul would react to the narrative of their early days in Aix and Paris. At first, he had to control his lisp and trembling hands, but these symptoms disappeared as he became absorbed in the book. Curious, he had hardly realized how much of himself he had grafted on to the personality of Lantier-Cézanne, the timid young painter full of artistic fire which should have set his canvases alight and never did, the romantic full of sensual passion which he bottled up so tightly that it exploded in a perverted distrust of all women. Paul and he might have been blood brothers from the way they had shaped their lives and careers; Paul had painted The Rape and The Strangled Woman, just as macabre subjects as his Thérèse Raquin and Madeleine Férat; they had both cocked a snook at authority and suffered critical scorn; they had begun as Romantics and escaped into Realism; they both at once idealized and mistrusted women, considering them a danger for their art; they had the grandiose notion of cramming Life whole into a book or on to a canvas. Only...only he, Zola, had compromised, had forsaken his early love, poetry, and had betrayed his artistic ethos with every book. At least, that's what Paul might have said. "But you've put us all in, Émeelo," Cézanne said. And as Zola mentioned them, he identified each member of the old gang who had congregated for the Thursday dinners in the early Sixties. Henriette, the helpmeet, was Coco; Mahoudeau, the hand-to-mouth sculptor was Philippe Solari; Chaine, bigheaded and ham-fisted, was Chaillan, a dauber from Trets, near Aix; Jory, the penny-a-line journalist and dim-eyed Don Juan was Alexis; Fagerolles, the artistic pimp and medal-hunter, was Guillemet; and the shadowy figures of Flaubert, Courbet, Manet and the dead Bazille flitted through the pages; both Zola and Cézanne went back in memory nearly twenty years at the description of the Café Baudequin (Guerbois) with the Impressionist bunch BOSON BOOKS

133

A Moment of Truth arguing across its marbles tables; and Bennecourt, where Zola had first expounded the Rougon-Macquart series to Cézanne. As Zola came to the end of what he had written of the book and his voice tailed off, they heard a snore and saw that Alexis had dropped off to sleep. "So, that's the effect it's going to have on my readers," Zola grunted. "No Émeeloo, it's good and true. You've given us back the best days of our youth. All I'd like to know is how it ends." "So should I," Zola muttered, casting a glance at the dossier, bulky with twenty years of material. How could he explain to Paul that his frustrated painter would never break through or leave his mark on art; that his story would end in tragedy. He led them downstairs, through the sunken garden towards the river which spangled in the long sunlight. "Émeelo, they've discovered everything," Cézanne blurted. "You'd better tell me from the beginning, Paul." "Of course...you don't know," Cézanne mumbled. "Well, Marie hired a new maid called Fanny at the Jas. You should see how beautiful she is—with a body just like a man's." Cézanne went on to describe how he had made a written declaration of his love for her and she had reciprocated; they had planned to elope though they didn't know or care where; so deeply had he fallen in love that he didn't care what happened to Hortense and had decided she could keep the boy. Listening to this garbled story, Zola could well imagine Paul's platonic infatuation and his bungled plot to elope. "That's when I wrote to you, Émeeloo." He had fled first, making for Renoir's home in La Roche-Guyon; although they had welcomed him, Renoir and his mistress had a child and were going through a difficult period themselves. He was going to wait for Fanny to join him there. "Then, what's forcing you to go back, Paul?" "They found out everything. Marie must have opened one of my letters to Fanny. Hortense and the boy came up to Renoir's and I had to run. "Do you know where Fanny is now?" Cézanne shook his head, sadly, confessing that he did not even know her full name or her home address. "If I thought she'd write, I would wait," he said. He turned to Zola. "You're strong, Émeeloo. What would you do?" "I'd go back and have it out with them, and if you're in love with Fanny you settle things with Hortense and leave." "But you know me...I'm no match for them...a weakling like me." He gave a deep groan. "A man of my years to yield like this to the temptations of the flesh..." Zola put his arm round his friend's shoulder. "Why don't you write and tell them all to go to hell then look for Fanny?" "I wouldn't know where," Cézanne stammered. "If only my family would leave me alone..." That heart-cry reminded Zola of Paul twenty-five years before, afraid to face his father with his ambition to become a painter; Zola knew that people like Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the martinet, and Marie, the soured virgin who sought solace in thinking of the hereafter, would never release their hold on Paul; but he BOSON BOOKS

134

A Moment of Truth realized, too, that Paul needed them as much as he needed Provence with its strong sun and strident, unchanging colors to paint. "Well, if you must go back..." he said. "You know you can always put up here and if it's money you need, I've got more than enough for both of us." He drove Paul to the station at Triel and stood until the figure stopped waving and the train disappeared. As he turned to mount the buggy, he had one of his strange premonitions that he had seen Paul for the last time. When he returned to work on L'Oeuvre, he realized there were other reasons why he had previously balked at writing the book; as he wrote, he was stirring specters he thought he had laid to rest long ago. If he had imagined he could gallop through the book drawing on a bit of personal experience and inventing very little, he was wrong. Those first chapter that he had read to Paul he went over himself to try to pick up the thread of the narrative: In that provincial backwater, in the dull stupor of a small town, they had broken away from the age of fourteen, enthusiasts ravaged by a fever for literature and art. First, it was Hugo's enormous stage-settings peopled with his giant imagination where phrases battled against each other, that had captured them...then Musset came to bowl them over with his love and tears; in him they heard their own hearts beating and the dawning of a new a more human world which conquered them through pity and the eternal cry of misery that they would hear everywhere. As he read, those early struggles and setbacks in Paris came back to him. Paul's futile attempts to paint his portrait, his vain assaults on the Beaux Arts citadel. Why and where had he begun to lose faith in Paul's genius? And why did Paul always give him the feeling that he had never compromised in his painting whereas he had perjured himself in judging his success by the number of books sold? Where had their ways parted? He had just watched Paul run back to Aix, cowed and beaten? What had become of the Cézanne of twenty years ago, the one who wanted to shift Montagne Sainte-Victoire with his bare hands, the one who ranted and railed against the two-cent daubers and men-on-the-make, the cretins and catchpenny artists who sold out to the Salon and the public? Who said: Ah! to see everything, to paint everything. Whole acres of walls to cover with paint, and stations, concert-halls, town-halls, everything they'll build when architects stop being cretins! We'll need to be strong in the head and hand for we won't run short of subjects. Just think! Life as it passes by, the poor, the rich, the markets, the race-courses, the tenement streets; and every class of working folk; we'll throw every passion into the open, paint peasants, animals countryside. They'll see, they'll see if I'm not an idiot! I have such a tingling in my hands. Yes! The whole of life as we live it. Frescoes as big as the Panthéon! A damned great pile of canvases that will crack the Louvre wide open! Surely that formed the kernel of his book. Paul's tussle with the Angel or Demon. And his failure. He had to portray him as he saw him, or not at all. For BOSON BOOKS

135

A Moment of Truth more than ten years he had stayed his hand wondering if Paul, the thin-skinned, would take offence. But he owed the truth to the whole Aix gang which had come to Paris, to Guillemet, to Duranty and Manet, now dead. Finally to himself. For in L'Oeuvre, he was telling his own story, too. Would they think he was joking and this paragraph was just literature when Sandoz (himself) moans to Claude (Cézanne)? Listen! Work has swallowed my existence. Bit by bit it has stolen my mother, my wife, everything I love. Ah! another life, another time round. Who would wish that on me so that toil would take it away and it would kill me once more? Paul wasn't the only one who suffered for his art. At this moment, not even Coco appreciated how depressed he felt, how he could throw everything over, forget the Rougon-Macquart, find an island in the Mediterranean sun and sit there until Nature called Time. But like all the others, Paul would consider him the happy, fulfilled writer who was sneering at his lack of success as an artist; he would see Claude Lantier as himself, seizing on those episodes where they blamed his defective eyes and accusing him of never finishing anything; he would read his own experience into the scene where the Impressionists blame him for ruining their show; above all, he would recognize himself in the incident where the Salon humiliates Lantier by hanging his portrait out of sight. But as a Naturalist novelist, how could he, Zola, avoid using that traumatic event in Cézanne's life. How often had he (Sandoz:Zola) seen Claude (Paul) as the great man whose unbridled genius must leave all the other talented men far behind him!... And then what? After twenty years of passion to finish with that poor, sinister thing so small, unnoticed and of a heart-rending melancholy in its isolation, like some plague specimen! So many hopes, so many tortures, a life worn out with the hard labor of creation. And that, and that, my God! Sandoz took him away, crooking an arm through his, holding him tight, comforting him, trying to draw him out of his bleak silence. "Ah! you still have a great role to play, old man," Sandoz continued. "Yours is the art of tomorrow, you have created them all." "Why should I give a damn about creating them when I haven't created myself? Look, it was too much for me and that's what sticks in my craw." With a gesture, he completed his thought, his impotence to be the genius of the formula he had evolved, his torment as a precursor who sows the idea without harvesting the glory, his desolation at seeing himself robbed, devoured by slapdash artists, a whole crowd of pliant fellows pacing themselves, popularizing the new art before he or another had the strength to stake their claim in the chef-d'oeuvre that would make its mark on the end of this century. And no doubt Paul would identify himself with Lantier and his obsession to paint huge, nude women in the open air. Paul had worked at his Baigneuses for twenty years without ever achieving the perfect marriage of the human form with nature. In the book, Zola had given this conflict and craze a new twist by turning BOSON BOOKS

136

A Moment of Truth it into a tussle between the painter, his nude subjects and Christine, the woman who shared his life, and posed as his model. Sensing that she is losing him to the nude monsters of his own creation, she mocks his painting then, in a final despairing effort, flaunts her sex in front of him and he succumbs. Christine and Claude groped and rolled across the bed. They were frenzied. Never had they known such passion even in the first days they had made love. All their past flooded back but with a new savor which went to their heads like strong wine. Even the darkness seemed to flame around them and they were flying on flaming wings, higher and higher, beyond the earth with great regular strokes, beating, beating. And ever higher. He cried out, his misery forgotten, drowned by a new happiness. She provoked him, forcing him to blaspheme, laughing with pride at her sensual domination. "Say that painting is imbecile."—"Painting is imbecile."—"Say that you'll stop working, that you don't give a damn, that you'll burn your pictures just to please me.”—"I'll burn my pictures, I'll stop working." It was nearly dawn when Christine, dog-tired but exultant, fell asleep in Claude's arms. An hour later, Christine woke and an icy shudder passed through her. At first glance, she saw nothing, the studio seemed empty in the cold, murky light. But as she was taking comfort from seeing no one, she raised her eyes towards the canvas. A terrible cry burst from her throat. "Claude, oh! Claude..." Claude had hanged himself from the big ladder in front of his botched painting...In his nightshirt, barefoot, his horrible black tongue protruding and his bloody eyes ejected from their sockets, he swung there, magnified by his stiff posture, his face turned towards the picture, close to the Woman with her sex covered in mystical flowers, as though he had offered her his soul with his last breath and he was still gazing at her with his dead pupils... "Oh! Claude, oh! Claude...She has possessed you again, she has killed you, killed you, killed you, the tramp." What would Paul make of that scene and the burial which ended the book? Zola hoped it would not kindle his morbid imagination, his dread of death, and scare him. From December 1885 to the following March, Gil Blas serialized L'Oeuvre. He had no doubt that Paul and every other member of their circle would have read the installments, but they made no comment. Just before the book appeared in the shops, he sent his usual copy, dedicated in his own hand, to Paul, then waited for some reaction. It came in the middle of April, although Cézanne had dated his letter April 4 and, from its flap-eared look, had carried it for some days in his pocket before posting it. Polite but curt, it said: My dear Émile, I have just received L'Oeuvre which you were good enough to send me. I thank the author of the Rougon-Macquart for the kind token of

BOSON BOOKS

137

A Moment of Truth remembrance, and I ask him to allow me to shake him by the hand in memory of days gone by. Ever yours under the impulse of past time. Paul Cézanne. So Paul had taken mortal offence; he had obviously read himself into the manic, obsessive Lantier when he must surely have acknowledged him as a fictional character belonging to the tainted Macquart clan. Ironically, friends who knew the art world and had read L'Oeuvre as a roman à clé saw everybody else as Lantier—Monet, Manet, Courbet. Not one had mentioned Cézanne as a possible prototype. After all, outside the Impressionist coterie, who knew Paul either by his painting or in his private life? Perhaps at Aix they might identify him. Certainly, he had used some of Paul's and his own personal secrets and drawn on their experiences. But did it warrant a bald, impersonal note like this after more than thirty years of friendship, of brotherhood! A touchy lot, these painters. Guillemet had gone into a huff, seeing himself (rightly) as Fagerolles, the Salon creep, and had reproached him for the bleak pessimism of the book; Claude Monet had associated Manet with Lantier, had taken him to task for pandering to the enemies of Impressionism and had even gone as far as suggesting foils or pistols at dawn! "Don't let them worry you, Meemeel," Coco said when he showed her Paul's letter. "You've written nothing but the truth." "And nothing like the whole truth. If I'd put everything in, Paul and the others would really have had something to complain about." "I don't care what anybody says, I think it's your best book," Coco affirmed and meant it. He knew why. Her character-part as Henriette Sandoz portrayed her as a faithful, loyal and devoted wife as much at home with artists and writers as with the literary salon set. "I consider L'Oeuvre as my cross of honor," she said. Zola laid down his pen for a day and rowed across the Seine to the Grande Ile to think. He and Paul had always disagreed about art, but he never thought a book would break up their friendship. Letting several weeks elapse, he wrote to Gardanne, near Aix, where Paul was lodging. He received no reply. "He'll be back begging you for help as soon as he's in trouble again," Coco said. She did not believe it. Neither did he. Alexis whispered that Paul had yielded to his sister and married Hortense on April 28 with his parents' blessing. It looked to Zola as though Paul had surrendered all along the line, as a person and as an artist. When they left Paris for Médan that summer, he raised no objection when Coco proposed doing something she had threatened for a long time; she took down the portraits that Cézanne had painted of both of them along with his early canvases and still lifess. She had her place already mapped out for those and others of his monstrosities which defaced her walls at Médan. Up they went, into the attic.

BOSON BOOKS

138

A Moment of Truth And with them, the ghost of Cézanne which she hoped she had exorcised for good.

BOSON BOOKS

139

A Moment of Truth

IV Zola had to plant his elbows on the huge mahogany desk at Médan to steady his hands and the copy of Figaro which carried three words in its boldest type, À ÉMILE ZOLA, and an article running to one thousand two hundred words which took half a page of the influential newspaper for August 18, 1887. Five young authors had signed what they called a manifesto attacking him for the latest of his Rougon-Macquart novels, La Terre (The Soil). A bitter indictment. It seemed he had betrayed Naturalism, failed young writers who trusted him, deserted combatant literature on emigrating from Paris to Médan; he had also grown lazy and now worked from a job-lot of second-hand notes, regurgitating ideas and clichés like a bloated Victor Hugo. His RougonMacquart was ridiculous, its heredity doubtful, its family tree infantile, his own medical and scientific ignorance profound. Monsieur Zola, the Naturalist, might plead that he was seeking only truth, like a scientist, they said; yet, the Rougon-Macquart disproved these arguments; it smelled not only of brutality but also of deliberate obscenity. "While some attribute this to a disease of the genital organs of the author and his mania for monastic isolation, others would see the unconscious development of someone famished for best-sellers, an instinctive skill of the novelist who sees that his biggest sales come from the fact that idiots buy the Rougon-Macquart not so much for their literary quality as for the reputation of pornography which the man-in-the-street has pinned on them. (A different generation, but still the same old pitch, Zola reflected). "Now, it is very true that Zola seems excessively preoccupied—as those of us who have heard him talk are aware—with the sales question; but it is also wellknown that he kept his distance as a young man and overdid his sexual restraint, through necessity at first then on principle. (I wonder which of my gossiping friends told them that.) In his youth he was very poor, very shy and the women that he never knew at the age when one should know them haunt him with an obviously false vision. “Then, his lack of balance caused by his kidney trouble undoubtedly contributes to worry him unduly about certain functions, compels him to blow up their importance. (Now where did they discover he had to urinate so often?) Perhaps Charcot, Moreau (de Tours) and those doctors of the Salpêtrière who exhibit their dirty-word perverts, might determine the symptoms of his sickness...And to these morbid motives can we not add the concern, so often seen in woman-haters as well as in all young men, that their skill in lovemaking isn't denied?...” "La Terre is published. The disappointment has been deep and painful. Not only is the observation superficial, the tricks outmoded, the narrative dull and common, but the squalid note is exacerbated even more, down to such base filth that at times it reads like an anthology of excremental literature. The Master has sunk to the slimy bottom. "Well, that ends the adventure. We energetically repudiate this imposture of truthful literature...we repudiate these figments of Zolist rhetoric, these BOSON BOOKS

140

A Moment of Truth enormous, superhuman and weird silhouettes which lack subtlety and are thrown brutally in heavy handfuls into settings seen accidentally from the window of an express train. “From this last work created by the great mind which gave us L'Assommoir, from this bastard, La Terre, we cast ourselves adrift resolutely though not without sadness. It is a wrench to reject the man that we have too well loved." And on and on they went. He had the morbid depravity of the chaste man; his decadent Rougon-Macquart would become more bizarre and barren; he had cried, “I'm a power,” but he had used this power to crush friend and foe; he had blasted open a literary door only to bang it shut in the face of newcomers. Who were these young writers who had pilloried him publicly out of alleged love and respect for art? Paul Bonnetain, J-H. Rosny, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte, Gustave Guiches. Not one of them belonged to his own circle; he merely remembered meeting them in Goncourt's attic at Auteuil and in Alphone Daudet's country house at Champrosay. There he had the key. Goncourt and Daudet. Both resented his success, felt jealous that the mantle of the dead Hugo had fallen on him, envied his sales figures. Goncourt had even gone so far as to accuse him of plagiarism. All that tittle-tattle that he weaseled out of people to scribe into his diary. He had obviously tipped them off about his youth, his sexual continence, his kidney trouble. Goncourt could consider himself well qualified to talk about perversion and morbid thoughts. Didn't these famous five know why they called him The Widow after his brother's death? His diseased genitals! That slight he could trace to one source: Daudet. How ironic when Daudet, now looking sixty-seven instead of forty-seven, was dying a thousand deaths as syphilis slowly and agonizingly devoured his nerves. But he could forgive Daudet who would never have tossed such insults at him in his right mind knowing that he might have countered by revealing how heavily Daudet relied on collaborators to sustain the painful effort of writing. In the following days, into the breach created by the “Manifeste des Cinq” jumped other critics. They sneered at him for picking up his background for La Terre by driving a two-in-hand full-tilt across the Beauce country; his characters acted like beasts and only the animals evoked any sympathy; they took exception to his descriptions of the unCatholic practice of coitus interruptus. "Georgics written in filth," Anatole France called La Terre, and even his friends, Octave Mirbeau and Gustave Geffroy accused him of creating brutish and inhuman peasants. Caricatures depicted Zola riding a winged pig and his characters in suggestive postures. Three words summed up the criticism: Venal, Visceral, Venereal. With one or two exceptions, nobody had perceived that he had intended La Terre as an epic poem to nature and the people who served her. Nor the fact that he had seized on age-old themes such as lust for the possession of land and women and woven these into his poem about the eternal cycle of death and rebirth which nature controlled. They had grasped none of his pantheism, his anthropomorphism, his determinism, even his symbolism; they had merely

BOSON BOOKS

141

A Moment of Truth turned up their noses at the obstetric detail in the simultaneous abortion of a calf and the birth of Lise's second baby. Why couldn't they discern the echoes of Shakespeare's Lear and Macbeth? Can't they see, he asked himself, that everything in this narrative stems from the fact that Old Fouan divides his land between his two sons and daughter—the land he adores and has served with passion like a mistress until he is too old to render it fertile. One son, Buteau, inherits this sensual, almost sexual passion to possess land. He marries Lise, already pregnant by him, to grab her land then her sister's. But Françoise, the sister, refuses to surrender either her land or herself to him and feeds his rage with frustrated passion. Her marriage to Jean Macquart drives him nearly mad. He vents his anger on his old father, Fouan, who is rejected by his three children and wanders around in a storm vainly praying for final peace in his beloved earth. Buteau gets his way with Françoise; he rapes her while his wife, her own sister, holds her legs open to let him have his pleasure; then Lise throws Françoise on to a scythe blade, destroying the Macquart child she is carrying and wounding her fatally. Now, only Fouan remains between Buteau and final triumph. Lise and he smother his father with a pillow and mask their crime by setting his room ablaze. Admittedly he had painted La Terre in primary colors. But didn't hot-blooded peasants behave like animals in the mating season? Didn't their land mean as much to them as their flesh? And if he had a brother and sister making love, did anybody dispute that this happened? Rape, murder, parricide—such events filled columns in the press every day. Why indict him for turning fact into fiction? Why should he feel answerable to five whipper-snapping scribblers and a bunch of bloodless critics? He had written the truth as he saw and felt it and would leave the verdict to the people, and posterity. Yet, those attacks had wounded him, had hit below the belt. He felt physically and mentally jaded, emotionally wrung-out. Five more Rougon-Macquart volumes! Would his body and mind stand up to it? His hands shook so violently that he could hardly guide his pen over the paper; his heart echoed in his legs and arms and hammered in his head when it rested on his pillow; in the mirror, his face and body reminded him of bloated and blown-up caricatures of himself in the Press. He weighed nearly sixteen stone and measured forty-six inches round his potbelly. Two flights of stairs to his turret study left him panting, palpitating and sweating. He put down Figaro and turned his head to stare at the alcove above him, lined with several hundred of his own books and their translations, bulky packets of work-sheets, documents, photographs culled from markets and mines, laundries and bistrots, factories and offices, the basic slag of his writing. For more than a quarter of a century those books and papers had been his life. Fifteen Rougon-Macquart volumes, five other novels, two books of short stories, the plays based on his books and a great pile of critical and campaigning journalism. Alexis, who had recently done a rough word-count, reckoned that he had written some 5,000,000 words. It hardly surprised him. In twenty-three years, he did not remember a day when he had missed writing his stint. He had often declared that he wrote with his life's blood and it seemed that now the ink was running out of his veins. BOSON BOOKS

142

A Moment of Truth Sometimes he even had the impression of confusing his paper-and-ink characters with real people, his friends among them. Where was he going? He was forty-seven and suddenly an open letter had caught him off-balance, caused him to question everything he had done. He had an uneasy sensation—like the one quarter of a century ago—when he met Berthe and his life had turned insideout. Among his immediate projects, he had the idea of doing a Rougon-Macquart novel about a man in his early forties who develops an obsessive passion for his ward, a girl of sixteen. A man like himself who had let his youth vanish pursuing a phantom. Like literature. Now, he jotted down some stray thoughts for the novel on bits of paper, and almost automatically, wrote "Myself...work, literature which has eaten up my life, and the upheaval, the crisis, the need to be loved..." Good God! Was he writing his own sad story?

BOSON BOOKS

143

A Moment of Truth

V Gabrielle had not mentioned taking on a girl to look after the linen room and do some sewing; and at first, he had not noticed her among the twenty-five men and women who worked in the house, the outbuildings and expanding Médan estate. Only when she came to change the towels in his private bathroom did she take his eye. Her raven hair she piled high on her head. Just like his mother's in her younger days at Aix. And not unlike Louise Solari's. She had a somewhat long, serious face, tranquil brown eyes and a winsome smile on her pouting lips. She might have served as the physical model for the book he was assembling of the man who feels time running out on him before he has lived. He noted: "Like a Greuze portrait. Supple-waisted with slender, tapering legs, fine but strong figure, round bosom, round and flexible arms; and the nape of her neck and shoulders of a pure, milky hue, of silken texture, smooth and infinitely soft. A fruit that no one has sullied." He thrust away his notes as though they were smoking and scorching his hand, and turned to the book he had started, Le Rêve (The Dream). Even there, his narrative involved a young girl's love, though this time unrequited and tragic. Throughout that spring, the girl's innocent voice would break across his thoughts and halt his pen as she sang in the linen-room below his study. Her name he discovered was Jeanne-Sophie-Adèle Rozerot, she had just turned twenty and came from the small Burgundy village of Rouvres-sous-Meilly; her father Philibort Rozerot was a miller. These facts made him wonder about coincidence—or fate. Had he changed the names and places, he might have been describing his own mother at nineteen meeting his father, aged forty-three. To these small clues, he added the fact that she had read almost all his books. She was flattered when he offered to dedicate the cheap, yellow-bound copies she possessed. But for months they did no more than say Bonjour to each other, neither willing to take the invitiative. However, for no good reason, he often found himself passing the room where she sewed or trailing her with his gaze through the autumn garden and forgetting Le Rêve. Now he knew the demon that had almost driven Cézanne to defy his family. He, who had thought himself fireproof against love, was infatuated with a chit of a girl. He must walk warily. Coco would scratch Jeanne's eyes out if she even suspected her of having designs on her Meemeel. Already, with less motive, she watched Daudet's wife, Julia, and Madame Georges Charpentier with a jealous eye. But neither Jeanne nor he gave her cause for worry. Only Paul Alexis, experienced hand with women and who knew Zola better than Coco in so many ways, caught a whiff of the truth and twitted Zola about his sudden interest in the linen-room. "Don't joke about that," Zola replied. "Jeanne's a nice girl and good worker and I wouldn't like to lose her just because..." He left Alexis to put his own construction on the sentence, then looked at him and grunted, "You keep your hands off her." BOSON BOOKS

144

A Moment of Truth "Pourquoi? Do you have droits de seigneur?" Alexis grinned but saw Zola was not amused. Nobody other than Alexis had a hint. When Coco came to say she was thinking of taking Jeanne to Royan, the Atlantic resort at the mouth of the Gironde, for their holiday, he hesitated then assented. It did seem that fate was throwing them together. That summer Coco spent most of her holiday in their hotel suite suffering from her chronic complaint—nerves and chest trouble. At her insistence, Zola showed Jeanne the town and the country around it; they went for long walks and hired bicycles which he taught her to ride. For the leading Naturalist novelist he had a fascinating new toy—a camera. His friend, Mayor Billaud of Royan, chose it for him and gave him his first lessons in photography. Jeanne, the Charpentiers, Céard and Fernand Desmoulins, his engraver friend, posed for endless pictures which Zola developed himself in Billaud's dark room. Close friends like the Charpentiers noticed several intriguing changes in him; he had a new line in summer suits of white linen with snappy shoes; for cycling, he donned a new Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers; a new diet was melting his paunch and jowls; now he breakfasted on a crust of dry bread, ate a light lunch with no liquid, cut out starchy foods, drank a couple of pints of tea at five o'clock and had a light dinner; he astonished them by foregoing his afternoon nap and hiking or cycling for a couple of hours; and at dinner, he joked and laughed, ignoring his weak heart and poor health. He even forgot to tell them how many words he had penned! On October 7, when the Zolas returned from holiday, Jeanne decided to leave her job and move to Paris. Zola had persuaded her to take a flat he had found at 66, Rue Saint-Lazare. But he did not hurry her into lovemaking. Almost as if afraid to commit himself as well as her, he wooed her slowly, leaving her to make the crucial decisions. After all, what could a girl of twenty see in a grizzled and portly litterateur especially when she was deeply religious and he a professed and practicing atheist? What did they have in common apart from perhaps the animal attraction he felt for her? Throughout the autumn of 1888, when Coco believed he was researching his novel, La Bête Humaine (The Beast in Him), he was in fact escorting Jeanne round the Paris of his books—the Halles market where Lisa, the pork-shop goddess reigned, the sleazy bistrots of L'Assommoir, the plush mansions and Parc Monceau of The Spoils, the big stores he had depicted in Pot-Bouille and Au Bonheur des Dames, the bal-tabarins, theatres, café-concerts, and maisonscloses where Nana, the sex-goddess held court. On December 11, 1888 (a date he always remembered with a card to her) Jeanne threw herself into his arms offering what he called the royal feast of her youth. When they had become lovers, he confessed that she had given him back something he thought lost for ever: his feeling of manhood. Jeanne was his second chance; she was Aérienne who had escaped so long ago. Shy and gentle, the antithesis of Gabrielle, she restored his belief in love, his faith in people, his strength. He saw things with a new eye and found new BOSON BOOKS

145

A Moment of Truth pleasure in sitting idling, watching the Paris scene go by on the boulevards; he cycled with Jeanne through the Bois de Boulogne and along the main avenues; he took her to cabarets like Le Chat Noir and indulged her small extravagances in the big stores. For the first time in ten years, he lost his nervous twitch and no longer lay awake at nights dreading death. He should have handled his love affair like many other men—discreetly, secretively. To him with his new love, Jeanne, that seemed alien, degrading. What had he once cried? "I've come to live life to the full." So, he paraded Jeanne in elegant cafés and shops and along fashionable streets, forgetting his many enemies. To Goncourt, he had to blurt out how well he felt. Then, before he could stop himself, whispering to the astonished novelist, "Look, my wife isn't anywhere about—let me tell you, I can't see a young girl like that one over there walking past without saying to myself: Isn't that perhaps better than a book?" In fact, writing La Bête Humaine seemed like shoveling treacle. And after that, he had two more of his Rougon-Macquart series to write! Maybe they had something, those five young Turks who accused him of pouring all his sexual energy into writing. Would they suffer, his books, when he had no more need to make them his escape-valve for his repressed emotions and frustrations? Perhaps...but he'd worry about that when one of them flopped. Another thing niggled at him. If he had to choose between Jeanne and Coco...He loved the first; but the other had stuck with him through his worst days without a hint of disloyalty. He shuddered at the thought of what Coco might do if ever she discovered his liaison. Already tongues were clacking and he knew that Goncourt and Daudet were sniggering about his old man's infatuation with young flesh. He overheard ribald jokes about himself: "I hear Zola's doing some first-hand sexual research for his new book...you know, it's about an engine driver who goes off the rails. Like Zola himself." "Oh! Is that why he's lodged his new mistress over the Gare SaintLazare?" "Maybe. I heard that he even wanted the railway company to stage a derailment so that he could get all his Naturalist detail right." "You mean, they wouldn’t?" "They thought about it. But the head of the company said finally, 'Tell Monsieur Zola we'll only lay on a derailment when he's a member of the Académie Française.'" La Bête Humaine was the novel he had imagined about the railways twenty years before when these new monsters were revolutionizing transport and striking awe into folk who had never traveled faster than horse-drawn buses; now he was documenting the book. For him, these mechanical brutes had their counterpart in his hero, Jacques Lantier, a man doomed by a primordial blood lust with its roots in sexual conflict, who needed only a glimpse of bare breasts or thighs to trigger this killer impulse. BOSON BOOKS

146

A Moment of Truth Zola believed that man might have invented the steamboat, locomotive, electric light, telephone, telegraph, photography and hundreds of other aids to progress, but just below his civilized veneer lay a beast with primeval, jungle impulses. When this caveman gained the upper hand, it meant madness, rape and murder. People only had to read about Jack the Ripper in London, or remember three years back to the discovery of Barrême, Prefect of the Eure Department, found murdered on the Cherbourg train. For years he had watched with schoolboy fascination as these beasts whistled and rumbled and clanked past his study window at Médan; he had always intended to match Claude Monet's great paintings of the Gare Saint-Lazare and railway engines with a book; around the railways he would construct a series of crimes with the central figure his human brute, Lantier, an engine-driver. Already he had written part of the novel, but he needed on-the-spot atmosphere. Pol Lefebre, an official of the Western Railway Company, took him round the Gare Saint-Lazare and fixed his journeys to and from Le Havre, along the line where he had set his novel. On the other side of Rouen, between Malaunay and Barentin, he found what he wanted, a series of cuttings, embankments and a long tunnel that would serve as a backdrop for the crime of Roubaud and his wife, Severine, and the blood-lust murder by Jacques Lantier. On most trips, Jeanne accompanied him, watching wide-eyed as he filled notebooks with his raw literary material; he also took dozens of photographs to develop and print himself as reminders of places and plot; when he made his footplate ride from Saint-Lazare to Mantes on a Model 120 locomotive, he left her behind. A trip like that on an exposed metal platform might scare her; it even shook him to fly along at eighty kilometers an hour on a swaying engine in the buffeting wind. Passing Médan, he thanked God she had not come with him; on the bridge that April day, most of his staff had lined up to wave and shout as he passed underneath. And Coco, too, stood waving from a turret window. However, Zola had an over-riding motive for refusing to take Jeanne. She was expecting his baby. When she disclosed the fact that she was pregnant he was overjoyed. If he had felt mean about deceiving Gabrielle, if he had experienced qualms about the twenty-seven years age difference between him and Jeanne, he had ever greater misgivings about indulging his sexual instincts for their own sake. Unbridled sex had always spelled disaster for him—in life and in his books. Now, when he realized he had fathered a child, his guilt vanished. It also seemed to unblock his writing hand. How could he keep on writing about sex and violence, murder and savage animal instincts in human beings when he himself fell victim to the same instincts? For these were the themes of La Bête Humaine. Roubaud finds out that his wife, Severine, has been seduced by her guardian, Grandmorin, and forces her to help him murder the old man in a private compartment of the Paris-Havre train. But near a remote level-crossing beyond Rouen, the engine-driver, Jacques Lantier, witnesses the murder yet decides not to mention his suspicions about the Roubauds, and the case is dropped for state reasons. However, Roubaud realizes that Lantier has guessed and encourages his wife to make friends with him. When Lantier tries to make love to Severine, she resists BOSON BOOKS

147

A Moment of Truth at first; she never imagines that Lantier cannot trust himself with women, that he has an irresistible urge to kill them, rip them apart and watch their life-blood ebb away. Unsuspecting, she gives herself to him: When Jacques got to his feet, he was surprised to hear the beating rain. Where was he then? As he felt the handle of the hammer he had seen as he sat down, he was overjoyed. Then he'd done it?—he'd possessed Severine and hadn't taken the hammer to smash her skull in. She was his without a fight, without this instinctive urge to throw her on her back, dead, like some quarry snatched from others. No longer did he thirst to revenge very old wrongs which he could not exactly remember, that accumulated rancor transmitted from male to male ever since the first betrayal in the depths of some cave. No, his possession of this woman was a powerful talisman; she had cured him because he saw her in a different light, violent in her weakness, covered with a man's blood which acted like a breastplate of horror. But that talisman and shield vanish when Severine confesses to Lantier the part she played in the murder of Grandmorin. Following the mounting thrill of this long story, Severine's cry was like her need for happiness overflowing these dreadful memories. But Jacques, who had been shaken by her confession and was as worked-up as she was, held her back. "No, no, wait a minute...you were lying flat on his legs and you felt him die?" Deep inside him, the unknown thing was stirring and a savage thrill rose from his vitals and burst into his head, filling it with a blood-red vision. His interest in the murder had been aroused again. "Well then, the knife. Did you feel the knife go in?" "Yes, with a dull thud." "Ah! a dull thud...Not a ripping sound, you're certain?" "No, no, nothing but a shock." "And then he had a spasm, didn't he?" "Yes, he had three spasms—oh! right through the whole of his body and they went on and on until I felt them even in his feet." "Spasms that made him go rigid, weren't they?" "Yes. The first was very strong, the other two weaker." "So, he's dead... and you, what did it do to you when you felt him croak like that with a knife thrust?" "Me! Oh! I don't know." "You don't know! Why tell lies about it? Go on, tell me what it did to you, the lot...Were you upset?" "Me, no, not upset." "Did you feel good?" "Good? Ah, no! Not good." "Then what, sweetheart? Please tell me everything...If only you knew...Tell me how it feels."

BOSON BOOKS

148

A Moment of Truth "My God. How can anybody tell that? It's horrible. You get carried away, oh, so far away, so far away! In that minute, I lived more than I'd done in all my years put together." With clenched teeth and only grunting sounds, Jacques had taken her this time; and Severine took him as well. They possessed each other, finding their love again in the dark secrets of death, in the painful voluptuousness of beasts ripping each other's bowels open when mating. Only their hoarse gasps could be heard. On the ceiling, the bloody light had gone; and with the stove no longer burning, the room became icy with the frost outside. Wrapped in snow, Paris had gone dumb. By her confession, Severine had unwittingly broken the spell that kept Jacques Lantier's blood lust in check; with him as accomplice, she plans to kill her husband by luring him to a remote house by the railway; but Jacques runs amok and it is she who dies in exactly the way she had watched Roubaud kill Grandmorin; Lantier fulfills his death wish under the wheels of his train which, like him, is careering out of control taking hundreds of soldiers to their doom. Writing La Bête Humaine came as easily as taking dictation; he had never felt better and ate and slept as he hadn't done since his boyhood. "I shall certainly have finished by December 1," he wrote to Charpentier. "I'm seized with a furious desire to finish the Rougon-Macquart as quickly as I can. I'm working well, my health is good and I feel as though I'm twenty, an age when I wanted to swallow mountains whole. Ah! old friend, if I was only thirty you would see what I'd do. I'd astonish the world." Charpentier knew why. So did all his friends. Zola could not keep it secret. On September 20, Jeanne Rozerot gave birth to their daughter, Denise. It caught him at an awkward moment. Coco had persuaded him to lease a vast apartment at 21b Rue de Bruxelles, round the corner from their present Paris home. They had just returned from Médan and had moved some of their furniture into the new place when Coco took to her bed with a bout of nervous asthma. For days, he found himself torn between two bedsides. Jeanne's baby came when he was sitting by Coco's bed. When La Bête Humaine appeared some baffled critics saw Lantier merely as a hairless ape bent on sexual murder. Others made fun of Zola's railway lore, the animal psychology of Lantier and the human character of his locomotive. But for the distinguished novelist, Anatole France, formerly a bitter antagonist, Zola had become the greatest lyrical prose-writer of his generation. And the eminent critic, Jules Lemaître, realized that Zola had turned his human brute into an original literary creation. "I look for what is really great in him (Lantier). It is this—he is like a memento of our most distant origins. Our puny and transient persons are only infinitely small ripples of impersonal, eternal and blind forces; and under these rippling waves there is always an abyss. This is really what La Bête Humaine is saying with a melancholic and savage grandeur. It is a prehistoric epic poem told like a present-day story...Zola is the poet of man's most somber inner being." If the critics were beginning to see things his way, not so the élite of French intellectual life. He craved the consecration of becoming one of the Forty BOSON BOOKS

149

A Moment of Truth Immortals of the Académie Française; but this august body was determined to hold out against this literary sewer man and sex-monger who came banging on its door. To friends, who raised their eyebrows at his candidature, Zola replied: "Since the Académie exists, I should belong to it." Most people thought he had done more than enough with his novels, essays, plays and journalism for the thirty-nine Immortals to vote him into the empty chair left by death; indeed, few Frenchmen could cite one Academician's name out of the forty custodians of their language and culture. But Zola had made too many enemies who were prepared to vote for any nonentity to keep him out; others seemed scared that, once admitted, he would take over the 150-year-old institution. Ruefully, he noted that he had merely given cartoonists and caricaturists another chance to mock him; they portrayed him with sledgehammer and battering-ram trying to breach the Academy door; they sneered that when he went to canvas the Immortals for their votes; he knew so much that he left them floundering even in their specialties. Snubbed again and again, he joined the Société des Gens de Lettres and within two months its authors, young and old, had elected him president. In November 1890, he traveled with Goncourt, Daudet and Maupassant to Rouen to inaugurate a monument to Flaubert. As their train crossed the Seine before entering the town, Maupassant gestured at the misty river and shouted, "It was boating down there that has made me what I am now." Zola and the others looked at him. His flesh had melted on his face and body, his skin had a fiery, terra-cotta tint and his pupils had a fixed glare as though reflecting some hellish vision. Zola had heard how syphilis was driving Maupassant mad and wondered how much longer he had to go. He couldn't deny that his mentor, Flaubert, had warned him about those orgiastic boating sprees and Paris bal-tabarins and brothels. Those last, strange unworldly tales of his, like Le Horla and the haunting memoir Sur l'Eau (On the Water) had done as much to confirm his madness as the gossip of Goncourt and Mirbeau. According to them, Maupassant kept on the run, trying to elude the specter of Death, his constant doppelgänger; he accused all his doctors of conspiring against him and at times proclaimed himself Christ. Daudet had a grim expression as he glanced at Maupassant. Another one who regretted those sophisticated Paris salons, Zola thought. Nowadays, Daudet with his stick, his taut face and clenched teeth, looked in perpetual pain. He now spared his wife's feelings and compassion by writing in his garden lodge. Zola had read Lou Doulou (Pain), pages which testified to the writer's Calvary; his heart went out to Daudet and his wife, Julia. How harrowing to see him now, sitting facing the ravaged, crumbled figure of Maupassant, a man he knew was suffering from the same disease. That day of freezing fog and rain and Norman indifference was one he wanted to forget. All the old Médan Group, now fragmented, had come to pay their respects to Flaubert. Only Alexis, more myopic than ever, had remained true. Céard and Hennique still paid lip-service, Huysmans had become a literary force in his own right but had forsaken Naturalism for mysticism and would soon land in a Trappist monastery, they said. Curious, the number of jokes life played. BOSON BOOKS

150

A Moment of Truth Maupassant had started in a seminary and was now descending through Hell; Huysmans, who had once professed atheism, had taken the road to Rome, prodded by fear of eternal damnation. And himself? He had created a world that had reflected the barbarous aggressions of Bourbon College, the gutter society of Rue Soufflot, the woeful, self-destroying hedonism of the Second Empire, the base materialism of the Third Republic. Only now, his world had shrunk to something infinitely more meaningful, his bleak outlook had softened and his pessimism had been tempered by the advent of a child whom he loved. When he left the train at Gare Saint-Lazare, he did not go to the Rue de Bruxelles with its grandiose furniture, its silk and satin trappings, its priceless antiques mixed up with their older junk, its Salon art on the walls, its study with his hundreds of books and mammoth Louis XIII writing table to remind him he had to slog through three more Rougon-Macquart tomes. He went to kiss his daughter and make love to Jeanne. And wonder what would have happened had he never touched a pen and married a girl called Aérienne, long-since dead, who looked like Jeanne's previous incarnation.

BOSON BOOKS

151

A Moment of Truth

VI He still had to close his account with the Second Empire and the family he had spawned to depict those twenty years; he still had to settle his score with Napoleon the Sham and the men who had led France into a futile war which they had bungled. His title seemed ready-made: La Débâcle (The Downfall). In mid-April 1891, he and Coco were jolting over dirt roads in the Ardennes trying to pick up the bits and pieces of the Franco-Prussian War of twenty-one years before; from Rheims to Vouziers and along the River Aisne to Le Chesne they traveled, noting and photographing the scarred ground, splintered forests, flattened farmhouses; Zola recorded battle scenes straight from the survivors' lips in a way that no writer had done before: Me! I was washing my shirt while they were making the stew....you can see it, a filthy hole, a proper crater with woods on every side that let those Prussian bastards crawl up without anybody even having a smell. Then at seven, Bingo, the shells began to land in our stewpots. God's teeth! We didn't mess about, we jumped on our muskets and right up to eleven o'clock, no kidding, we thought we were really giving them what-for...But you've got to understand there weren't even five thousand of us and these sods just kept coming at us all the time...Maybe I says it as shouldn't but we all reckoned that our brasshats were a right lot of Charlies to land us in a hornet's nest like that with none of our boys around and then let us take all that stick without giving us a hand. Then our general, the poor bugger, General Douay—no slouch and no chicken that one— he goes and cops a bullet and winds up his arms and legs in the air. Cleaned out, nobody left. What the hell! We held on just the same. But there were too many of them and we had to scarper. On and on went Zola. From Le Chesne to Mouzon and from there to Sedan. Sedan! A name that dinned like a funeral bell in every Frenchman's head. Where the Emperor, painted face masking his mortal illness, handed over his sword to King William of Prussia. Equipped with 1870 maps, Zola walked the routes round the town, following the track of one of the army corps that had fought at Sedan. He traced Dr Martin who gave him accounts of treating battle casualties. Then Charles Philippoteaux, brother of Sedan's mayor during the battle, showed him the key points in the fighting on that day when the German Empire rose out of the shambles of the Second Empire. At Le Chesne, they toured the house that Napoleon had used as a command-post; they visited Baybel's Farm, another of his halts. "You know, I met the Emperor here, Monsieur Zola," Philippoteaux said, pointing to the square farm building. "He had one of his diarrhea attacks and had to...you know what." "Did he look ill?" "Just like an old pensioner with a gray face and no life in his eyes." He indicated the Dieulit woods. "They were asking me for directions when the whole BOSON BOOKS

152

A Moment of Truth of that area lit up—just like the Fourteenth of July fireworks. But they were Prussian shells." Zola scribbled this in his notebook. "But the Emperor? Was his face painted...with rouge, I mean?" "Not that time. But I met him two days later at Bazeilles and he was made-up like some actor with rouged cheeks and waxed moustache. And I'm sure he was trying to get himself killed." "What makes you say that?" "He rode right through a cannonade and fusillade along an exposed road, and he must have missed death a thousand times—I'll show you where, Monsieur Zola." They stopped on the Iges Peninsula, formed by the looping Meuse River. "This is where the Prussians kept thousands of prisoners," he said. "Our men were more scared by the stampeding horses than the enemy." "Horses? Tell me about that." They had herded cavalry horses on to the peninsula and famished men smashed their skulls, butchered them and ate their meat raw; and ravenous horses even savaged each other in their frantic hunger. He had taken a knife out of his pocket, a small knife with a blade scarcely longer than his finger. Sprawled over the animal's body, arms round its neck, he plunged this blade in and dug around in the living flesh, hacking pieces away until he found and cut the artery. With a bound, he leapt aside as blood spurted out like water from a fountain spout while the feet pawed about and great spasms set the skin convulsing. It took nearly five minutes for the horse to die. It fixed its great, dilated eyes, full of sorrow and fear, on the haggard men who were waiting for it to die. Its eyes misted and then went dead. His notebooks full of scenes like this, he and Coco returned to Paris. There, he read dozens of books on the war. Since he was recounting contemporary history he could not afford to err, even in minor detail; he compiled plans and maps of battlefields and camps for his imaginary Seventh Corps; minutely, he schemed the construction of the book. For the first time, his readers helped. Old soldiers sent dozens of accounts of Sedan and other battles. In the last chapters he had no need of eye-witnesses; he had lived part of the Commune and the Siege of Paris, had seen the Tuileries and the Town Hall blazing, had heard shells whistle over him in Rue de la Condamine aimed at the Butte Montmartre, Butte Chaumont and La Villette. That he would make his finale. To tell such an epic story took nearly a year. He chose two men, Jean Macquart, hero of La Terre and Maurice Levasseur, both rankers to pull the narrative together. Jean represents slow, stolid peasant France and Maurice its effervescent, intellectual element. Though alien characters, the battle for survival makes them blood brothers; both realize their officers and chiefs of staff cannot match Prussian talent and efficiency any more than their old muzzle-loading guns can compete with the new, breech-loading Krupp cannon firing percussion shells; they and their squad BOSON BOOKS

153

A Moment of Truth lack the experience and morale to counter Bismarck's troops; both men come to despise peasants who refuse their own soldiers food and drink while selling to the enemy just as much as the spies who lead the Prussians through the forest to slaughter French units. When they are taken prisoner they escape together. Jean is wounded which separates them; but they promise to meet in Paris. Bismarck's humiliating terms, his armistice and the pro-monarchist French government that signed them. A hint that the Third Republic meant to disband the National Guard kindled revolt. Soon, Paris had become a battleground between regular troops and Communards who set the main public buildings and palaces ablaze. On one of the Communard barricades, Jean Macquart, still a regular soldier, unwittingly thrusts a bayonet through Maurice. Heartbroken, having lost Maurice and, through his action, his sister, Henriette, whom he loves, Jean watches Paris burning like the vast funeral pyre of Napoleon's doomed empire. Then Jean had an extraordinary feeling. It seemed that as the day was slowly dying, above this blazing city a new dawn was breaking. However, it was the end of everything, fate heaping disaster on disaster in a way that no other nation had suffered; one defeat after another, provinces gone, a mountain of debt to pay, the most dreadful civil war drowning in its own blood, whole districts full of dead amid ruins, no money left, no honor left, a whole world to rebuild. He himself was leaving his broken heart here - Maurice, Henriette, his golden future swept away in the maelstrom. And yet, beyond the still roaring furnace, new hope quickened yonder in the vast and calm sky, so supremely limpid. It was the inevitable rebirth of eternal nature, of eternal humanity, the renewal given to those who hope and toil, the tree which throws out a new and virile shoot when the dead branch which was turning the leaves yellow with poisonous sap has been amputated. Still sobbing, Jean repeated: "Adieu!" Henriette did not lift her head but kept her face buried in her hands. "Adieu!" The ravaged field was lying fallow, the burned-out house was razed; and Jean, the humblest and most grief-stricken, went off walking towards the future and the great and arduous job of building a new France. Of all his books, La Débâcle gave him the most trouble to write and ran a hundred pages longer than any other; but when it appeared, first as a serial then as a book in June 1882, even his worst enemies like Alphonse Daudet's son, Léon, hailed it as a great and original book. Paul Verlaine, the poet, wrote: "This book, which is your masterpiece among so many others, left me quivering and trembling with pangs of salutary sorrow and absolute admiration." With his notebooks and questing instinct, Zola had brought war alive as not even Tolstoi had done in War and Peace; readers felt they were camping, marching, fighting, retreating and sharing the bewilderment and frustration of common soldiers; and like the men thrown into battle at Sedan and the reluctant Emperor who led them, they felt that fate had already cast France as the loser; BOSON BOOKS

154

A Moment of Truth they could comprehend something of the rage of the Communards who sought revenge on the clique that had betrayed La Patrie. La Débâcle made Zola a whole host of new enemies. Military leaders and the younger generation of career officers accused him of vilifying the army and its chiefs of staff, of maligning the solders and blackening the effort of peasants and patriotic civilians who had not trafficked with the enemy but had done their bit to resist. At a banquet to honor Zola, his friend, General Jung, who had fought bravely in 1870, taxed him with dwelling on the bleak side of the story. "I hope with all my heart that my illustrious friend will follow up The Downfall with The Triumph." "General, that's up to you," Zola shot back. Besides France, twelve countries published The Downfall simultaneously; Zola felt that his stock had never stood higher; now he had only to write the final book, the one that would drop the curtain on the Rougon-Macquart family. In the first days of November 1891, he sensed something amiss. Coco was going around looking dazed and tearful, yet for once did not complain about her migraine or breathlessness; and their Pyrenean holiday a month ago seemed to have done her so much good. He was still wondering when the storm broke over his head. In the middle of the month, she burst into his study in the Rue de Bruxelles and flung two packets of letters on his writing-table. His heart started hammering and his whole body trembled as he recognized Jeanne's few love letters to him and the bulkier pile of letters he had written to her. Coco was sobbing, more in fury than grief. "I should have killed her, the trollop, the tramp, the tart, the bitch..."She ran out of expletives. "Who are you talking about?" Zola blustered, although his experience as a Naturalist novelist should have whispered that bluff wouldn't work. "You know who. Your kept woman. The mother of your two bastards." "I still don't know who you're talking about," he stuttered, compounding his lie and giving himself away at the same time by his scarlet face and trembling hands. His mind was whirling with questions and suppositions. How had she found out? She had ferreted out Jeanne's letters in his writing-desk. But where had she got his? And him thinking he had covered his tracks so well! Even telling Céard to code his small ad in Figaro announcing the birth of Jacques, their second child, just over a month before when he was on holiday. Could someone have deciphered that one-line announcement?—Pheasant arrived safely. Blackmail, betrayal—all sorts of assumptions flashed through his head. Coco was glaring at him, flourishing both packets of letters. "Oh, so you don't know your own handwriting and that woman's...that prostitute's. Then you won't miss these." Wrapping her powerful hands round the letters, she began to rip them to shreds. "Where did you get them?" Zola asked. "Where do you think? In your love-nest." She glowered at him with an expression he knew well, one which made him think she had reverted to the BOSON BOOKS

155

A Moment of Truth flower-girl of Place Clichy. "I had to ransack your nice flat and smash your nice writing-table to get them," she cried. "You didn't harm her," he gasped. "No, I treated her with the scorn she deserves," she spat. "But it was as much as I could do to keep my hands off that slut. I felt like murdering her and your two brats then coming back here and killing you then myself." He could see she was not joking and he feared for the children, Jeanne and even himself. So often had he described the potent forces of jealousy and scorned women that he could envisage the havoc Coco could wreak around her; he had catalogued too many battles between woman and woman and man and woman to shrug aside these threats; now his mind relived some of his most violent pages and he shivered and cursed himself for a coward before this raging creature. He watched, impotent, as her powerful fingers tore the letters into confetti and tossed this on to the fire. "I knew you were filthy," she said. "But I thought you kept the filth for your books." "I couldn't help it," Zola said. "I wanted to break it off but..." "But what?" "You know yourself...we had a child and I couldn't." He paused then mumbled. "I wanted children." "Children!" she cried. "If that's the only reason, why didn't you want them when I could have given them to you?" Her arm swept in an arc to embrace his serried ranks of books on every wall. "I thought those were your children," she exclaimed. "All I ever wanted to do was help you in your work and you know how I've slaved all these years and stuck by you and I've put up with poverty and misery...and all for what?...to see you throw yourself away on some little tramp?" She was sobbing pitifully now and he rose and went to comfort her with an arm round her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Coco," he said." "Oh, Meemeel! Oh, Meemeel! How did it happen?" she wept. "She threw herself at you, didn't she?" "I suppose she did," he sighed. "You don't love her, then...you can't love her...if I thought you loved her..." Imagination completed her thought, lighting his mind with violent images. Coco was buying a bottle of vitriol and striding towards Saint-Lazare to spray Jeanne and their defenseless children with the corrosive acid; he could hear their screams, picture their disfigured faces; and she had kept half the bottle for him. He saw the flaring headlines and heard the laughter of his enemies, even of his friends, like Goncourt and Daudet. I love you," he said. "Then you'll give her up, won't you?" "Yes, I'll give her up." "Merci, Meemeel." They fell, weeping, into each other's arms. But how could he give up Jeanne and his children? All three meant so much to him, and he could no more sacrifice Jeanne that he could Coco. When things had quietened down, he sent two wires, one to Jeanne saying, I did everything to stop the visit to you, and another to Céard requesting him to ensure Jeanne was all BOSON BOOKS

156

A Moment of Truth right and had everything she needed. Céard, who acted as a confidant for both him and Coco, discovered that one of his many enemies had written her a poisonpen letter with all the details of his liaison. "Now, you'll have to decide one way or the other, Zola," he said. How could he? And although he had constructed immense frescoes in words and handled labyrinthine plots, he could not keep his continuing visits to his mistress secret. Inevitably, Coco learned he was still seeing Jeanne. For weeks she screamed and ranted round Médan at such a pitch that he could no longer work and had to lock and barricade himself in his study and bury his head in pillows to shut out the oaths that she bellowed at him through the door. To Céard, she affirmed that she had suffered enough and would quit Zola and find a job to keep herself. In the middle of July, she carried out her threat, packed her bags and left Médan. At Villennes station, Céard caught up with her and brought her back to talk things over with Zola. They both decided to let their tempers cool before making a final decision. Zola lived in anguish; he had no one to confide in. His friends like Goncourt and even Daudet sympathized with Gabrielle who, they sneered privately, would have to become governess to the two little Rougon-Macquart bastards. One day, Zola broke down and wept on Daudet's shoulder, confessing his terror that Gabrielle would smash bottles of vitriol over all four of them. Finally, he hit on an idea. He was working on the last Rougon-Macquart novel, Le Docteur Pascal. This book would tie together all the loose ends, would summaries the whole saga of his family and relate Pascal Rougon's love for his young ward, Clotilde. Throughout the summer, he had forced himself to backtrack over the nineteen published volumes of the series and labor to complete the family tree, which would precede this last book. He wrote out his dedication and showed it to Coco. Tears spurted in her eyes when she read: To the memory of My Mother and to My Dear Wife, I dedicate this novel which is the summary and conclusion of all my work. "I was thinking, Chèrie, I have to go to Aix to have a look at the setting for Le Docteur Pascal," he said. "You've never really seen the places where I set some of my books." "No," she admitted. "Then, I have an idea for my next series of novels." "Oh What's that?" "Remember we had a quick look at Lourdes on our holiday last year? I thought of a series of novels about a young priest who makes the pilgrimage there to try to restore his faith, loses it and gets married." He could see the idea of Aix and the series appealed to her. "Then I thought we might spend a week or more in Aix before taking a turn along the Riviera...Cannes, Nice, Monaco...and finish up in Italy." "As long a we don't work too hard," she said. He realized that by consenting to his scheme for a six-week holiday, Coco had resigned herself to sharing a part of him with Jeanne and the children. It lifted a mountain off his back, for wasn’t she a remarkable woman to have come from BOSON BOOKS

157

A Moment of Truth nowhere and held her own with the literary and artistic set, rich society bitches and salon lionesses like Juliette Adam and Georges Charpentier's wife? He had to acknowledge it—without her strong arm and protective instinct, he could never have escaped into the Rougon-Macquart world of his own creation. They began their trip at Lourdes. In his previous casual visit, the place had fascinated Zola—not because Bernadette Soubirous claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary, but because the town and the Catholic church had created a whole industry around the grotto and healing spring with nearly a quarter of a million pilgrims, sick and healthy, arriving from every country by special trains to pray on the anniversary of the vision. He and Coco took the Pyrenees express on August 18,1892; for twelve days he moved among crowds of sick pilgrims noting their stories, listening to open-air prayers, sitting by the healing spring, following mass in the grotto and eavesdropping on the commission inquiring into alleged miracles. From Henri Lasserre, he heard first-hand the story of Bernadette and almost scrapped his original notion and decided to write a straight biography of the illiterate girl who had received a message from the Virgin. When Lasserre told him that his own eye trouble had responded to Lourdes water, Zola remembered Alexis. Filling a bottle from the healing spring, he sent it to his disciple who bathed his eyes with it. And lo! His sight improved. Only the skeptical and the doubters murmured that Alexis's faith in Émile Zola had more to do with the miracle than his faith in Our Lady of Lourdes. *** Aix had not changed much in the twelve years since they had both come to bury his mother there. Before unpacking his bags in the Hotel Negre-Coste, he made his own pilgrimage to the grave with its marble headstone and inscription: TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER. His old grandmother, who had taught him simple faith, lay in some unmarked plot in the same cemetery; he reflected that her teaching, too, had moldered in his scientific mind. Yet, standing looking across at the tattered, sun-bleached summit of SainteVictoire, he wondered if life meant something more that a groping procession into darkness and nihilism. Jeanne didn't think so. She had faith. And with her love, she had imparted some of this unreasoning faith to him. There and then it came to him: Le Docteur Pascal would be his book and Jeanne's, a story of love and hope played out against the conflict between religion and science, age and youth, self-interest and altruism. At the bottom of the cemetery road he stopped for a moment to look at the tangled patch of ground where he had placed the first scene of the RougonMacquart saga, two million words and nearly a quarter of a century ago with the lovers' tryst between Silvère and that other Jeanne, Miette Chantegreil alias Aérienne. In front of it sat their first house where, as a three-year-old, he had heard lights-out and reveille from the nearby Caserne Forbin. How could he guess that he would trail his cast of more than twelve hundred characters through Paris slums and palaces, salons and fleshpots, art-galleries and department stores; then into the coal-mines of the north, the farmland of La Beauce and along the Paris-Normandy railway line and finally to Sedan? BOSON BOOKS

158

A Moment of Truth And when he had reread the cycle recently, he felt that in a curious, inadvertent way he had written himself into every book making the RougonMacquart a sort of disguised self-portrait. From the waste-ground he cut across fields and fruit orchards to an ornamental garden with a square pavilion set in a clump of pines, olives and cypresses. So often on their way from Bourbon College, he, Paul and Baptistin would cross these grounds to get to the River Arc. He took several photographs of this Pavilion Boissy and the views from its terrace over the railway station and the Arc valley. Pascal-Zola and ClotildeJeanne would live their idyll and their torture in that house. As he sketched its layout, he gave it a Provençal name, La Souléiade (The Sun Trap). Making his way back through the gardens, he crossed the boulevard and found himself outside Bourbon College. It had nothing to do with Doctor Pascal, but he went inside. He glanced at the sunken garden, eavesdropped for several minutes on the Sunday service in the small chapel then strolled through to the playground. By that gap in the wall, Paul had tried to fight off the hooligans who were ragging him. Nothing had changed in thirty-five years except that the whole place looked smaller, the plane trees had grown bigger and the pool a bit cleaner. When he stuck his nose inside, the classrooms still had that tang of damp, dry rot, chlorine and powdered ink. He noted that the previous year, 1891, they had changed the name to Lycée Mignet. For several days he wandered round the town, incognito, reliving those years in Thiers's house and the rundown lodgings they'd rented; he climbed over Bibémus Quarry and on to the Zola Dam, feeling like some old gun-dog retrieving the heady scents of his youth in thyme, rosemary, jasmine, lavender and pine resin; he took Coco to see the Château de Galice, Lou Paradou of Abbé Mouret's Transgression. As their coach passed the Jas de Bouffan, he pointed to it and said, casually, "That's where Paul lives." She stared straight ahead as though she had not heard. How would Paul react if he approached him as in the old days with outstretched arms? They might forget their quarrels over art and remember only their loyalty to each other. Unknown to Coco, he had kept track of Cézanne through Alexis, Numa Coste and Marius Roux. Paul appeared to have cast adrift from everyone; he had become a recluse, suspicious of even his best friends; his primitive ways had earned him scorn and sneers and his unavailing attempts to create great pictures had made him the butt and laughing-stock of the town. His marriage to Hortense had merely driven them further apart, and Paul had fallen an easy prey to his shrewish sister, Marie, and the Roman church. Now, it seemed he put his personal faith in God and his artistic faith in posterity. Yet, Zola discovered some things in Aix had changed. Within a week, the whole town knew he was visiting his old haunts; people outdid one another to make amends for his father, his impecunious widow and son; Aix even contested his paternity with Paris, claiming him as its son. Wasn't he the most widely read French author of all time, president of the national society of authors, member of

BOSON BOOKS

159

A Moment of Truth the Legion of Honor, a future member of the Académie Française with his plot already mapped out in the Panthéon? Zola politely refused all their invitations, making one exception when he addressed a gathering of Provençal artists and writers. When he sat down, Numa Coste pointed to a reporter from the Mémorial d'Aix. "Paul will read about you in the local sheet," he said. "Why don't we take a turn out to the Jas and shake him by the hand?" Zola shook his head. A whole galaxy of time separated them. Paul might easily create a scene and snub him. "No," he said. "It wouldn't do any good raking over old embers." In the middle of December when he settled in Paris to write Le Docteur Pascal, he felt he was drawing a veil over a whole era of his own life; everywhere in the book he stirred antiphonal echoes of his own thought and philosophy, his own feelings: He had let work devour him, let it eat away his brain, his heart, his flesh. Out of all this solitary passion, he had created nothing but books, soiled paper which the wind would no doubt carry away and whose pages chilled his hands when he opened them. And no palpitating breast of a woman to press close to his own, no infant's warm head to kiss. He had lived alone, a self-centered scientist in frozen isolation, he would die there alone. Was he really going to die like this? Wouldn't he get the taste of the happiness of ordinary street-porters, of the carters who cracked their whips under his window? Jeanne had come to save him, just as Clotilde, his niece and ward, gives Pascal new hope and new life by offering him her youth and her love: And he no longer felt afraid, or suffered, or doubted; they were free and she gave herself with full knowledge and because she wanted to; and he accepted the supreme gift of her body like some priceless thing that he had won by the force of his love. The place, the hour, their ages had vanished. Only immortal nature remained, the passion which possesses and gives birth to the happiness which wills itself into being...In her delicious rapture, she uttered only the soft cry of her lost virginity; and he with a sob of ecstasy, clasped all of her to him to thank her without her knowing it, for having given him back his manhood... Clotilde was the rejuvenation which came late to Pascal, in his declining years. She brought him sunlight and flowers, the bouquets of a lover; and her youth, she gave him this after his thirty years of hard toil, when he was already pallid and weary from too deep a knowledge of human suffering. Under her great, frank eyes and in the pure odor of her breath he felt reborn. Once again, he had faith in life, in health, in strength, in the eternal cycle of nature. However, things turn sour in La Souléiade; Pascal worries about money (just as Zola had worried about morals) and finally remorse compels him to sacrifice his own happiness, and Clotilde's, by sending her to take care of her crippled BOSON BOOKS

160

A Moment of Truth brother in Paris. Stricken by a heart attack, Pascal dies before she can get to his bedside; but he knows she is expecting their child. With his last energy, he completes the family tree and papers that he has been compiling for more than a quarter of a century. But these papers, the entire history of the Rougon-Macquart family, are burned by his mother before Clotilde can save them. She has his child, though. Pascal's child. What did misery, suffering, evil matter? The healthy life came through universal work, in the fertilizing life-force. The effort was justified when there was a child born out of love. From that moment, hope was reborn despite the running sores, the blacklist of human shame. It was the perpetuation of life, dared yet again, life that we never tire of believing to be good because we live it with so much excitement in the midst of injustice and sorrow...In the cool silence of the work-room, Clotilde smiled at the child which still sucked at her breast and held its little arm in the air, straight up, raised like a flag beckoning to life. These were his last words on the Rougon-Macquart family. Not many people liked Le Docteur Pascal, viewing it as the morbid passion of an old man for a girl; his critics, failing to make allowance for the fact that he had written the book to round off the cycle, sneered at the crude thesis on heredity and environment he had propounded in the novel; they twitted him about his summary, literary execution of clan members, in particular the old rogue, Antoine Macquart. Who had ever heard of anybody, even Macquart, a drunk with more liquor than blood in his system, being devoured by spontaneous combustion until nothing remained but his pipe, its ash and a greasy veneer on the kitchen walls? Only those close friends who knew the story of Zola and Jeanne Rozerot realized that with Le Docteur Pascal he had abandoned Naturalism for the sort of fairy tale he had written as a stripling in his Paris garret. He wondered what Coco thought of the book. If she realized that he was Pascal and Jeanne was Clotilde. Whether or not she guessed, she made no comment on this or anything else in the book, although it was dedicated to her. When he presented his copy to Jeanne, he tore out the printed dedication on the flyleaf and wrote: "To my beloved Jeanne—to my Clotilde who gave me the royal feast of her youth and renewed my youth in making me a present of my Denise and my Jacques, the two dear children for whom I wrote this book so that when they read it one day they will know how much I adored their mother and with what respectful tenderness they will repay her later for the happiness with which she consoled me in my deep sorrow. Émile Zola. Paris, June 20, 1893." Their children looked on, uncomprehending, as he handed the book to Jeanne with a kiss then threw the crumpled pellet of rice paper with the official dedication on it into the fireplace as though consigning that part of his life with it.

BOSON BOOKS

161

A Moment of Truth

BOOK 4

BOSON BOOKS

162

A Moment of Truth

I Edmond de Goncourt, Julia Daudet, and Coco spectated while Daudet and Zola went into their little pantomime of presenting a petition to the minister of public instruction, Raymond Poincaré. Now bowed and almost crippled, Daudet had to lean one hand on his stick and the other on Zola's arm while Zola held on to both their hats and juggled with the scrap of paper on which he had written his little speech. "And that, my dear Goncourt, is how you got the Legion of Honor," he said. Touched by the scene, Goncourt could only nod his thanks. Daudet had invited them to dinner in his Paris house, Rue Bellechasse, to announce the news to Goncourt and welcome Zola and Coco back from their sixweek visit to Rome. "Where's Léon?" Goncourt asked. Daudet shrugged. "He went along to the École Militaire earlier today to watch the ceremony of degradation of that Jewish captain, Dreyfus." Dreyfus? Neither the name nor the incident meant anything to Zola. They finished their aperitifs and took their places at the table to gossip about the old days with Flaubert, Turgenev and Maupassant, who had died raving mad eighteen months before, in the summer of 1893. "And Rome? How did you find it, Émile?" Daudet asked. "It reminded me of Aix—a smell of rancid olive-oil and washing hanging at the windows around the Colosseum." "But surely the Quirinale, Saint Peter's..."Goncourt interjected. "Saint Peter's dome is too far back from the square," Zola said, dismissively. "Now the Sistine Chapel...that's something...and the Appian Way and the Catacombs. You must see my photographs of them." "And the Italians, how did they strike you?" "They're all right. But their country! Banks with no funds and a finance minister with no money. And the Vatican rolling in gold with a mean pope who detests Rome." "He wouldn't grant you an audience then?" Zola shook his head. "He was frightened off by what he read in some of the anti-Catholic papers about my visit." "Or what he read in Lourdes," Daudet grinned. Zola had called his new trilogy The Three Cities—Lourdes, Rome, Paris. His novel on Lourdes had figured on the Roman Curia's Index of banned books just after its publication in August 1894, and no one doubted why. Zola had not only damned Roman Catholicism but also suggested a new religion to replace it. His hero, the priest Pierre Froment goes on a pilgrimage to Lourdes with his close friend, Marie de Guersaint, who is suffering from tuberculosis, to find out if miracle cures take place and to inquire into the truth of Bernadette's vision. But on his pilgrim's train, he discovers people making the journey to Lourdes with baser motives in mind: the woman who meets her lover there; the two schemers who go to pray for their dying son but also for the death of the boy's BOSON BOOKS

163

A Moment of Truth aunt who has left him her fortune; their son lives, the aunt dies; another married woman asks the Virgin for the return of her errant husband, and gets her wish. And Pierre Froment? He sees Marie cured of her TB after a night of prayer in the grotto. But he does not feel the miracle. Marie does, and promises her life to the Virgin, knowing that Pierre loves her. His doubts about the truth of Bernadette's vision weaken his faith further; he considers the apparition a hallucination experienced by a sick girl mentally conditioned by one of her confessors; Pierre returns from Lourdes dreaming of a new religion to replace Christianity, one that will bring happiness on earth not just its promise in the hereafter. Zola caught the grin exchanged between Daudet and Goncourt. "What did they expect?" he said. "If I'd said that Bernadette had really seen the Virgin and if I'd given my word about witnessing one miracle I'd have sold half a million copies of the book in the churches. But how could I?" "You have to have faith," Goncourt said. "Blind faith," Zola snapped. "Look here, Lourdes is werewolf country with a monster or a legend every kilometer. The town seized on Bernadette to give their legends a new twist and the Vatican smelled big business." "I can see why the pope didn't care much for your book," Daudet chuckled. "On a much lower plane, our Catholic English governess quit when she found we were entertaining Zola, the devil who wrote Lourdes. It must have made you a lot of enemies." "Oh, I've long ago lost count of those," Zola grunted. "I just tried to tell the truth as I saw it." "It's a lot easier to paint sex and sadism then to paint souls," Goncourt said, blandly. "I didn't try painting souls since I didn't believe in them anyway." Goncourt and Daudet had both read Lourdes and agreed that Zola had lost none of his cunning as a constructor; when he painted scenes in the grotto, armies of sick pilgrims, torchlight processions, open-air prayers and people round the healing spring, he had the same eye and ear, touch and smell; nor had he lost his flair for sculpting powerful characters in prose. And yet...yet something had gone wrong. Neither Goncourt nor Daudet could put a finger on it. Maybe Zola had erred in changing his element and sacrificing his Naturalist style; he seemed ill-at-ease with metaphysical arguments; for his Rougon-Macquart family and their perversions he had employed raw color and robust literature; but pitmen and prostitutes weren't the same thing as battalions of priests and penitents. Critics joked that fat Zola wrote better than thin Zola. And his two friends— and rivals—felt that the real clue to Zola's transformation might lie in his altered life-style. They had already discussed Zola's sex life, or lack of it, his phobias and manias with the five young writers who had attacked him and La Terre in their manifesto. They agreed that his fictional creations did seem to sprout from repressed sexual hunger. But now Zola had met his mistress and had two children by her. No longer did he need to repress his sexual urge only to watch it outcrop in his literary characters. Old Man Flaubert had always insisted that creative writing demanded BOSON BOOKS

164

A Moment of Truth sexual continence. And Zola might be suffering as a novelist from expending his emotional energy somewhere else. "You know, Émile, they're whispering that you've taken the road to Rome like Huysmans," Daudet said with a grin. "An old Positivist like me doesn't change his spots," Zola said. They had finished dinner when Daudet's son, Léon, made his appearance. Excitement showed through the olive tint of his face. Zola had watched him grow into manhood and sometimes wondered how Daudet, the dreamy, homespun sage and his gentle wife, Julia, could have produced a choleric and aggressive gourmand like Léon. He had studied medicine under the great Charcot then abruptly quit medical school and delivered a crucifying attack on his old professor and others in his first novel, Les Morticoles, which did show some of his father's brilliance. (But why the attack? Because Medicine could do nothing for his father?) Léon had then allied himself with Édouard Drumont, notorious author of a book attacking the Jews, La France Juive, and founder of the anti-Semitic journal, La Libre Parole; he had become a collaborator of another Provençal, Charles Maurras, an ardent Catholic, royalist and rationalist. Zola could see that Léon had come home flushed with some triumph that he had celebrated in style. "Well, that's one Jewish traitor less," he cried in his strident voice. "You should have been there just to see how he took his punishment—not a sign of guilt—you'd have thought everybody else was guilty." With bitter verve, he recounted that afternoon's scene in the forecourt of the École Militaire where they had publicly cashiered Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish artillery captain, found guilty of high treason for having passed military secrets to the Germans. Goncourt, who had followed the case, filled in some of the details. Arrested on October 15, Dreyfus had been tried by court-martial behind closed doors and sentenced to life deportation on Devil's Island penal colony in French Guyana. "He got off too lightly,” Leon barked. "He should have been shot." He described how the ceremony had taken place in front of a hostile crowd of between five and six thousand people, all shouting, "Down with the traitor," and "To the gallows." When General Darras gave the order, four soldiers escorted Dreyfus before Adjutant Bouxin of the Dragoons. "And do you know—that Yid marched with his head up as though he was getting the Military Cross—they have no shame, that race." "But it's only an accident of chance that he's a Jew," Zola put in. "It was no accident," Léon countered, glaring at him. "You should have seen the kids on the trees all round the École Militaire shouting "Bastard," and "Coward." And he didn't blink an eyelid when Captain Bouxin ripped the braid off his kepi and cuffs, then the buttons off his tunic." "This Bouxin, was he a big man?" Zola queried. "A giant. He jerked that Yid's saber out of its sheath and broke it over his knee like a stick loaf. And do you now what Dreyfus was yelling? "Soldiers, you're cashiering an innocent man! I'm innocent. Long live France! Long live the army. I swear by my wife and children that I'm innocent." Léon snorted with disgust. "It was sickening. I wonder the crowd didn't lynch him." BOSON BOOKS

165

A Moment of Truth "The crowd!" Zola retorted. "The crowd has no sense of right and wrong." "It was right this time. Even that traitor admitted his crime just before they cashiered him." "Did he make this confession in writing?" Zola asked. "He didn't have to," Léon said. "Anyway, a court-martial with seven highranking officers doesn't make mistakes." Unless they're as anti-Semitic as you, Zola thought privately. But Jew, Gentile or Arab, this Dreyfus meant nothing to him. Nonetheless, young Daudet's account of the man and the ceremony—even though partisan—had the compelling quality of good fiction. Maybe when he had finished his trilogy about the priest, Pierre Froment, and had nothing better in mind, he would look at the possibilities of fashioning a novel around this Dreyfus Case. He turned the card over in his fingers. Dr. Édouard Toulouse, head of the mental illness clinic of the Paris Medical Faculty and physician to the SainteAnne asylum. Nearly twenty years ago he had spent long days in that asylum watching men dying of DTs for his description of Coupeau's death in L'Assommoir. What did this Toulouse want? Édouard Toulouse, middle-aged, whiskered and bespectacled, came to the point. He was conducting a medico-psychological inquiry into the relationship between intellectual superiority and neuropathy among writers, artists and scientists. He had chosen Monsieur Émile Zola as an example of superior intelligence not only known throughout France but in the world beyond. "As an example of nervous disorder as well?" Zola commented, dryly. "Well, what worth-while artist isn't?" Toulouse came back. "Besides, you've admitted it many times yourself." "Oh! Where?" "In your articles—but especially in your novels." "Go on." Dr. Toulouse proved that he had read the twenty Rougon-Macquart novels with an analytical eye, and also the novels that had preceded the family saga. In Madeleine Férat, hadn't Monsieur Zola revealed his own phobia about lightning storms? Hadn't he drawn on his own wife for the character of Madeleine? And hadn't he painted a portrait of an overpowering father? His own father? And that murky passage where the characters of Thérèse Raquin lived like trapped victims in hell with those haunting images of the dead man between them? Monsieur Zola believed in a hell on earth and not necessarily in the hereafter. "I would also say you had a dread of live burial, Monsieur Zola?" "What makes you say that?" "Germinal...the people entombed in the pit disaster. And that short story you wrote sixteen years ago, “The Death of Olivier Bécaille,” where you buried somebody alive." "But I resurrected him." "So, are you religious deep down?" "No. My religion is man and nature." "Do you still have this fear of live burial?" Zola shook his head. "Do you know why it has gone?" "Perhaps I'm older and more settled." BOSON BOOKS

166

A Moment of Truth And perhaps you're no longer running away from things...from people. Perhaps you've found a new meaning for your life." Toulouse proposed a long series of tests but Zola was reluctant to submit to being cross-examined, which seemed to him too personal. "I don't like psychology," he said. "In fact, I don't believe that mind and matter are separate things with separate functions." "But my inquiry will be purely physiological," Dr. Toulouse countered. "I have the collaboration of sixteen experts in every field from anthropology to zoology. These gentlemen will measure everything that can be measured mentally and physically to ascertain where people of superior intelligence differ from the common run of people." "You say it will be completely scientific, your investigation." "I have Mr Francis Galton, of the British Royal Society to analyze heredity traits. You've heard of him, surely. Cousin of Charles Darwin." "A cousin of Darwin!" Zola listened to the names of the other experts, all international authorities in their field. Bertillon would measure his anatomy, other specialists his eyesight, hearing, sense of smell, touch, reflexes, musical ability. What could he lose by submitting his body and brain to such research men? However, he had no idea that Toulouse's inquiry would take the best part of a year, cover the whole of his life and involve him in time-consuming tests; they dissected him, measuring everything from the amount and frequency of his urine to his comical attempts to sing a scale in tune; until they quizzed him, he had no idea he had sat on his father's shoulders before the age of three to watch a military march-past at the Carrousel in Paris. "And sex, Monsieur Zola? When did you have your first experience?" "Eighteen, I think." "Do you believe in sexual liberty?" "Liberty yes—license or promiscuity, No." "Is that why sex is always equated with catastrophe in your books like Nana and La Bête Humaine?" "The natural purpose of sex is always procreation. Any other purpose is unnatural and therefore against the natural law." Dr. Toulouse and his team found plenty of evidence of his nervous trouble; his fingers trembled violently, he micturated twenty times a day even after reducing this by will-power; it needed no more than a closely-fitting garment to provoke chest pains and a choking feeling; even after seven hours' sleep, he woke tired and stiff-jointed. Not one of these symptoms did they trace to an organic cause of illness. And his manias and phobias! He had a bad case of arithomania, obsession with numbers; he made his choice of good numbers like three and seven, or bad ones like seventeen; he must start walking always on the right foot and step on pavement cracks; he had to touch things, to close doors several times and he worried about fire, flood and tempest. Thunder and lightning terrified him. Monsieur Zola, the experts concluded, had a remarkable facility for soaking up facts and putting them on paper with clarity and eloquence; yet, he could walk round Paris without knowing which street he was on, or remembering where he BOSON BOOKS

167

A Moment of Truth had gone; his mind seemed highly selective and, unlike his myopic vision, beamed powerfully on the task which preoccupied him to the exclusion of everything else. He liked youth, health, goodness but above everything else, truth. Grey skies he preferred to blue, strong flavors to weak, primary colors to pastel shades. For him, running water always had a cleansing feeling. Monsieur Zola was a home bird who liked neither games of chance such as cards, nor shooting, nor billiards; but in word games they found he excelled, both in harmonizing the sounds and rhyming as well as quoting synonyms. In word-association tests, his responses yielded important clues to his personality: LEAF?—Tree: THUNDER?—Painful feeling; SUNDAY?—Unpleasant idea of boredom; HEART?—Heart trouble; STRUGGLE?—My life; VIRILITY?— Man's penis; COITUS?—Woman; COUCH?—Coitus. "You don't like crowds, Monsieur Zola, yet you describe them brilliantly." "Maybe that's why." "And death?—are you afraid of death?" "Sudden death, yes. I have bouts of nerves worrying about death." "Pain, physical pain—does this make you afraid?" "No, I'm much more angry about moral assault and injustice than about physical pain or violence." With the help of his team of experts, Dr. Toulouse finished his bulky volume which appeared in the book-shops in 1896; Zola found it fascinating to read about himself; he realized, too, that this study gave the lie to those who dismissed him as a literary backwoodsman who wrote filth because it sold, who fomented revolution, who preached atheism and denigrated France's glorious army. Yet, his expert panel had taken a year to arrive at a conclusion he could have written for them before they began: he was a nervous, sensitive, shy man who feared the voice of the mob, hated injustice and loved truth. To prove his collaboration, he wrote Dr. Toulouse a preface, saying: "I have given you my authorization because I have never hidden anything, having nothing to hide. I have lived openly and I have said openly and without fear what I believed good and useful to say. Among the thousands of pages that I have written, I have denied none...My brain is like something in a glass jar, I have given it to everyone and it doesn't frighten me if everyone reads it...I accept the Truth."

BOSON BOOKS

168

A Moment of Truth

II Pinpin towed him out of the carriage entrance of the Rue de Bruxelles and along past Vintimille Square, lifting his leg at every lamppost and squirting the base of the Berlioz statue; Zola tripped after the black-and-white Pomeranian up to the Boulevard de Clichy. Around the bookstalls his ear caught the cry, "l’Affaire Dreyfus—new sensation." Through his pince-nez, his myopic eyes picked out headlines announcing that suspicion was fingering a certain Count Esterhazy as the real criminal in the Dreyfus Case; he noticed they were even selling cards showing the handwriting of Dreyfus and Esterhazy so that people could compare them and conclude who had written those secrets to the German ambassador. But Pinpin had little nose for newsprint, left no messages at the bookstalls for his canine friends and towed his master away. Neither did such news bother Zola. A thousand pages of notes and documents and the first two hundred manuscript pages of Paris lay on his writing-table. His priest, Pierre Froment, had returned without faith from Lourdes with its mediaeval pilgrim rites and has gone to Rome to seek an audience with the pope and defend his book, The New Rome, against Vatican interdiction; in this book, he has urged Pope Leo XIII to found a new socializing religion promising happiness now and not in the hereafter, but after endless collisions with minor Vatican officials he loses both his impulsion and his way in the interminable corridors of Roman Catholicism and finally flees back to Paris. Pinpin pulled him towards Pigalle where the Nouvelle-Athènes lay deserted; he had not set foot in it for fifteen years, nor in any of the Pigalle haunts where they were now sweeping the cigarette and cigar butts into the gutters and filling dustbins with champagne bottles on that gray April morning; on the other side lay the Assommoir district. Zola reflected, ruefully, that the second volume of his trilogy, Rome had sold nothing like the better Rougon-Macquart books. Not even an immediate ban by the Vatican and mutterings from hundreds of French pulpits could boost its bookshop stock. Funny, he'd no intention of injecting socialism, religion or politics into books like L'Assommoir and Germinal and what an impact they'd made! Perhaps he was preaching too much. Anyway, he had to finish the trilogy. Three might bring him luck. And the third volume, Paris might hoist his literary reputation. This time, he would transform Pierre into someone who finds both faith and his new religion in the joy of working, the bliss of marriage and children, a belief in life where truth and justice prevail and peace reigns. As though trying to drop him some hint, Pinpin set his nose across the boulevard and into his old Batignolles territory of soiled pavements and strong smells. How long would it take a new religion of science plus socialism to transfigure those rank slums and sleazy bistrots into a city of the future? Zola about-turned and marched through the network of streets to the Place Clichy and home. BOSON BOOKS

169

A Moment of Truth No sooner had he sat down at his desk and begun work than Gabrielle entered to whisper that a Monsieur Bernard-Lazare wished to speak to him. Vaguely he put a face to the name—a young essayist and critic who had savaged and slammed the last Rougon-Macquart books. However, he nodded that he would meet him. Bernard-Lazare apologized for disturbing him then produced a brochure, several papers and a manuscript which he placed on the table. Now Zola remembered him—a young Jew who had written a fine book, Anti-Semitism, and had fought a duel with Drumont, the Jew-baiting editor of La Libre Parole, last year. Zola reckoned him in his early thirties. He picked up the brochure which had a Belgian imprimatur and bore the title: A Judicial Error—the Truth about the Dreyfus Case. Now, he recalled that, although every French parliamentarian and newspaper had received copies, the pamphlet had made little noise. "What is the truth?" he asked. "Dreyfus is innocent." "You're saying that seven officers and gentlemen, members of a court-martial, have convicted an innocent man." "More than that. I contend the General Staff know that Dreyfus is innocent and they're covering up for someone else." "Who?" "Major Walsin-Esterhazy...he's a count from an old Austro-Hungarian family settled in France and he's got lots of friends in high places." "What proof have you got that he's guilty?" Bernard-Lazare opened his brochure and indicated the photographic reproductions of a commercial docket on which was scribbled five pieces of military information and several comments. "That's the document they used to condemn Dreyfus," he said. "It was picked up by a cleaner from the waste-paper basket in the German Embassy." "By a charwoman!" Bernard-Lazare then realized Zola knew next to nothing about the Dreyfus Case. Patiently, he explained the espionage game, how the Germans, Italians, British and French all had their spies and their informants. Madame Bastian, who worked for the French intelligence service, rifled the German Embassy waste-paper baskets and sometimes surfaced with secrets like this cover-note which had been written by some French officer to Colonel Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen, the German military attaché. French counter-espionage agents suspected it had been written by an artillery captain and alerted army intelligence; Major Mercier du Paty de Clam believed that Captain Alfred Dreyfus answered the suspect conditions and summoned him to dictate the script of the docket to him. On this handwriting evidence they had indicted Dreyfus, tried him in camera and convicted him of high treason. Bernard-Lazare pointed to the copy of the docket and a handwritten note on the facing page. "That's Dreyfus's handwriting—you can see it's not the same as the writing on the docket." Zola took a lorgnette to peer at the two documents. "Hmm. With handwriting you join a school of thought. It's always difficult to be precise." BOSON BOOKS

170

A Moment of Truth "But they convicted Dreyfus on that alone," Bernard-Lazare protested. "Surely there was other evidence." "A forged letter, that's all," Bernard-Lazare said. "It was supposed to have been written by the Italian military attaché, Colonel Panizzardi, to Schwartzkoppen, saying, 'Herewith twelve plans which that bastard, Dreyfus, gave me for you.' Dreyfus no more wrote that than he did the original document." "And who do you think forged this second note?" The man who engineered the whole affair—Major Henry, the friend of the real traitor, Esterhazy." Zola stared, incredulously, at him then at the brochure before leafing through the manuscript of the book Bernard-Lazare meant to publish about the Dreyfus Case. Shaking his head, he muttered, "With a story like that they wouldn't even believe me." "You mean, you don't believe it." "No, it's possible—but you'll need a lot more proof." Bernard-Lazare persuaded him to keep the brochure, the copy of the manuscript and the other documents, and Zola promised to study them when he had time. But Paris was waiting, absorbing all his thought and energy, and the Dreyfus Case did not seem all that significant. However, had he felt convinced that an innocent man was sweating and fretting his life away in Devil's Island... While he was finishing the book during the summer of 1897, he caught so many echoes and reverberations of the Dreyfus Case; so many people seemed to want to involve him. For instance, Joseph Reinach, historian, member of parliament for Digne and Gambetta's old secretary. "You know, Zola," he said, "there was even talk of war with Germany over the Dreyfus business." "War? You're joking." "Not at all. The Minister of War, General Auguste Mercier showed the Dreyfus document to the President of the Republic, Casimir-Perier, and everybody got cold feet." "Because it had been stolen from the German Embassy, is that it?" Reinach nodded. "That's how those two villains, Du Paty de Clam and Major Henry, managed to get the case tried behind closed doors and convict on such flimsy evidence. It was either that or the Germans might march on Paris." "But both these villains must have known the truth would come out." "Oh, they tried to fix that, too. You know they left Dreyfus alone with a loaded revolver and made it plain that, for the honor of the army, he should blow his brains out." "But it gets more and more ludicrous," Zola cried. "What a story it would make...I can see it all." He looked at Reinach. "But we still don't know for certain Dreyfus is innocent." "Colonel Picquart thinks he has proof." "Picquart? Who's he?" Reinach explained that Colonel Georges-Marie Picquart had taken over as chief of army intelligence the previous year; the youngest colonel in the army, everyone considered him one of the most brilliant officers ever to graduate from Saint-Cyr. Just after he assumed his intelligence job, Madame Bastian produced more evidence." BOSON BOOKS

171

A Moment of Truth "La Bastian, the charlady? From the German Embassy waste-paper basket?" "The same," Reinach confirmed. "She came up with a telegraph message to Major Esterhazy asking for more details about the relations between the Germans and their contacts." Zola was now listening intently while Reinach described how army intelligence had kept surveillance on Esterhazy; it took four months before Picquart acquired samples of the count's handwriting which he then compared with the original docket on which Dreyfus had been convicted. "They matched perfectly," Reinach said. "And what did the experts say to that?" "That the Esterhazy letter had been forged by the Jewish syndicate which had been formed to rescue Dreyfus." "Then surely Picquart revealed all this to his superiors, the chiefs of staff of the army." "He did just that. And they got rid of him. Posted him to Tunis then brought him back and jailed him in secret at the Cherche-Midi military prison." "On what charges?" "Communicating secret information, falsifying documents...Major Henry trumped up the charges, but as you know, they can do you for anything in the army." "Is Picquart the only man with proof of Dreyfus's innocence?" "No," Reinach said. "To cover himself he told his friend, Louis Leblois, the lawyer." Zola raised his eyebrows at the name of a man who had a reputation for integrity and absolute loyalty to the principle of justice. "What does he propose to do?" he asked. "I don't know. Picquart has sworn him to complete secrecy." Reinach got up to pace back and forth across Zola's vast study before halting and facing the writer. Zola, you're the only man who can break the conspiracy around Dreyfus." "Me? How?" "You command the biggest audience in France and you can run a newspaper campaign giving the facts and pleading for truth and justice." "But I haven't a platform." "Go and see Rodays at Figaro. He believes us." Zola shrugged. In May of the previous year he had published several articles in Figaro including one entitled In Defense of the Jews; that had earned him bludgeoning headlines and several pages of execration in Drumont's Libre Parole, Rochefort's L'Intransigeant and Charles Maurras's Le Gazette de France. If he broke a lance for Dreyfus, the church, the army, the aristocracy and the more powerful bourgeois would have his head. "I've a feeling that Dreyfus will be better off without my help, Reinach," he muttered. He had another reason. For eight years he had run two households. Drumont, Rochefort and Ernest Judet, editor of Le Petit Journal, might emblazon that across their scandal sheets; they might even molest Jeanne in Paris or at Cheverchement where he had rented her a mansion within half an hour by bicycle from Médan. BOSON BOOKS

172

A Moment of Truth For himself it did not matter; he thrived on scandal. But Coco! More bourgeoise than the Tuileries Gardens on Sunday, she would shrivel and die a thousand deaths at that sort of scandal. So, with a sorrowful shake of his head, he showed Reinach out. Yet, Dreyfus niggled. Judas! Traitor! Jew! Those words resounded and wounded like the taunts and thrashings they had given him in Bourbon College. Mobs he detested. Just violence and ignorance on the rampage. Despite himself, he began to study The Affair going over the articles and accounts published since October 1894 when Drumont had disclosed the arrest of Dreyfus. On one side, Du Paty de Clam and Henry had rigged the evidence to shield Esterhazy who had powerful allies; on the other side, Picquart had inside knowledge that he had told Leblois who had passed this on to Auguste ScheurerKestner, vice-president of the Senate. But all three felt bound by idiotic vows. Zola might still have refused to act had the anti-Jewish newspapers not begun to attack Scheurer-Kestner, proving that the senator knew too much. Then, one day in November 1897, he bumped into Fernard de Rodays, editor of Figaro, in the street. Like two boulders in a stream, they anchored themselves in the middle of the boulevard pavement with the crowd swirling round them. Talking about The Affair. "No, I've no proof...nothing but my flair...but he's innocent, "Rodays shouted above the street din. "Well, why let them pillory Scheurer-Kestner? Why don't you do something useful with that rag of yours?" "I would, if I had somebody like Zola to take up the challenge." "What does Zola matter in this case? " "People listen to him." "But he's a novelist, not a politician. He has always kept out of politics." "This isn't politics. It's a question of truth and justice. A miscarriage of justice." Rodays caught Zola by the sleeve of his Macfarlane. "Stop seeing it as your next novel and look at it as a human tragedy, something that could happen to any one of us. Or all of us." Rodays had put his finger on it. Up to now, he had considered Dreyfus as book fodder; or a sort of morality play in which Dreyfus was the crucified Jew, Esterhazy the devil and Scheurer-Kestner and Picquart avenging angels; or a pawn in a political tussle between reactionaries and republicans. But if he saw Dreyfus as a battleground where truth and justice, tolerance and racial equality were fighting for their existence...Suddenly, he turned and slapped Rodays on the shoulder. "How many articles?" he asked. "As many as the traffic will bear." His first article he kept short, less than two thousand words and extolled Scheurer-Kestner for defending Dreyfus and taking a public slanging without betraying his trust and revealing what he knew. And we have come to this horrible shambles where every sentiment is faked and no one can seek justice without being called senile or a traitor. Lies are spread about, the most absurd stories are printed solemnly by reputable newspapers, the whole nation seems stricken with madness when a little goodBOSON BOOKS

173

A Moment of Truth sense would restore everything to normal. Ah! how simple that will be, I repeat, the day when those who are our masters dare to stand up to the mob like brave men!... “Truth is on the march and nothing will stop it. Zola found himself invited by Scheurer-Kestner to meet him with the writer, Marcel Prévost and the lawyer, Louis Leblois. There, he confirmed the facts which the disgraced Colonel Picquart had passed on to Leblois proving the innocence of Dreyfus, the guilt of Esterhazy and the plot by the general staff and even General Mercier, the war minister, to compound the injustice by camouflaging their error. Dreyfus had never once admitted guilt. When Scheurer-Kestner had placed all this testimony before his friend, General Jean-Baptiste Billot, the present war minister, he had been sworn to secrecy. It was then Billot's army subordinates had started their hate campaign against him in the press. "We'll hit them back twice as hard as they hit us," Zola told the trio. On December 1, his second article appeared. Called “The Syndicate,” it scoffed at the popular notion of the Jews forming a secret society to spend their ill-gotten millions to falsify evidence, prove Dreyfus innocent and free him. If such a society existed, then Scheurer-Kestner, Colonel Picquart and Émile Zola all belonged to it. Look at the French citizens, our equals and brothers, that idiotic antiSemitism drags through the mud daily. They have thought fit to crush them with Captain Dreyfus, they have tried to pin his crime on the whole race. All of them condemned, venal, traitorous men. And we don't think these people will protest furiously, will try to clear their name, will demand an eye for an eye in this war of extermination waged against them? In his third article, he took issue with the gutter press that had fanned the Dreyfus Case into an anti-Semitic rage and poisoned the national conscience. I have already said how this barbarous campaign which takes us backwards a thousand years, insults my need for brotherhood, my passion for tolerance and human emancipation...The poison is in the people, if the whole people is not poisoned. Anti-Semitism has caused this dangerous virulence which the Panama Scandal has spread among us. And all this lamentable Dreyfus Case is its work; it is anti-Semitism alone which has made the judicial error possible, it alone has enraged the masses and prevented this error from being gently and nobly recognized for our sanity and good name. Figaro refused to publish the other two articles. Apoplectic readers bellowed their wrath over the telephone and choked the paper's mail department with written protests and cancelled subscriptions. Shamefaced, Rodays had to admit that thousands of his readers put the honor of the French army above their morality, and thousands more just hated Jews. BOSON BOOKS

174

A Moment of Truth For Zola, it proved that the Dreyfus Case had split France into two nations: on one side, the army, church, aristocracy and grande bourgeoisie were determined that, whatever the truth, Dreyfus would remain on Devil's Island, a guilty traitor; on the other side, the Socialist and Radical parties, the intellectuals, Jews and several minorities seized on Dreyfus both as a principle of justice and as a political issue. In the National Assembly, the name of Dreyfus provoked verbal battles and even scuffles among deputies. One December 4, 1897, the prime minister, Jules Méline, tried to quell the din by shouting, "There is no Dreyfus Case." Several days later, Zola watched august senators fling their order papers at ScheurerKestner, their vice-president, when he mentioned Dreyfus and Zola. "Zola-the-stinker! Zola-the-vile! Zola-the-Italian!" they shouted. Outside the senate, they heard people humming and singing one of the Dreyfus ditties that were making the rounds of the cafés and nightclubs: His brother Mathieu, artful Jew, With more spondulicks than the mint To buy up any deputy Who'll say his brother's innocent In the National Assembly Zola published his last two articles as a brochure. By now he realized that reactionaries were manipulating Dreyfus and anti-Semitism to tilt at nothing less than the Republic itself. In his “Open Letter to Young People,” he implored them to fight for truth and justice. "Oh, Youth! Youth! You will create the future, you will build the assizes of the next century which will solve the problems of truth and equity left by the dying century...Youth, Youth! Think of the sufferings your fathers endured, the terrible battle they had to win, to conquer the liberty that you enjoy...Youth, Youth! Always be on the side of justice. If the idea of justice darkens in you, your path will indeed be perilous...Youth, Youth! Be human, be generous. Even if we make mistakes, bear with us when we say that an innocent man undergoes a fearful punishment and it breaks our hearts with shock and anguish." His articles and the growing public doubt now focused attention on Esterhazy. A former mistress revealed some of his letters which Figaro published. "I wouldn’t hurt a little dog, but I would have 100,000 Frenchmen killed with pleasure," Esterhazy had written. "If they came and told me that tomorrow I'd be killed as an Uhlan captain while sabering a Frenchman I would be perfectly happy...Paris taken by assault and given over to be pillaged by 100,000 drunken soldiers. That's the birthday I dream about." Already Dreyfus's brother, Mathieu, had denounced Esterhazy as author of the spy docket; not even the general staff could now avoid putting him on trial. But they arranged a secret court-martial. Zola felt convinced that Esterhazy would now take Dreyfus's place on Devil's Island; he only doubted if they would reveal the whole story. Appealing to everyone to speak out, he wrote: "After a secret investigation, a judgment in camera will finish nothing. Except that The Affair will really begin, BOSON BOOKS

175

A Moment of Truth for we shall have to speak up since to hold our tongues will make us accomplices. What madness to believe that they can prevent history from being written! It will be written, this story, and there is no responsibility however insignificant that will not have to be met." Yet, five days after Zola's brochure went on sale, the trial of Count MarieCharles-Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy ended in his acquittal. Zola was stunned. They had deliberately flouted, justice, morality, truth. No one—no, not even the President of the Republic, stood above the law. That evening of January 11, 1898, Gabrielle entered his study to ask why he was still working when the staff were about to serve dinner. "Tell them to keep me something hot and I'll eat when I've finished this," he said. She glanced at the heading on the paper that he had covered with his clear and powerful script. Her eyes dilated when she read the title: LETTRE À MONSIEUR FÉLIX FAURE: Président de la République. "Do you really think he'll do anything?" she asked. "It won't matter either way." "What do you mean?" "When this is published they'll have to prosecute me." "Prosecute you!" she cried. "Meemeel, you're not serious." "Well, I've libeled five generals including the former war minister, a colonel, a major, three expert witnesses and the fourteen members of two courts-martial." Zola lifted his head to smile at her. "I don't think that even Monsieur Félix Faure can ignore that, do you?" "But...but Meemeel, they'll send you to prison." "The way they see things, they can send me to join Dreyfus on Devil's Island." "You can't do it...I won't let you do it." "Nobody's going to stop me," he snapped. "Anyway, somebody has to bring the case into an open court so that this time the witnesses will be forced to tell the whole truth." "Then let someone else do it—one of the family." She grasped the hand holding the pen. "What has it got to do with you?" "It's got everything to do with every one of us," he retorted. "If I sat back and did nothing, I couldn't live with myself." "But if you lose everything you've worked for all your life..." "Truth and justice are more important." "And if they set the mobs on you…" He shrugged. "I know the risks I'm running. I've weighed them all up." He had said nothing to Coco about the threats which had followed his first Figaro articles; nor had he mentioned that on December 20, when he had given the official address as President of the Society of Authors at Alphonse Daudet's funeral, a crowd had collected at the gates of Père Lachaise cemetery to boo and jeer him. "Do you think you can get anybody to print this?" she asked. He removed and polished his pince-nez then stuck then back on his cleft nose before taking up his pen and resuming the line she had interrupted. "I was thinking I might have to go back to the editor who published my first poem in Paris thirty-five years ago." BOSON BOOKS

176

A Moment of Truth "Poem! Who was that?" "Georges Clemenceau. He's now editor-in-chief of L'Aurore, Ernest Vaughan's paper. They won't mind taking on the whole hierarchy." He fixed his eyes on her. "Now, leave me alone. I've got a lot of work to do." She knew that look too well to argue; she had seen it for the first time that day he had shown her his manuscript entitled My Hates and again, on every occasion Zola felt cornered by the mob, high-born or low-born. She closed the door quietly. For more than half an hour they had sat, nine of them crowded into the small newspaper office listening to Zola reading his open letter to the French President from galley proofs of the brochure he meant to publish if Ernest Vaughan and his editor, Georges Clemenceau, refused to print it. Although he mumbled and sometimes lisped and his deep voice lacked penetration, nobody missed a syllable. Case-hardened journalists and writers in that director's office recognized that none of them could have fitted together the Dreyfus jigsaw in five thousand trenchant words which also added up to an indictment of the whole French political, administrative and military establishment Not one of them doubted that he was witnessing someone reading history of his own making. Zola began by appealing to President Faure, at the same time warning him that his name would suffer with his country's unless he acted to redress the judicial error. Then, bit-by-bit, he took the Dreyfus Case apart. Behind every dishonest trick moved the sinister figure of Colonel Du Paty de Clam, manipulating people like puppets, faking papers, pulling strings and turning the Dreyfus Case into something between a cloak-and-dagger melodrama and a vaudeville show. He had invented Dreyfus as the Jewish arch-traitor. Didn't everything point to Dreyfus's guilt? He knew too many languages; he thirsted for knowledge; he worked too hard; he visited his family in Alsace; he didn't look worried; he looked too worried; he had no incriminating documents in his house. To condemn a man on flimsy handwriting evidence and a tissue of negatives then leave him rotting for three years on Devil's Island was an iniquity, Zola declared. When Picquart discovered the true traitor, Esterhazy, his chiefs of staff posted him to the dangerous Tunisian frontier; they turned a deaf ear to ScheurerKestner; they arranged Esterhazy's acquittal. Who, Zola cried, is protecting Esterhazy? And who can trust the honesty and efficiency of such high-ranking officers to defend France in any war? They have ground the nation under their jackboots, choked truth and justice, all for reasons of state: Zola had reached his final pages: But this letter is long, Monsieur le Président, and it is time to conclude: I accuse the Lieutenant-Colonel du Paty de Clam of having been the diabolical hand behind the judicial error, unwittingly I would like to think, and then having defended his baleful work for three years by the most culpable and bizarre machinations. BOSON BOOKS

177

A Moment of Truth

I accuse General Mercier of having made himself an accomplice, at least through weak will, of one of the greatest iniquities of the century. I accuse General Billot of having in his hands certain proof of Dreyfus's innocence and stifling this; of being guilty of betraying humanity and justice with a political aim and in order to save the compromised general staff. I accuse General Boisdeffre and General Gonse of becoming accomplices of the same crime, the first no doubt by religious passion and the other by esprit de corps which makes the war office the unassailable holy of holies. I accuse General Pellieux and Major Ravary of having conducted a villainous inquiry, I mean an inquiry of the most monstrous partiality, an imperishable monument to naive audacity according to Ravary's report. I accuse the three handwriting experts, the gentlemen Belhomme, Varinard and Couard of having made false and fraudulent reports, unless a medical examination finds them stricken with bad eyesight and bad judgment. I accuse the war department of having carried out an abominable campaign in the press, particularly in L'Eclair and L'Echo de Paris, to pervert public opinion and cover its error. I accuse finally the first court-martial of having violated the law in condemning an indicted person on evidence which has remained secret, and I accuse the second court-martial of having covered this illegality, on orders, and of having committed in its turn the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty person. In making these accusations, I am aware that I expose myself to articles 30 and 31 of the Press law of July 29, 1881, which punishes acts of defamation. And I expose myself voluntarily. As for the people that I accuse, I do not know them, I have never seen them and I bear them neither rancor nor hate. For me they are only entities, minds full of social malice. And the act that I accomplish here is merely a revolutionary method of hastening the eruption of truth and justice. I have one passion only, that of enlightenment, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and has a right to happiness. My vehement protest is nothing but a heart-cry. Let whoever dares, bring me before the assizes and let the inquiry be held in the full glare of daylight! I am waiting.

BOSON BOOKS

178

A Moment of Truth When Zola had finished, silence still gripped the small gathering as though the nine tocsin notes of J'ACCUSE still clanged in their ears with the explosive phrases that followed the two syllables; for what seemed minutes they sat scrutinizing Zola, still clutching the galley proofs in trembling fingers, waiting for their reaction; they were wondering what compelled him, this man who had mounted so many barricades, who had fought for painters, for literary license, for downtrodden slum-dwellers and miners; behind his pince-nez, in his gray face with its grizzling beard and receding hair, they discerned nothing heroic. But didn't that exalt his act of defiance on behalf of some unknown and insignificant Jewish artillery captain? Suddenly, one of them rushed forward to embrace Zola. "But it's magnificent, Zola," he cried. "What courage!" Seizing the pages of the article, he held them aloft. "That J'Accuse sounded like hammering nine nails into their coffin," he shouted. "Thank you, Georges," Zola stammered to Clemenceau, embarrassed by the compliments. "Thank me!" Clemenceau said. "Zola, you may not realize it, but this letter of yours is going to change the whole history of France." He brandished the proofs as he turned to his staff. "We cover the whole of our front page with this tomorrow," he said. With his lean figure, bony face and quicksilver gestures, Clemenceau seemed to personify revolution. As leader of the Radical Party, he had made and unmade almost every government since 1870; his mordant sarcasm and political flair had toppled the administrations of Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Henri Brisson, and he had provoked the downfall of General Boulanger when he bid for power. But this firebrand found himself in the political wilderness when they linked his name with the scandalous liquidation of the Panama Canal Company in 1892 and also accused him, on a forged document, of spying for Britain; his articles in L'Aurore pilloried everyone from the President downwards, and though he had no great love for the Jews, he seized on Dreyfus as a stick to thrash the Establishment. Zola waited until the typesetters brought in a page-one proof of the next day's paper. "Do you want to read it?" Clemenceau asked. Zola shook his head, knowing that if he did, he would want to change everything. "I don't like the title," Vaughan commented. "It lacks the punch, the bite of the text." Clemenceau picked up the page proof and peered at it through his lorgnette. "I think Zola himself has given us a better one," he said, taking a thick, black pencil and striking out the original headline—LETTRE À MONSIEUR FÉLIX FAURE—and scrawling seven seven letters under the paper's masthead, J ' A C C U S E. Vaughan nodded his approval and they turned to Zola for his consent to change the title. "That's what I wanted to say," he declared. He got home with the whine and rumble of the rotary presses in his ears and crawled into the great Henry II four-poster beside Coco who was asleep. That night neither the specter of Dreyfus on Devil's Island nor any others of his BOSON BOOKS

179

A Moment of Truth phantoms came to haunt him. When he woke, newsboys were already shouting along the streets outside: "Zola accuses the generals...New sensation in the Dreyfus Case." When he padded in slippers to the dining room window to look out, he saw that two gendarmes had taken post opposite his house. Surveillance or protection? He only hoped that whatever it was, Coco hadn't spotted them.

BOSON BOOKS

180

A Moment of Truth

III His open letter to the President might or might not change the history of France. It certainly changed his life. Now he could not even walk Pinpin without some working-class tough or top-hatted gentleman elbowing him into the gutter; relays of policemen tailed him wherever he went and noted his movements; morning and night, crowds of workmen and well-dressed people demonstrated at his door and kept a glazier busy repairing broken windows. Every morning he had a sack of letters denouncing him as a Judas or an Italian traitor and threatening to kill him and his wife. Jeanne and he could only meet furtively in the street or at Cheverchemont for the odd day since they had either the police or the press on their backs. Eventually, he stayed indoors and worked. Against him he had the might of the mass-sale press: L'Echo de Paris, Le Petit Journal, Le Gaulois, l'Eclair, L'Intransigeant and La Libre Parole; they had started a national campaign to vilify and blacken him, and they screamed for his indictment. On January 20, the government accused him of defaming the second courtmartial for having acquitted Esterhazy on orders, choosing only fifteen words out of the five thousand in J'Accuse; they had ignored the much graver accusations. His case would come up on February 7 at the Palais de Justice in the Ile de la Cité, the heart of Paris. Most of the country, it seemed, had already condemned him. Historian Jacques Bainville cried: "This half-Italian, quarter-Greek, quarter-Frenchman, three and four times half-caste, isn't a good example of humanity." He was a senile has-been, a muck-raking scribbler whose defense of Dreyfus ranked with the smut and scatology that he wrote; one paper devoted a whole page to telling its readers in cartoon form how to fashion Zola's head with a lavatory brush, a chamber pot, a loaf of German bread and a sausage, while another suggested ways of assassinating him as he left the law courts, or at least pitching him into the Seine. Henri Rochefort published the fact that a rotting carcass lay at 21b Rue de Bruxelles after which, eight slaughterhouse vans reported at Zola's house. Several songs about him rang from the bistrots, caféconcerts and nightclubs: Master dear, your nerve is breaking, For some time past you've been mistaking Your bottom-wiper for a serviette, Your pisspot for a dinner-plate. Ugh! Ugh You need a rest, Your Doctor Toulouse, he knows best. Some organizations incited people to lynch him, and crowds gathered around bonfires of the opposition papers like Le Siècle, Le Rappel, L'Aurore and sang: Zola's a fat old pig, BOSON BOOKS

181

A Moment of Truth The longer he lives the dumber he turns, Zola's a fat old pig. Let's catch him and see how he burns. From one of the Aix-en-Provence municipal councilors he received a telegram proclaiming: THIS BEAUTIFUL CITY REJECTS YOU AS AN ADOPTED CITIZEN. What did he expect? Welcoming him with open arms when he was riding high, putting the boot in when he fell. They had even dredged up the court reports of his father's legal battles with the Marquis of Gallifet to imply that he was a coward. Even his erstwhile friend, Paul, ardent royalist and Catholic, was sniggering, they told him, that the Jews had duped him or he had taken up Dreyfus to boost his books. Boost his books! Poor Charpentier had watched their sales plummet because of adverse press comment; and his wife had witnessed her salon in Rue de Grenelle, one of the most brilliant in Paris, quietly empty as friends deserted Zola and his publisher. Huysmans, Céard and Hennique had gone, and Forain, eminent cartoonist and once a friend, now caricatured him with a billhook nose in company with Dreyfus and leading Jews: Zola, when're you goin' to put the lid On stickin' up for that damn' Yid? Unless you mean to shut your trap We'll send you away for a nice long rap. A few friends rallied round. Intellectuals like Anatole France, Georges Courteline, André Gide, Maurice Maeterlinck, Stéphane Mallarmé. And a devout young writer for whom truth and justice mattered, came to pay homage. Charles Péguy saw in Zola someone who refused to concede one article of his faith in human beings and their innate morality; however, he noted how weary Zola looked. Octave Mirbeau translated an article in the New York Times by the American humorist, Mark Twain, who said: "It takes five centuries to produce a Joan of Arc or a Zola." His stand for Dreyfus also redeemed lost friends. Claude Monet, estranged after L'Oeuvre, wrote, "Bravo! with all my heart for your valiance and courage." Pissarro said, "My dear Zola, This is to express my admiration for your great courage and noble character." And at a gathering of Socialists, ambivalent in their attitude to Dreyfus and wondering about his bourgeois champion, Jules Guesde waved his copy of J'Accuse in brochure form. "Zola's letter is the greatest revolutionary act of the century," he cried. On the morning of February 7 his coach took him to pick up his lawyer, Maître Fernand Labori. A brilliant Parisian barrister, Labori had volunteered to defend Zola, fully aware of the risks. As they turned right along the Boulevard Haussmann, Zola repeated his instructions. "You make no attempt to defend me. Just try to throw as much light as possible on Dreyfus's innocence and Esterhazy's acquittal."

BOSON BOOKS

182

A Moment of Truth Both brothers Clemenceau were waiting for them. Albert was defending Perrenx, manager of L'Aurore jointly accused with Zola, and Georges was holding a watching brief for the newspaper. Looking at Clemenceau's mongoloid features, Zola wondered whether Clemenceau was merely using Dreyfus to knock the government and pull more circulation for L'Aurore. Although they made a detour round the Palais de Justice to avoid trouble, a mob was waiting for them at the Pont Neuf. They had to sprint into the law courts behind a wedge of gendarmes with shouts ringing in their ears: "À bas Zola! Italian bastard!" Inside, so densely had they packed into the public galleries that men had to protect their top hats by sticking them on canes and holding them aloft; women stood trapped by those who had their feet on their long dresses; amid all the clamor, Zola noticed one serene lady who had grabbed a seat and was quietly reading Nana. His mind photographed the scene. A fusion of the National Assembly with the war ministry and something of a first-night at the opera. Women in floral hats and silk dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves; men in morning coats and toppers. Socialists in bowler hats. No cloth caps. He spotted Jean Jaurès, the socialist leader, Poincaré and several other ministers. Even his myopic gaze flinched at the amount of gold braid on tunics. He'd heard that Du Paty de Clam had drafted officers into the public gallery to provide covering fire or a smoke screen for himself and the generals when they gave evidence. He recognized several plain-clothes policemen, among them Chief Superintendent Cornette, the tactful little man who kept surveillance on him. They were watching a bunch of men from Paul Déroulède's Patriots's League who had set out to molest him and his defenders. Fernand Desmoulins, who had armed himself with a pistol to protect Zola, had found Coco a seat and she nodded as he took his place in the well of the court. He felt glad, reassured. Like him, rather bewildered by the setting and spectacle, the twelve jurymen at on either side of the bench. Ordinary individuals: businessmen, shopkeepers, a wine merchant and several employees. "Silence!" someone cried. A bell rang. From the rear of the court appeared a red-robed, pot-bellied homunculus with moustache and side-whiskers. As Judge Albert Delegorgue sat down, he warned the public that he would clear the court at the first sign of trouble; he called on the tall, scrawny figure of Edmond Van Cassel, the advocate-general, to begin. Van Cassel declared that Zola and his allies wanted to reopen the Dreyfus Case by revolutionary tactics and by provoking scandal; but the court would stick to the letter of Zola's indictment and demand proof of his statement that the second court martial had acquitted Commandant Esterhazy on orders. On whose orders? To whom? Where? When? This ruled out discussion about Dreyfus. When Labori called Lucie Dreyfus, the condemned man's wife, to testify to Zola's good faith in writing the defamatory letter, President Delegorgue refused to allow the questions. In the court there was no Affair Dreyfus and no Affair Zola. Up jumped Zola. "I demand the same right to prove my good faith, to prove my honesty, to prove my honor." "You know article 52 of the law of 1881?" President Delegorgue asked. BOSON BOOKS

183

A Moment of Truth "I don't know the law and I don't want to know it at this moment." "The question will not be put by me," said the President. And for the rest of the session, he invoked the law and his privilege as president of the court to refuse to put questions to witnesses which he felt irrelevant to the issue. That meant every question that even hinted at the Dreyfus Case. Leblois, Scheurer-Kestner, the former President of the Republic, Jean Casimir-Perier and other defense witnesses came and went without uttering a word of what they knew about Dreyfus and Esterhazy. Delegorgue used article 52 to gag them as soon as they opened their mouths. His cracked refrain—“The question will not be put"—reminded his audience of one of the new phonograph records with its needle stuck in the groove. When the court rose, Zola, Labori and the Clemenceau brothers had to run the gauntlet of an angry mob. Zola kept a brave face as he came down the steps into the Salle des Pas Perdus, but the police appeared neither willing nor capable of controlling the crowd; men elbowed him, punched him, shook their fists in his face and someone planted a boot in his backside; scuffles broke out between members of the mob and their escort of gendarmes and they had to seek shelter until Charles Blanc, the police prefect, summoned reserves who butted through the mass of people to the Boulevard du Palais and their coach. "What jury can remain impartial with this mad army round them?" Zola thought to himself. From that day, the prefect took no chances, conjuring them in and out of a side door behind the Sainte Chapelle and through police headquarters on the Quai des Orfevres. Like criminals, Clemenceau growled. After his vain attempts to reveal the truth about Dreyfus through defense witnesses, Labori summoned the élite of the French general staff; one by one, they paraded like marionettes to the semi-circular rail in front of the three judges and the jury. Du Paty de Clam, with his braided dress uniform, his heel-clicking and saluting looked like his own caricature. He point-blank refused to answer Labori. Nor did the counsel fare better with the other generals and experts. General Mercier all but admitted unwittingly the existence of secret evidence exonerating Dreyfus. Then came the inevitable phrases scything the debate: "The question will not be put." Yet, two generals did break the monotony—with threats that if Zola were acquitted, France and her sons would suffer. General Gabriel de Pellieux said, "What do you expect of wretched soldiers led into battle by chiefs that people try to discredit in their eyes. It is to the slaughterhouse that your sons will be led, Messieurs les Jurés.” When he exclaimed that the court-martial officers had fought bravely in 1870 when those who accused them were God-knows-where, Zola got to his feet. "There are different ways of serving France," he cried before Judge Delegorgue stopped him, "No speeches. You can only ask questions?" Zola came back. "I ask General Pellieux if he thinks there are different ways of serving France. She can be served by the sword and by the pen. General Pellieux has no doubt won great victories. I have won mine...I bequeath to posterity the name of General Pellieux and the name of Émile Zola. Posterity will decide."

BOSON BOOKS

184

A Moment of Truth General Le Mouton de Boisdeffre, chief of the French general staff, rubbed home Pellieux's threat. "You are the jury. You are the nation. If the nation has no confidence in its army chiefs, in those responsible for the national defense, they are ready to leave this heavy burden to others. You have only to say the word." That was the tenth day. Five more days of flitting in and out of the Palais de Justice like thieves, of listening to interminable wrangling between Labori and Delegorgue, always ending with, "The question will not be put," of waiting for the inevitable verdict. One scene highlighted that week of hearings: Esterhazy on the witness stand. Even Zola conceded he cut a better figure than his superiors with his gull-wing moustache, his arrogant, aristocratic face and swaggering manner. Every one of Labori's questions he ignored, even defying the judge and appealing to General Pellieux to order him to say nothing. When Labori sat down, Albert Clemenceau rose to cross-examine Esterhazy, who still declined to answer. Unruffled and undeterred, Clemenceau put question after question. Sixty questions in all. Not one answered. But every one stripping away part of Esterhazy's mask, revealing him for a blackguard who drank and gambled at other people's expense, who sponged on his own and other people's mistresses, who strutted around Paris proclaiming his dislike and disgust of the French and even recording this in writing, who knew too much about too many important people for them to condemn him for his treacherous crime. To build this interrogative portrait of Esterhazy took more than an hour. Esterhazy swaggered back to his seat to the applause of his fellow-officers; but everyone knew that those questions would appear in the Dreyfusard press the next day. Not even the confrontation between Colonel Picquart and his subordinate, Major Henry, could unlock the Dreyfus riddle, even though they knew Henry had protected Esterhazy and was more than suspected of forging documents incriminating Dreyfus more deeply. With the rhythm of a guillotine blade, a piping voice cut across this duel between the two men: "The question will not be put." When all the witnesses had given the evidence that the judge permitted, Georges Clemenceau rose to plead for L'Aurore, his newspaper. He reminded the jurors that they did not have to pronounce on the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, but on whether Zola was justified in affirming that the 1894 judgment had not been given within the legal norms. But, he told them, at every turn the court has balked the defense and its witnesses, has refused to admit the possibility of error, has upheld the authority of the thing already judged. "The authority of the thing judged," Clemenceau cried. He pointed a finger at the ivory statue above the president's head showing Christ on the Cross. "There you have it," he said. "The thing judged." For fifteen days, Zola had sat in the overcrowded courtroom, cramped into a bench near the witness-stand, conscious that all but a handful of these political and military cohorts had vowed his downfall. He had bitten the knob of his cane, exercised his fingers to relieve cramp and tension, polished his pince-nez, seesawed his left, leg, looked at the ceiling, adjusted his coat collar, rubbed the back

BOSON BOOKS

185

A Moment of Truth of his neck, knocked his knees together, curled his moustache (but not his beard) pinched his nostrils, swung left, then right, then left again. What a bundle of nerves he seemed to Gaston Méery, the Jew-hating chronicler of Drumont's Libre Parole, who sat in court with a hypnotic eye on him noting every twitch. And Méry was right. He did have to fight down his nerves. He, who could not even remember the names of his Society of Authors committee and say fifty words in public without sweating, now had to get up and plead for an hour in front of three stony-faced judges, twelve perplexed jurors and the cream of the army, who blamed him for everything from the 1870 disaster to fomenting an open revolt for a Yiddish captain. From his coat pocket, he took a wad of paper and stood up, digging his elbows into his sides to stop his arms and hands from trembling. Dammit, he was lisping, but he soon forgot that in the excitement of the moment. "Messieurs les Jurés. If I appear before you it is of my own doing. I alone decided that the mysterious and monstrous Affaire would be brought before your jurisdiction and it is I alone and of my own free will who have chosen you, the highest and most direct representation of French justice, so that France can know everything and reach a verdict. My act has no other aim and my own person means nothing; I sacrifice it, simply content to have placed in your hands not only the honor of the army but the jeopardized honor of the whole nation." Step by step, he led them through the intricacies of the Dreyfus Case, shrugged aside by many as insignificant. "The Dreyfus Case! Ah, Messieurs, it has grown very small now, it is so lost and remote compared with the terrifying questions it has stirred up. It is no longer a question of the Dreyfus Case, but of whether France is still the France of the rights of man, the country which has given the world liberty and which should give it justice. Are we still the most noble, fraternal, generous people? Are we going to preserve in Europe our name for equity and humanity?" After spelling out the consequences of making Dreyfus a scapegoat, he looked at each of the jurors, then said, "Dreyfus is innocent, I swear it. I stake my life, I stake my honor on it. In this solemn hour before this tribunal which represents human justice, before Messieurs les Jurés, who are the symbol of the nation, before France itself, before the whole world, I swear that Dreyfus is innocent. And by everything I have done, by the name I have won, by my works that have helped to spread French literature abroad, I swear Dreyfus is innocent. Let everything crumble, let my works perish if Dreyfus is not innocent! He is innocent. "Everything seems against me, the two Chambers, the civil power, the military power, the mass-circulation newspapers, public opinion which they have poisoned. And I have on my side the idea of truth and justice. And I am not worried. I shall overcome. I did not wish my country to live with a lie and an injustice. They can condemn me here. One day, France will thank me for having helped to save her honor." They had to wait only forty minutes for the verdict. Yes—to both counts of guilty. But five of the twelve jurors had voted against Zola's condemnation and the jury was split equally on whether to give him the benefit of extenuating circumstances. BOSON BOOKS

186

A Moment of Truth In the courtroom, Kepis and top hats filled the air and everyone was shouting, Vive-le Jury—Vive l'Armée—À mort Zola!—Mort aux Juifs." This time, Judge Delegorgue did not try to interrupt the proceedings. Zola turned to look at the pandemonium of delight. "Cannibals," he muttered. Delegorgue handed down the maximum sentence. Zola got a year in prison and Perrenx four months; in addition, the three experts each received 10,000 francs in damages for defamation. Labori immediately filed an appeal, allowing his clients to go free until the hearings in a higher court. When they stepped outside the courtroom, Zola wondered if they would leave the Palais de Justice alive; in the Harlay Gallery, the mob was dancing, chanting and beating up anyone who contested the verdict. Somehow, the police bulldozed them through to a side door, though Desmoulins had to knock several people out of their way. Hands grabbed and feet lashed at them before they reached the safety of police headquarters and their coach. As they trotted towards Place Dauphin, Georges Clemenceau mopped his brow. "If that verdict had gone our way, not one of us would have got out of there alive this evening," he gasped. Now Zola could not even leave his house; they had thickened the police ranks in the wine-bars along the Rue de Bruxelles and Place Clichy to break up mobs outside his house; or perhaps to pinpoint the place for country louts who came in for a day's Jew-baiting or Zola-bashing. His trial and verdict had triggered off a witch-hunt of everybody who had backed him or Dreyfus. Poor Picquart would stand trial later that year and his career and life lay in ruins; Leblois and several other advocates had been suspended; pro-Dreyfus civil servants, army officers and priests were downgraded or sacked. Georges Clemenceau fought a duel with Drumont in which both missed their marks, but Picquart punctured Major Henry's arm with his dueling foil; Henri Rochefort and the brilliant woman journalist, Severine, slanged each other in print; crowds gathered round blazing piles of Zola's books chanting death threats. He had gone into the dock to weld people together through truth and justice; it seemed he had merely driven them further apart. Only in the world beyond France did they acclaim his action, sending him 6,000 telegrams of support; one in five of the Frenchmen who wrote him condemned his action; and he knew that France, while vaunting liberty, equality, fraternity denied all of these. And justice, too. Justice! That juggernaut seemed determined to grind him into nothing. One court had quashed the verdict against him because the accusation should have come from the court-martial officers and not the war ministry; now the officers themselves had taken up the defamation case, demanding also that Zola be stricken from the membership of the Legion of Honor. So they had to go through the whole ordeal again, this time on July 18 at Versailles. What could he do but submit? He shut Dreyfus out of his mind and returned to his writing-table. He had finished his trilogy of the three towns; he now had a much more imposing idea. To rewrite the Gospels. But gospels founded not on religion but science. They would be Fécondité (Fertility) which peopled the earth with life of all kinds; Travail (Toil) which would exalt work and worker creating a BOSON BOOKS

187

A Moment of Truth new Utopia out of the mines and mills and factories of the present day; Vérité (Truth) which he had lived himself over the past months and which he would stencil on the elements of the Dreyfus Case transposing the facts and characters slightly; Justice which used truth to reunite families, peoples, races into the whole of humanity living in prosperity and peace. For these four long novels he had already chosen his heroes—the sons of Pierre Froment, the priest who had lost his religious faith and found a new hope in Science. His four sons, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would be the apostles of his Gospels. For Fertility, he had read almost everything modern about the dangers of the falling birth-rate in France, the monstrous waste of manpower and the criminal consequences for humanity in contraceptive methods which went as far as infanticide. As with every previous novel, he began compiling a dossier against the day when he could start writing. Amassing documents, plotting the story line and assembling the long cast of characters quietened his mind. Desmoulins, always armed, arranged his outings, furtive sorties to see Jeanne, who had changed her apartment and now lived in Rue du Havre. Then came the blow that floored him for days and made him almost regret having become embroiled in the Dreyfus Case. A flaring headline, ZOLA FATHER AND SON, in Le Petit Journal over a text revealing that François Zola had stolen money from French army funds. He could not believe it. His father! A paragon of integrity and intelligence, guilty of theft! Surely another slur invented by that master-liar, Ernest Judet, editor of the paper. Judet, seven feet tall and all arms and legs like two hairpins stuck end to end, had already flung every calumny at him and the Jews. Yet, this article had the ring of authenticity. His father had joined the French Foreign Legion just after its formation in 1831 and had served as a lieutenant in Algeria at roughly the dates given by Judet. Had his mother known this story she would certainly have told him; but obviously his father would not confess to her about stealing money to run after a woman. Where had Judet got his facts? Evidently from Du Paty de Clam or Henry, his friends in the war office or army intelligence. They must have slipped him his father's military record. Two days later, Judet fleshed out the story with more revelations under the title, ZOLA THE RECIDIVIST. Here, he recounted how François Zola, then quartermaster-lieutenant in the Foreign Legion, had fallen in love with the wife of an NCO named Fischer, a German legionnaire; in the summer of 1832, for the love of this lady, he had stolen money from regimental funds then disappeared, leaving his clothes on the beach to fake a suicide; military police found the stolen money in the Fischers' trunk as they prepared to sail for France and repatriation. Lieutenant Zola had reappeared, refunded the stolen money, but his commanding officer, Colonel Michel Combe, had demanded and received his resignation. For days, Zola scoured his study trying to track papers left by his father; his Aix friends sent him the controversy from the local press; but he found nothing anywhere to refute the Judet allegations and contented himself with publishing an article in L'Aurore about his father's work as an engineer. But he had another BOSON BOOKS

188

A Moment of Truth shock. On July 18, the morning he had to appear for his second trial, Judet reproduced two letters written by Colonel Combe proving his father's guilt and enforced resignation from the Foreign Legion. An anonymous reader had sent both the letters and the commentary, Judet declared. Zola could guess which anonymous reader. Those letters made him feel sick, yet he could do nothing but ram the article into a file. He'd probably spend that night in a Versailles prison cell and the best part of a year in Sainte-Pélagie Prison. Plenty of time then to challenge Judet. At eight o'clock, Desmoulins came for him with a car and they set out for Versailles, escorted part of the way by gendarmes on cycles; every hundred yards, a uniformed policeman kept vigil, for Catholics from La Vendée had promised to blow up Zola, and a journalist had provided them with a formula for waylaying and murdering him. At the courthouse in Versailles, a crowd of more than three hundred spat oaths and chanted threats as they arrived. In the middle of a heat wave, Zola sat for three-and-a-half hours that July day listening to the evidence of the court-martial officers and the generals. Two people fainted while Labori was using his eloquence and logic to try to quash the previous judgment. But the judge dismissed his arguments and upheld Zola's guilt. In the office allotted them beside the courtroom, Georges Clemenceau caught Zola by the sleeve. "You've got to get out of here before they pronounce sentence and pick you up," he whispered. "Get out!" Zola repeated, incredulous. Never had he considered flight, and prison did not frighten him; indeed, he looked forward to the new experience and the isolation which would allow him to write Fertility. But he noticed Labori was nodding his agreement with Clemenceau. "Get out! But where to?" "England," Clemenceau said. "England?" What did he know about England and the English? Only that they had treated him and Coco well when he had visited London five years before to speak to the Institute of Journalists. "I don't know," he muttered. They still had to run the blockade round the court. By sending the car one way and bringing a coach-and-pair to a side door, Superintendent Mouquin steered them past the most dangerous mob; but at the entrance to the Palais de Justice a crowd hemmed them in and only a charge by mounted gendarmes broke their ranks. They reached Charpentier's house near the Bois de Boulogne that evening; both brothers Clemenceau arrived with Desmoulins. Everyone now pressed him to flee to London "It will help to keep l'Affaire Dreyfus and l'Affaire Zola open," Clemenceau said. Zola finally agreed. "But my wife?" he muttered. "She doesn't know." While Desmoulins went to fetch Gabrielle, he wrote a note to Jeanne. "Dear Wife," he said, "The case has taken such a turn that I am forced to leave for England this evening...I shall try to find a place where you and the children can join me...Don't tell anyone at all where I am going...A very tender kiss for all of you." BOSON BOOKS

189

A Moment of Truth Coco arrived in tears clutching a newspaper in which she had wrapped a few toilet articles and a nightshirt; they both said goodbye to the others and left by hackney coach for the Gare du Nord. Charpentier followed them to buy Zola's ticket and stand by the window of his compartment until the nine o'clock train for Calais departed. Coco wept as they embraced each other. "But Coco" he stammered suddenly. "I've no money." She just had time to empty the contents of her purse into his coat pocket before the train pulled out.

BOSON BOOKS

190

A Moment of Truth

IV He was alone. As the lights of Paris flashed by and finally disappeared, a lump rose in his throat; he felt so feverish that he lowered the window and shrouded the light and tried to reflect, something he had not had the time to do all that day. One thought recurred. After a lifetime of work devoted to France, he now had to flee his own country like a common criminal. At one-thirty the following morning from the deck of the Channel steamer, he watched the lights of Calais recede; he wondered if the thirty-odd English people aboard observed him cry. It was the worst moment of his life. At Dover he felt hungry and thirsty but knew so little English that he could not ask for water or milk and went and sat in the London train, tired and dejected. At eight in the morning, he arrived at Victoria Station in drumming rain without an overcoat and his only belongings wrapped in yesterday's copy of l'Aurore. Where to stay? Clemenceau, who knew England well, had suggested the Grosvenor Hotel. He made his way to a horse cab and shouted to the sleepy driver, "Grosvenor Hotel, s'il vous plait." "You're there, mate," said the driver without turning his head. "Grosvenor Hotel, Monsieur," Zola cried, sternly. "I said, you're there, mate." "Grosvenor Hotel," Zola shouted, climbing into the cab. Shrugging, the driver chucked at his horse and drove the fifty steps to the hotel entrance. Zola stammered an apology, paid the regulation shilling and went inside. Again he met incomprehension when he tried to explain why he had arrived from France with no baggage and no letters of credit. Finally, they gave him a bleak, fifth-floor room reserved for travelers without baggage, and he scribbled his name in the register: Monsieur Pascal from Paris. When he had eaten, he stepped outside to buy a shirt and socks; but no one understood him or his gestures and he fled without anything, wondering how near he had come to exposure and arrest. Next morning, Desmoulins arrived with l'Aurore which had published an article under his name (written by Clemenceau) declaring he had fled not to escape his punishment but to keep the case open: "Next October, I shall be before my judges," he had said by proxy. "What's Clemenceau playing at?" Zola groaned. "He's beginning to get on my nerves." Indeed, he suspected Clemenceau of having maneuvered him out of the country to grab the credit for defending Dreyfus. According to Desmoulins, Paris newspapers and even the police had seen him everywhere—in Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and of course in his spiritual home, Germany. "Not in England." Desmoulins shook his head. "Maybe it would embarrass them too much to find you," he commented. Zola took no chances. Within a few days he had moved to Weybridge where his English translator, Ernest Vizetelly, found him a detached house called Penn at Oatlands Chase. Bernard-Lazare and Desmoulins acted as go-betweens, but BOSON BOOKS

191

A Moment of Truth Zola still insisted on giving them all code-names and using them as personal couriers. He had become Mr Émile Beauchamp, Coco was Alexandre, Jeanne was Jean and Desmoulins was Valentine. He soon settled down and within days was cycling along country lanes, taking pictures of Walton-on-Thames, Weybridge and other Thames-side villages. Vizetelly's sixteen-year-old daughter, Violette, ran the house, acted as interpreter and vainly endeavored to teach him English. Within days of receiving his trunk and documents, he had started reading and planning for Fertility. On August 4, 1898, he inscribed in his diary: "Today at 10 o'clock, I started to write my novel Fécondité. I worked until one o'clock and did my usual five pages. It's now eleven months since I finished my last novel, Paris. Nearly a year since that monstrous Case prevented me from living and working." Jeanne managed to give the cordon of journalists the slip and arrived on August 11 with the two children; they moved from Penn to Addlestone, several miles away, and a house called Summerfield with more rooms and vast gardens. Jeanne said detectives and pressmen followed her and all his friends everywhere; nothing happened at Médan or Rue de Bruxelles without being reported in the anti-Dreyfusard papers. Zola learned that Esterhazy, arrested with his mistress for falsifying papers to incriminate Picquart, had secured his release, no one knew how; Picquart was awaiting trial in the Cherche-Midi Prison and the rumor ran they were mixing powdered glass in his food to try to get rid of him. As for himself, the press reported sightings from every corner of the world. Even England. He thought it mysterious that the French police, through their agents or Scotland Yard, had not discovered his whereabouts. Maybe Desmoulins was right; he would cause them more worry in France than in London. On September 1, Violette Vizetelly said, "Monsieur Zola, I had such a funny dream last night. I dreamt I saw you standing in front of a corpse." "A nightmare," Zola said. "Something you had to eat before you went to bed." "But Monsieur Zola what was oddest about the dream was that you were laughing—as though you were delighted to see the corpse." Zola shrugged. Dreams! What did they mean, especially to a hardened rationalist like himself. He had forgotten Violette's nightmare when the wire arrived from Dr Larat, his family doctor and Desmoulin's cousin. TELL BEAUCHAMP IMMEDIATELY—VICTORY. What victory? Out came his bicycle and he pedaled to the newsagents at Addlestone to buy the morning edition of the Daily Telegraph and the first edition of the Evening Standard. As Violette had gone for the day, he sat down with a dictionary to decipher the Paris reports word by word without fully understanding their sense. But one thing stood out: They had arrested that wily peasant, Major Henry, for forging a key document in the original Dreyfus trial. And General Boisdeffre had resigned as head of the general staff. Back Zola cycled for the later editions of the Standard which carried even more startling news. Henry had locked himself in his cell at Mont Valérien prison and killed himself by slashing his throat with a razor. A dozen times he translated the report to assure himself of its truth. BOSON BOOKS

192

A Moment of Truth "Jeanne Chérie! Jeanne!" he called. When she came into the study, he pointed to the newspapers and hugged her. "It's all over," he said. "We can go back to France." He had tears in his eyes. Only when he had calmed down and reflected did he remember Miss Vizetelly's strange dream. What had it been? Wish fulfillment on her part? Thought transference from him to her? A chink of tomorrow's light falling on her mind? Some things defied even the understanding of an old Determinist like him. His jubilation turned out premature as well. In his naivety, he had imagined the case against Dreyfus and himself would now collapse, that Dreyfus would return to acclamations a free man with a complete pardon and state indemnity; he, too, could leave for France within days and accept apologies all round. Soon, he realized nothing was going to change. Judet, his persecutor, was trumpeting that Henry's forgery was not a real forgery but a cover-up for state secrets; that other young jackal, Charles Maurras, raved about Henry's crime, comparing it with the finest wartime actions. And Henri Brisson, the prime minister, allowed such people to dupe and sway him! Zola fell into a mood of deep depression. "It's finished with France," he lamented to Jeanne who tried to console him. "Why don't the masses rise up and demand the truth? Now!" But nothing happened. Labori and other friends advised Zola to wait until the appeal court had pronounced definitively on the Dreyfus trial and sentence. He had to steel himself for a long and lonely exile in a country where cooking seemed a rudimentary art, where bread had the taste and texture of a sponge and he could eat only roast-beef and ham-and-eggs. When Jeanne and the children left in October, he moved to the Queen's Hotel in Upper Norwood and changed his name to Jean Richard; it took some time to settle to his novel again, for he learned that Pinpin had died. Coco wrote to say that the little Pomeranian had never recovered from his desertion and had gradually lost the will to live. For weeks, the image of Pinpin came between him and everything he thought or did. Sometimes he even had the curious sensation the dog was trotting at his heels. But he mastered his grief. He even contrived to forget about The Case; the fact that Esterhazy had confessed fully; that Picquart was still in prison; that they had doubled his fine to the three handwriting experts; that they had decided to seize his furniture to pay these fines; that they had expunged his name from the roll of the Legion of Honor. Gradually, his book absorbed him and he worked steadily through October when Coco came to spend five weeks with him in the hotel. She brought him all the news. "How did the sale go?" he asked. "It was dreadful," she replied. Bailiffs had placed posters all over the district and even in central Paris, advertising the seizure of Zola's belongings and their auction at his house; then Loison, the bailiff, and his staff came snooping round the house to catalogue the sale. "Loison was one of THEM," Coco said. "He'd have sold the whole house to raise the 32,000 francs for those fines. Just think, he marked our Louis XIII sideboards at a hundred francs. And would you guess how much he was going to

BOSON BOOKS

193

A Moment of Truth sell your bust by Manet for?" He shook his head. "Forty francs," she cried. "Forty francs! He knew nothing about art, he said." "They must have put him up to it." "They didn't have to. It was monstrous. He was going into your study to catalogue the furniture there. I locked the door and stood guard over it." "Good for you. What did he do?" "He read me the law, so I sent for that nice superintendent, Cornette, and he ordered him to limit the sale to the vestibule, the billiard room and the dining room." "I read about Eugène Fasquelle," Zola said, grinning. "It must have been a shock to that mob of vultures." "They didn't know what to do," Coco said. She described how the auction had begun with a hundred people in the foyer of their house and two hundred more outside. "We had every kind—anarchists, anti-Dreyfusards and the gutter press. If Monsieur Cornette hadn't put a couple of dozen plain-clothes policemen there, I think they'd have broken the place up." No sooner had the auctioneer started by asking for bids on a small Louis XIII table than Fasquelle, Zola's editor, jumped up and bid 32,000 francs for it, the whole of the sum needed for the fines. "What could they do?" Coco said. "The Bailiff's man had put the table down at 125 francs, but they had to accept Eugène's bid and close the auction." "At least I have some true friends left," Zola said. "But it makes me sick to see those handwriting experts get that money for their phony testimony." "Never mind, Meemeel, they'll pay it back, every sou." "Let them keep it," he grunted. "I'll even put it in writing so that everybody now and later knows the names and title to ignominy of Messieurs Belhomme, Couard and Varinard." From the day Coco quit him to return to France, he had six months to wait before the appeal court heard the evidence for quashing the conviction and sentence on Alfred Dreyfus. Time to finish Fertility. Through the long English winter and the slow spring, he labored, oblivious of everything; he cocooned himself in his own world of paper and ink, absorbed in the history of Matthew Froment and his wife, Martha, who flee the city to live in an idyllic farmhouse and breed twelve lusty children and like biblical patriarchs, live long enough to see their brood become a tribe of 158 descendants without counting those who are building France's colonial empire. He was really writing a poem to procreation and warning about the punishments which befell countries and individuals who cut their birth-rate. In Fertility those who practice birth control suffer illness, loss of beauty as well as childlessness. Only the spreading battalions of Froments seemed proof against sickness, mortal accidents, murder, by virtue of their numbers. How would the public react to a book with such a flimsy plot, so little shape, a biblical ring and Old Testament morality? Perhaps it read too much like a socialist or Utopian tract. No matter, he had written what he felt. On May 27, 1899, he printed the word END on the fat script. A week later, the appeal court voted unanimously to nullify the Dreyfus trial of 1894 and ordered a retrial by court-martial at Rennes in Brittany. BOSON BOOKS

194

A Moment of Truth On Monday, June 5, Zola stepped off the train at the Gare du Nord. At a bookstall, he bought a copy of l'Aurore to see the headline over his own article announcing his return. When he had finished summarizing his part in the Dreyfus Case and giving his own reasons for quitting France, he concluded: "I am back home. Monsieur le Procurator-General can therefore when he thinks fit, serve notice on me of the judgment at the Versailles assizes, which condemned me in absentia to a year in prison and a fine of 3,000 francs. And we shall meet before a jury. This time, no one picked up the challenge.

V But he and others who considered The Affair finished did not reckon with the Army or its government supporters. Or the anti-Dreyfusard newspapers. Or the rabble. On July l, Dreyfus returned from Devil's Island, a gaunt, pale-faced and bewildered ghost who had no conception that a five-year war of principle had been fought around him and his name, a series of battles that had altered the political, military and social history of France. At Rennes, on August 8, his second court-martial began. A formality, Zola and his friends believed. But not General Mercier, now retired though bent on a new political career in the Senate. Dreyfus innocent! Surely that made him, Mercier, guilty! During the trial, he stonewalled under a barrage of questions from Labori; but in the classrooms of the college where the court sat, he ambushed subordinates and wielded his authority to suborn court-martial members and witnesses. Esterhazy remained in voluntary exile, tirelessly confessing to having written the original docket—yet now maintaining that Dreyfus had dictated it to him! For more than a month, the wrangle continued, producing only one sensation and that outside the courtroom. An anti-Dreyfusard fired several shots at Labori, wounding him. Zola had kept out of things, quietly gathering material for the second of his Gospels and reading the trial reports. On September 9, when the verdict reached him, he refused at first to believe it. They had convicted Dreyfus again! They knew Esterhazy for the real traitor yet five out of seven officers had voted Dreyfus guilty and sentenced him to ten years' imprisonment with extenuating circumstances. One again, the army had wiped its feet on Dreyfus, on truth, on justice. He sat down and began an article for l'Aurore: I am in a panic. And it is not anger or vindictive indignation nor the need to shout the crime aloud, to demand punishment in the name of truth and justice; it is panic, the sacred terror of a man who sees impossible things happening— rivers flowing backwards to their sources, the earth somersaulting under the sun. And I cry for the distress of our noble and generous France and for the fearful abyss into which it is rolling... BOSON BOOKS

195

A Moment of Truth When the full report of the Rennes trial is published there will not be a more execrable monument to human infamy. That exceeds everything. Never will a more villainous document have been given to history. Ignorance, stupidity, folly, cruelty, mendacity, crime, they are all displayed with such impudence that tomorrow's generations will tremble with shame. Zola's heart-cry found an echo in public opinion; both the country and its government had heard enough about the Dreyfus Case; for two whole years no one had talked about anything else; it had split the country, had sundered lifelong friendships, had estranged fathers and sons, men and wives. Earlier that year, President Faure had died in his mistress's arms and the new president, Émile Loubet, took a more broad-minded view of L'Affaire; on September 19, ten days after the court-martial verdict, he signed an amnesty and pardon for Dreyfus. Clemenceau, Jean Jaurès, Colonel Picquart, Labori along with Zola urged him to stand firm and reject the pardon, thus forcing the courts to pronounce him not guilty; his brother, Mathieu, Bernard-Lazare and other friends advised him to accept. Dreyfus had to decide. He accepted the pardon and his freedom. "Idiot," Clemenceau said to Zola. "I'll never give him my hand for having surrendered like that." Zola had never set eyes on Dreyfus; but he took a more charitable view, considering that a man who had spent four-and-a-half years on Devil's Island hungered for freedom at any price. "You know, now they've settled with Dreyfus, they can vote an amnesty for the whole bunch of rogues who framed him," Clemenceau said. "I know," Zola replied. "But they can't turn the clock back. The army, the church, the aristocracy and their lackeys will never be able to run things in the way they have up to now." "Maybe not. But as long as that man hasn't been judged Not Guilty they'll say or they'll think he's guilty." "They'll say I'm guilty, too," Zola sighed. "And like Dreyfus, I won't get the chance to prove otherwise. I shall get my amnesty with Judet, du Paty, the generals and all the other criminals." "He should have fought." Dreyfus had gone to Carpentras in Provence to regain his strength, and gradually his name fell out of the headlines. Yet, as Zola predicted, a pattern of change followed from L'Affaire; those members of the general staff implicated in the plot retreated quietly; counter-intelligence passed from the army to the Sûreté-générale and in political circles, the power of the army seemed broken; those right-wing church leaders also stepped down, the hold of the clergy on education slackened and the bonds between the church and state began to loosen. Zola protested against the general amnesty. To the Senate when it was voting the Bill, to the President when it became law. How could they put Picquart and Esterhazy, Joseph Reinach and du Paty de Clam, General Mercier and himself all in the same sack? And why speak of the Dreyfus Case doing the country harm? Wasn't it just a skin rash that betrayed the rot beneath? Didn't it unmask those right-wing reactionaries poised to take over the country from republicans? BOSON BOOKS

196

A Moment of Truth "The whole republican defense movement sprang from it and if France is saved from the reactionary plot, she owes it to the Dreyfus Case," he said. Nevertheless, he felt weary of the whole business and finished by telling President Loubet: "Me, I'm nothing but a poet, a solitary storyteller who does his work in his own corner and gives it everything he has. I realize that a good citizen should content himself with offering his country the work he does least badly; and that's why I keep my nose in my books. I'm going back to them since the mission that I set myself is finished. I have fulfilled my role as honestly as I could, and will now say no more." When he saw him for the first time, eighteen months after his return, Zola began to perceive why they had picked on Dreyfus. He was the original invisible man. Escorted by Jules, the butler, and leaning on his wife, Lucie, Dreyfus shuffled forward with outstretched hand. Zola introduced him to the other guests, Alfred Bruneau, the composer and his wife, then to Coco. Dreyfus inclined his head and shook hands like some automaton; his ordeal in the penal colony showed in his stoop shoulders, halting step, nervous gestures and facial tics. At dinner, Zola quizzed him about Devil's Island (with half an eye on his third gospel, Truth). In a hoarse voice, eyes misting behind his pince-nez, Dreyfus told them about the bamboo hut behind the stockade where they shackled him; they fed him such appalling slops that even the vermin, his only company, would not eat them; hardly anyone spoke to him, the traitor; when they heard that people were plotting to free him by force, they surrounded his stockade with artillery, shackled even his hands and kept a twenty-four hour watch from the look-out tower. "But it's monstrous," Zola cried. "And you didn't even know that people were trying to free you by legal means?" "No they censored my wife's letters." Dreyfus shrugged. "Anyway, I thought my army chiefs would rectify their error the moment they realized the truth." Poor fool, Zola thought. They chose the right man, somebody who would take a kicking quietly for the greater glory of Saint-Cyr and the École Militaire and La Patrie." "And they didn't even allow you newspapers, I believe." "They did, but they cut out everything about me before I got them. Anyway, they were months out of date and I was too ill to bother with them." He lost all idea of time and even place; each day resembled the previous in that clammy prison with nothing to occupy his mind or hands. He felt less alive than the fungus growing on his cell walls and the rats and lice crawling over him. When they led him to the boat and brought him home, they told him nothing; he went through the Rennes court-martial like a sleepwalker. "And it took more than a year before he ate and slept properly," Lucie Dreyfus put in. Everyone round the table could see that it would require several more years to erase the pain and the nightmare of his time on Devil's Island. Yet, he felt no rancor at the army and its brass hats; nor at villains like Esterhazy and Du Paty and Henry; nor at the government which had connived at the miscarriage of justice; nor even at the anti-Jewish press. A good soldier, he had accepted

BOSON BOOKS

197

A Moment of Truth imprisonment even wrongful, like some tactical exercise, or assault-course, or trial by ordeal. It gave his story an even more poignant ring, Zola felt. "I knew nothing about your suffering, Monsieur Zola," Dreyfus said, apologetically. "Compared with yours, it was nothing. I did what I had to do." Dreyfus shook his head. "No, you didn't have to do anything, but you saw the whole thing more clearly than I did, or anybody else...You looked beyond me and my case to something much higher and more noble...Justice." He raised his glass and the others did the same. "It will be to your eternal honor, Monsieur Zola," he said simply, and they all drank. When the dinner was over and all his guests had gone, Zola went into his study to reflect, to scribe the dialogue and his impressions of the evening; in the third gospel, Truth, he would have to transpose and transcribe the events of the Dreyfus Case; he would also have to change all the main actors in the drama. How, for instance, could he ever turn that blurred, impersonal and bloodless figure of Alfred Dreyfus into a hero—or even an anti-hero? In fact, Dreyfus seemed the antithesis of everything they had struggled for, of everything he had symbolized for them. Irony of ironies, Dreyfus as chief of staff would have kept Captain Dreyfus on Devil's Island for life rather than betray his glorious army by admitting its error. Had Dreyfus not been Dreyfus, he might have given Mercier, Billot, du Paty points on militarism. Had he not been Dreyfus, he might have outshone Édouard Drumont, Ernest Judet and Charles Maurras in rigging truth and justice for the honor of (their) France; had he not been Dreyfus he might have shown them an anti-Semitic trick or two. Why, this rich captain even seemed embarrassed and troubled that republicans, intellectuals, socialists and ordinary folk had challenged the action of His Army to liberate him from his prison and expunge the stigma. Clemenceau was right: He looked just like a post-office clerk.

BOSON BOOKS

198

A Moment of Truth

VI On the first day of the new century, Zola went to his desk at the usual time and sat down to the concluding chapters of his second gospel, Toil. He worked until after midday when Coco reminded him that he had invited several friends, including Labori and Bruneau, to lunch. She remarked that he seemed pensive, and he cleaned his pen and thrust it into its holder before saying, "After I've finished this and the next two books, no more marathons or long series. "Oh! What will you write?" "Maybe books for the mindless—short and lively with no message, no moral, no philosophy." In three months he would be sixty and into his forty-odd working years he had crammed several times more effort than most men. The strain was telling, and The Affair seemed to have taken as much out of him as out of Dreyfus. Sometimes, pen in hand, he dreamed of that Balearic Island where he might just sit and let the world gyrate round him on its axis without attempting to nudge it one way or another. Idleness he supposed he could learn as he had the art of working. Fertility had appeared just over a year ago and he and Georges Charpentier noticed it broke no records. Not because the critics had panned it; on the contrary, this time they had even praised his style and commended the idea of a novel with people producing assembly-lines of children rather than machines; some more waspish writers had denounced his rabbit-warren mentality while others jibed at the raw obstetrics and what they termed a tidal wave of sperm; to the pious and puritanical he remained the anti-Christ, now guilty of blasphemy by rewriting the Gospels. Charpentier imputed their plummeting sales to their part in the Dreyfus Case and Zola agreed. Yet, he had a private suspicion that his eye and hand might have lost their cunning at constructing big frescoes in primary colors and filling them with original characters. L'Aurore had just begun to serialize what he had written of Toil. With readers that had fared better, but there he felt more at home. He had taken Luc Froment, second son of Pierre and placed him in a grim, satanic factory town dominated by a steel-works just as he had thrown Étienne Lantier into the pit of Germinal; but Luc has a mission—to build a new city with new ideals, new laws, a new religion. To document the book, Zola had visited a friend's steel-works and forges where they made cannons and shells in the Loire Valley. In Paris, he clambered over the pavilions of the Universal Exhibition, camera in hand, to take hundreds of shots of new machinery, the wonders of electricity and the latest ideas for exploiting this magical force on the factory floor and in homes; from the top of the Eiffel Tower, he photographed the buildings and the layout of the small city which contained the exhibition. For the Utopian part, he drew heavily on the philosophy of Charles Fourier, the nineteenth-century socialist who advocated a co-operative system allying labor, capital and talent. Toil he found easier to write than Fertility; it had strange echoes of Germinal, though this time the workers had come into their own, sharing their labor with BOSON BOOKS

199

A Moment of Truth capital in equal parts; his anarchists of the future channeled their aggression and passions into useful jobs; strikes never occurred since everyone recognized their suicidal quality; gradually, the various social factions of Luc Froment's new city fused together to create a unified community with a two-hour working day which lived in Utopian harmony. He finished the book at the beginning of February 1901 and it appeared in May. This time, critics spoke of it as an epic poem while the socialists and disciples of Fourier welcomed him and his book as the voice of the new order. One reviewer compared him with Tolstoy, though more sympathetic and optimistic. Several of the commentators who had attacked him for his RougonMacquart series found that he had regained his old Germinal touch but had leavened this with a new morality. Zola read them all. Better perhaps than swallowing his morning toad. Did these writers really understand what he was all about? He doubted it. When he had finished the four books, they might begin to glimpse his real message. He had already begun to document the third of the gospels—Truth. So much of this novel had he lived and so many of its characters had he witnessed at close quarters that he foresaw no difficulty in researching and writing it. He had his stencil, the Dreyfus Case. Although its end still waited to be written by events, he did not doubt its outcome and his book would show the hero rehabilitated and rewarded by the state. Dreyfus had become a schoolmaster, Marc Froment, third son of Pierre, who is unjustly accused of raping and murdering a schoolboy when the real killer is Georgias (Esterhazy) a monk and teacher in a Catholic school. For the army he had substituted the church, in his view more malicious because it exalted blind faith and slavish obedience. Dreyfus, the docile, had proved that those two attitudes twisted truth out of shape and bred or inspired corruption. In so many ways, Truth turned out the most complicated book he had ever undertaken; perhaps the plot, like the labyrinthine counterpoint of the Dreyfus Case hampered him and failed to square with his idea of a novel; perhaps pure truth ran deeper than the springs of human conduct which he had to chart in the book; perhaps he had acted too big a part in the real-life drama to distance himself from his story line and characters. After all, The Case still haunted him. He needed only to look out of his window to see several suspicious characters prowling up and down Rue de Bruxelles; or one or two of Commissaire Cornette's plain-clothes men winebibbing in the nearest bistrot, or strolling casually round the area; every day, almost, his post would throw up an unsigned threat on his life. THEY had not forgiven him his role in backing and freeing Dreyfus and he doubted that they ever would. Last July when they were spending summer at Médan, anarchists or antiDreyfusards had planted a bomb in his carriage entrance here. Cornette, one of the few fair-minded policemen he had met, defused the bomb; he said the mechanism appeared so crude and amateurish that it would probably never have exploded. Zola knew those dangerous amateurs. He still had the press against him. Judet would never forgive him for having to choke on most of his defamatory utterances about François Zola; and Drumont BOSON BOOKS

200

A Moment of Truth and Charles Maurras still ran scurrilous stories about him in their papers, feeding mob prejudice and hate. In the first week of June 1902, they packed up for their summer at Médan. At least there he felt at home in the small, friendly community and on his estate. Coco, who had been ailing, soon recovered her health and spirit and he buckled down to the last chapters of Truth. On July 2, he wrote to Alfred Bruneau: I've worked well, but I don't reckon to finish Vérité before the end of the month. It's awfully long. It's nearly a year that I've been at this book, every morning without missing a single day. And I'm tired and feel a great need to have a bit of a rest... The Charpentiers don't get here until August 15. We have six weeks of solitude before us and that doesn't displease me; I spend delightful afternoons in my garden looking at everything living around me. At my age, I feel everything departing and I love everything more passionately. Some afternoons he cycled over to Verneuil where he had rented Jeanne and the children a large house. In Denise, a pretty girl of thirteen, he saw some of his own traits; he took her and Jacques, now nearly eleven, for a gentle spin on their bicycles then had tea in the garden before cycling back to Médan. Now, he had no need to keep these excursions secret from Gabrielle since she accepted the situation; she had even met and made friends with the children, though not their mother whom she could not forgive. Some woman, Coco. Where would he have been and what would he NOT have done without her? She, too, had come a long way from Place Clichy. When he had parked his bicycle in the coach-shed, he went into the garden where she was sitting reading and took her hand and murmured, "Coco...thank you." "Thank me? What for, Meemeel?" "I don't know...just thank you." She smiled as though interpreting his mind and heart. After all, only she knew his whole story, only she remained of those who had stood by him in his blackest days, now that Paul Alexis was dead these twelve months. With Pinpin II and his twin, Fanfan, at his heel he wandered into his study to fix his writing stint for the next day. Only at the beginning of August when he looked back at all he had written in Truth did he realize how much of himself he had infiltrated into the personality of Marc, the innocent victim. On August 8, he began the final page of the manuscript: And it was Marc's reward for so many years of courage and struggle. He witnessed his work. Rome had lost the battle, France was saved from the dangers of death, the dusty ruins where, one after the other, the Catholic nations disappeared...France was no longer threatened with burial under the ashes of a dead religion, she had become her own mistress again, she could march forward to her destiny as a liberator and law-giver. And she had only conquered through primary education, lifting humble folk and country children BOSON BOOKS

201

A Moment of Truth out of their slavish ignorance and crushing idiocy in which Catholicism had maintained them for centuries. An execrable voice had dared to say: "Blessed are the poor in spirit!" and 2,000 years of misery were born from this mortal error. The legend of the benefits of ignorance now appear like a long, social crime. Poverty, dirt, iniquity, superstition, falsehood, tyranny, women scorned and exploited, men besotted and enslaved, all the moral and physical evils were the fruits of this voluntary ignorance built into a system of celestial police. Only knowledge would kill false dogma, scatter those who lived by it, be the source of great riches, the over-brimming harvests as well as the universal flowering of the spirit. No! Happiness never lay in ignorance, but in knowledge which was going to change the baleful field of moral and material misery into a vast, fruitful soil yielding increasing riches from year to year. Thus Marc, full of years and glory, had the great reward of living to see his work. There is no justice without truth, no happiness without justice. And after the Family is born, after the City is founded, the Nation was constituted from the day that public education of all its citizens rendered it capable of truth and justice. But as he confessed to Bruneau, the effort of manipulating so many characters and such a complexity of detail had left him wrung-out physically and mentally. Georges Charpentier and his wife arrived a few days after he had dispatched the final manuscript and they made several trips along the Seine and to riverside villages. When the Charpentiers had gone, he pottered round his study, correcting the proofs of Truth, now running as a serial in l'Aurore, reading the odd book and cutting snippets from newspapers to file for the last of his gospels—Justice. He felt footloose. "Why don't you just sit and do nothing for a change, chéri," Gabrielle suggested. He took her advice. Fine weather lured him into the sunken garden where he sat contemplating the shrubs and roses, his island in the Seine and the low, wooded hills beyond. Images and memories drifted across his mind like the powder-puff clouds overhead. As he grew older, it seemed that he had total recall of years and days long ago lost. He could hear the boy sobbing in the school playground and taste the shared apple which had begun his first real friendship. These days, he often wondered about Paul. His paintings were gathering dust in these attics behind him but were beginning to fetch high prices at auctions and through his art-dealer, Ambroise Vollard. It seemed he still flitted between Aix and Paris, still suffered from ambulatory neurosis or the romantic itch to be elsewhere. Some people now called him a painter of genius. How long ago had he affirmed that, too? Paul could never exploit his genius, though others undoubtedly would. He had also said that in L'Oeuvre, then regretted those indiscretions that had wrecked their friendship. Provence! What memories that word conjured up, what sorrows! A coffin on a cart, carried on a shutter and the emotional current of his mother's sobs running through his arm. BOSON BOOKS

202

A Moment of Truth Those two other coffins he never forgot—one emerging from the window behind where he now sat and another vast and sinister, stuck tight in a hole in Rouen Cemetery. So many deaths. On shutting his own eyes how often did he still see the bright eyes of Duranty, the sad eyes of Daudet and the mad eyes of Jules de Goncourt and Maupassant? And overhear the clip-clopping, ataxic gait of Manet, another sexual casualty? And Aérienne, dead all those years ago. Her wistful face reminded him of the reams of verse he'd written and never published. Like his Weft of Life. Ah! but that he HAD written—in twenty-six volumes. One day they'd come to realize that the Rougon-Macquart, the Three Cities, the Four Gospels were all prose poems— they were the Genesis, Humanity and the Future of his Weft of Life. Maybe that day, they might also perceive he had built the whole of his work, style and substance around Determinism and Taine's injunction to him to portray types rather than individuals, to paint the masses rather than families; they might even discern the poetic symbolism underlying all his writing; and if they really probed, they would uncover the Myth, that archetypal, ultimate Truth. Then they would grasp that Abbé Mouret's Transgression was Adam and Eve retold, that he had put something of Macbeth into La Bête Humaine and much of King Lear into old Fouan of La Terre; they might see that Germinal had something in common with Orpheus and Nana was Eros transformed into Kali the Hindu goddess of destruction; if they knew enough about him, they might draw parallels between the traumatic episode with Berthe and his Claude's Confession just as they could between the Dreyfus Case and his latest book, Truth. He'd dealt with Humanity as a whole, erected his own world. Oh, they'd sneer that the myth of Oedipus figured largely in it because he loved his mother, and they'd say he had peopled it with fantasies, phantoms and freaks of his own mind. Well, what writer didn't in some way or another paint his own portrait in his literary creations, albeit unwittingly? He sat in his garden daydreaming into the future, too. He still had much to accomplish. Justice would occupy him for a year; then he'd like to write a book about the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Zionists. He would have to smash his way into the Académie Française and blast the cobwebs off that antique institution; he'd always wanted to do something big in the theatre, not just adaptations of his novels. Bruneau and he would collaborate on more musical versions of his novels. It seemed a world away, that Mediterranean island he hankered after. Gabrielle broke across his reverie, calling from upstairs to ask what clothing she should leave out for the journey back to Paris. She was packing their trunks. He had already given her two full suitcases of documents and source material for Justice, which he would continue in Paris. This year, they were leaving Médan on September 28, a bit earlier than usual for him to have a troublesome tooth fixed and to allow Gabrielle to arrange her holiday in Rome at the beginning of October.

BOSON BOOKS

203

A Moment of Truth

VII Just before midday on Sunday they arrived at Rue de Bruxelles. Jules, the valet, who had caught the first train, had already opened the windows and doors to air the rooms. While the servants unpacked their trunks and settled the household in, Gabrielle made her usual tour of both floors of the apartment. In the bedroom she noticed that Jules had lit a fire in the huge fireplace. A closer look and she spotted a piece of plasterboard that had fallen behind the grate. "We've told the sweeps to come tomorrow as always, Madame," Jules said. "You'd better get a mason as well to repair the bit that has fallen," she said and the valet nodded. After they had lunched, Gabrielle went into the bedroom to answer several letters; although the day had turned chill and damp, she felt warm enough to open one of the three bedroom windows. Zola spent the afternoon working in his study, arranging his books and papers and reading. At about 7.30 they had dinner in the dining room, a light meal of clear soup, chicken, cheese, fruit and coffee. They retired to their room not long after ten o'clock having decided to go to bed early. Zola had to see his dentist the next day, and Gabrielle her doctor. In the bedroom, Zola went through his ritual of shutting windows and locking the two doors before undressing, donning his nightshirt and climbing into the huge four-poster. Something had dropped from the mantelpiece and as Gabrielle bent down to pick it up, she felt the heat from the fire which she thought had gone out. Raising the trap, she saw that the round briquettes were glowing red. "Shall I leave it shut, chéri?" she said, pointing to the trap. Zola glanced over the book he was reading and shook his head. "No, leave it open and the fire will go out by itself." Gabrielle finished her toilet at about eleven o'clock and got into bed. Zola put out the electric bedside light and in a few minutes they were both asleep. Gabrielle woke after what seemed hours, although she had no precise idea of the time. Her head seemed to have swollen to twice its normal size and hammered with pain; her heart palpitated and she felt breathless as though suffering from one of her nervous asthma attacks. She also had violent griping pains in her stomach and retched as if she was going to vomit. Levering herself out of bed, she felt her way to the bathroom door a couple of yards away and grasped the handle. Then she fell. She had the curious sensation of collapsing on bales of cotton-wool...it took her some effort to rise, tug open the door and stagger towards the lavatory in the corridor outside the bedroom...her head seemed crushed in a vice...she pushed the door inwards...she collided with something then sat on the toilet seat, steadying herself with both hands. How long she remained there she had no idea, but when she felt able she walked back—still on cotton-wool—to the bedroom. Still she felt ill and moaned, tossed, turned until Zola woke up. He turned the electric light knob on. "Are you ill?" he mumbled. "I feel dreadful. I have a splitting headache and can't breathe." BOSON BOOKS

204

A Moment of Truth "Well, don't for pity's sake have one of your nervous attacks. I'm ill myself and I'm in no state to look after you." "Shall I ring for the servants?" "No, they'll just fuss and keep us awake. It's nothing. Maybe we ate something that disagreed with us last night. We'll feel better tomorrow." Gabrielle tried to get to sleep, but after what seemed several minutes she heard Zola get up and trip over something. "Chéri, where are you going? Do you want any help?" He made no reply, but that did not worry her since he had grown slightly hard of hearing. She dozed off and slept for some time. Suddenly, she woke. Their bedside light still burned and she peered through the grill at the foot of the four-poster. Zola was sitting, his elbows on the table, his head resting in his hands. "Meemeel chéri, what's wrong? Are you ill?" He did not respond or give any impression of having heard her. Then, as though time had slowed down, she watched him slide gently and soundlessly to the floor. "But Meemeel, what's the matter. Please! Speak to me." He still did not react. She tried to rise but now seemed nailed to the bed; she tried to reach the bell but even that small effort failed; with all the force she could summon, she called for help and kept on calling until her strength ebbed. Yet, she woke again. Her mind was confused, wandering. Had Meemeel got up? Yes, she could see he was kneeling on one of the two Henry II armchairs. But so curiously. His head rested in his left hand and he had thrust one leg out behind him. Suddenly afraid, she cried out to him, "Meemeel, Meemeel! Come back to bed. But he gave no sign of having heard. And with that vision on her fuddled consciousness she fell into a deep sleep.

BOSON BOOKS

205

A Moment of Truth

EPILOGUE Through the window of his commissariat in Boulevard Rochechouart, Chief Superintendent Cornette heard some men and women in a nearby bistrot singing the latest sardonic ditty: Zola, the bawdy ass, The famous novelist, With carbonic-acid gas He's choked to death at last. It was a rude awaking That day he died, Oh-la! There's some of us still quaking Lamenting poor old Zola. Six days ago Zola had died. From Madame Zola's testimony and his own reconstruction of the drama, he knew how the writer had died and why she had lived. His meticulous investigation had more than ever convinced him that Zola had been murdered by someone who had blocked his chimney the day he returned and unblocked it early the next morning before he and the experts had arrived at the scene. He had another more pressing problem. Later this Sunday morning quarter of a million people would line the streets to watch Zola's funeral procession from Rue de Bruxelles to Montmartre Cemetery, and Cornette prayed they would behave themselves. To guard the route, they had drafted every available policeman into the area from other Paris districts and detailed troops at strategic points; Louis Lépine, the police prefect, had banned all demonstrations and banners, but Déroulède's right-wing Patriots' League had promised to make things hot for socialists and Dreyfusards; Alfred Dreyfus himself was defying those who threatened to assassinate him and joining the procession; even Émile Loubet, the President, had cut short his holiday in case of trouble; along the route where people were paying a hundred francs for a window place, Cornette had posted his men; he had others watching the grave overlooking the Round Point of the cemetery where half a dozen orators would say their pieces, where they would drop Zola six feet under, seal the vault and hope that everybody would filter home peacefully and forget his name for a while. This would suit the government which feared that Zola's name might rally social and political discontent at a moment when right-wing and left-wing factions were spoiling for battle; it would please Madame Zola, who had suffered enough, and like a good bourgoise, wanted no trouble, no scandal. Cornette could understand the lady. He found it much more difficult to fathom the mind and heart of his immediate chief, Judge Joseph Bourrouillou. What did he really think of Zola and the manner of his death? BOSON BOOKS

206

A Moment of Truth Cornette pondered that question as he again picked up the newspapers and read Judge Bourrouillou's remarks the day following their reconstruction of the drama with Zola's staff. Bourrouillou had told the press that his inquiries revealed the chimney had been blocked accidentally and the criminal investigation could be considered closed; now it only remained for the architects, chemists and other experts to fix civil responsibility for the accident. Never had Cornette seen a case closed with such brusque alacrity—almost as though Judge Bourrouillou and his superiors were scared of what might come to light. Yet, the judge seemed nobody's fool. Had someone higher up tipped him the wink to wrap up the inquiry before the funeral to keep the mobs on either side quiet? Or did Bourrouillou, like so many others of his kind, hate Zola and what he stood for so much that he had no intention of exposing the truth. While he waited for the police and troops to take up their positions on the route, Cornette leafed through his folder on the case, a rough duplicate of the dossier assembled by Judge Bourrouillou. He had snatched a look at the judge's file of sixty-odd documents. Remarkable for what it did NOT contain, that casebook. No statement from the chimney sweep, Manchien. No mention of threats to Zola's life. No hint of the murder attempt nine months before. No explanation of why a fire smokes and emits carbon monoxide during the night and burns normally the next and following days. No answer to the question of why that fire burned without smoking before the Zolas left for Médan. In fact, no reason why Zola died and sensitive birds and guinea-pigs survived. Cornette already knew what the two architects, Henri Bunel and Georges Debrie, would conclude since he had discussed the puzzle with them. They contended that traffic vibration in the street outside, plus the wind and rain had gradually blocked the pipe of Zola's chimney where it bent and ran up the outside wall of the next-door building, Number 19. Traffic vibration from horse carriages in a quiet street paved with wooden blocks! And the wind and rain? Didn't they see that the chimney pipe had a cowl on it? They had never explained how Manchien only got three and a half buckets of soot—the normal amount—when he swept the chimney a few days after the drama. Or why Manchien and before him, Monsieur Arrizoli, had swept the chimney once a year for twelve years without incident. Bunel and Debrie would quote police regulations of 1875 and 1897 which stated that chimneys should be swept twice a year if used throughout the winter. So, they would exonerate everybody for Zola's death. Except Zola, who was responsible for having his own chimney swept. It would complete Judge Bourrouillou's file and allow him to close the case without fear of family argument. Cornette had looked at that chimney pipe after talking to the architects. Their theory would not have fooled a half-wit. Girard and Ogier, the chemists, were still toiling valiantly to kill off guineapigs in that bedroom; but so far, the animals refused to die and prove the architects' theory. Those facts alone would have convinced Cornette they were dealing not with a simple accident but something more complex, even sinister. A few days ago, they BOSON BOOKS

207

A Moment of Truth had received a significant hint that someone might have arranged Zola's death. Cornette found the copy of a letter that had come through the Sûreté Nationale to Judge Bourrouillou. Addressed to the police prefect, it read: In Zola's house over several years, I installed a hot-air stove from Besson's firm in Rue Rennequin and with me were employees who uttered threats to kill Zola. Now that I am no longer with the firm, have those same employees, who are still there, succeeded in fixing and lighting this portable stove without the knowledge of Zola's servants? This is what I wondered when I heard of the accident. Excuse me, Monsieur le Préfet, for writing to you on such a scrap of paper but I am unemployed and have no money. The stove (Besson) is small, expensive, nickel-plated and square; every summer, Monsieur Zola put it into store with Besson, Rue Rennequin, and when it got cold the employees went to Rue de Bruxelles to install it. I have a presentiment that it is the few rogues from that firm who did the job after installing it and locking the door. For, as I said before, they wished Zola dead many times over. I hope I'm wrong but any opinion is better than none in this case. Your respected and devoted, Edmond Monger, 3, Rue Saussures. Number 3, Rue Saussures lay near Batignolles Station, a lodging-house where the landlady told Cornette that Monsieur Monger had left two days before without giving her an address. What was he like? Intelligent, well-spoken, welldressed and paid his rent regularly. No, she knew nothing about his friends or his politics. However Cornette came away more than ever convinced that Monger had hit on the solution to the Zola mystery. He had written his letter three days after the event. Time enough to meet and have a drink with some of his old workmates. And perhaps overhear their chat that must have touched on Zola's death. Monger knew they still worked for Besson. When he had written and posted his letter to the prefect, he had quit his lodgings in a hurry. Why? Had he heard something he had not mentioned in his letter? The real story? And had someone scared him? Threatened to do him in, too, if he blabbed. Cornette had walked from the Batignolles to Rue de Bruxelles to look at the hot-air stove. Both architects had examined it and pronounced it really dangerous. But he verified that it had not been lit that night. He knocked at the door of 21, Rue de Bruxelles and had a word with Édouard Guillemot, the master-builder who lived above Zola. He had done repairs to his chimney that ran alongside Zola's since he sometimes smelled smoke. No, he had not heard of the Besson firm, but men from a chimney-sweeping firm had worked at Number 19 recently. They might have come from Besson. When he had confirmed this, Cornette had one of his men check on Besson's employees without arousing suspicion. Nothing known in the police files about BOSON BOOKS

208

A Moment of Truth any of them, except one: Henri-Charles Buronfosse, aged twenty-eight, originally from Saint-Quentin but now living in the Batignolles; he had demonstrated with the anti-Dreyfusards and had become an active member of Déroulède's Patriots' League; he had tried to enroll some of his workmates into this ultra right-wing nationalist movement. Cornette wondered if he should approach Besson direct. No, this would only scare the man and alert anyone who might be involved in Zola's death. He took his information to Bourrouillou, who merely shrugged and said they had ruled out foul play. How could anyone prove that someone had blocked that chimney then cleared it if everyone denied having done so? "But if we had a witness who'd heard something?" "A witness?" "Monger, the man who wrote to the Prefect." "We've done our best to locate him and he's gone." Cornette knew that Bourrouillou had merely sent a bailiff round to Rue Saussures and had done nothing to trace Edmond Monger. "We should put out a general call on him, shouldn't we?" he said. "Why? He's only guessing or he'd have given us what facts he possessed. We can all guess. Apart from the civil liabilities, the case is closed." Cornette gave up. He could no nothing more without Judge Bourrouillou's sanction; his investigation depended directly on the examining magistrate and he did not know what secret instructions he might have received from the justice ministry or higher. If he defied Bourrouillou and higher authority, he might jeopardize what remained of his career. Yet, whichever way he looked at Zola's death and the mystery of that bedroom, he could only explain them by assuming one thing: someone had blocked the chimney the day the Zolas arrived and unblocked it early that morning before he was called. Cornette closed his file as his two inspectors, Noriot and Denis, entered to say that their coach was waiting to take them to their post on the funeral route. A double row of gendarmes and troops lined the Boulevard and Place Clichy, wedging the crowd against the tall buildings. The coach had to squeeze down the Rue de Clichy into Rue de Bruxelles where more than three thousand people stood packed together; banners of the Patriots' League vied with those for the Rights of Man; elegant women jostled with men in toppers, bowlers and cloth caps for places near Zola's house; a company of the 28th line regiment in full marching order cleared a place round the entrance and stood to attention with fixed bayonets. Zola would have refused military honors, Cornette reflected. He did not believe in them, and, anyway, they had never officially restored his Legion of Honor entitling him to a military burial. He and his two inspectors checked on the dispositions of their men as they brought out the coffin and maneuvered it into the ornate hearse drawn by two horses caparisoned in black, embroidered and piped with silver. Several plain-clothes detectives were watching Dreyfus, who had insisted against Madame Zola's wishes on attending the funeral as a private person; another detachment was looking after Jeanne Rozerot and the two Zola children BOSON BOOKS

209

A Moment of Truth who were waiting in the crowd around the Place Clichy to follow the procession on foot. At one o'clock, Captain Oliver, who had fought several duels with antiDreyfusard officers for backing Zola, gave the order: Present arms! His company assembled in front of the hearse, heaped with flowers; a drumbeat sounded and the cortège moved off. Directly behind Zola's friends and relations came Monsieur Selle, Mayor of Denain, the mining town where Zola had researched Germinal; with him were a miner, a farm-worker and a blacksmith in their working clothes and a miners' delegation. As they marched through the Place Clichy, they raised their fists and cried: "Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!" A shout echoed by thousands in the crowd, but answered by another cry: "À bas Zola! À bas Zola!" Gathering masses of people behind it, the long procession moved slowly under the gray skies of Paris into Avenue Rachel and through the main entrance to Montmartre Cemetery; to allow the throng to thin out, the hearse led it into a huge square round four main cemetery avenues before halting at the roundabout where a dais had been erected. On the bridge overlooking the cemetery, people clung to girders and squatted on the parapet to spectate. As the hearse stopped, a forest of red roses sprouted from upraised arms in the crowd. "Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!" "À bas Zola et Dreyfus!" But Cornette and his policemen had no cause to worry; most of the crowd had come to look and listen to the orators, Abel Herman, President of the French Society of Authors, and Anatole France. Cornette spotted Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde, the socialist leaders, and Dreyfus, who stood silent and inconspicuous. His eye rested on Jeanne Rozerot and her children. What had she cried when they broke the news?—"They've assassinated him!" Womanly intuition often pierced to the truth. He caught the eye of one of his detectives who knew Henri-Charles Buronfosse, but the man shook his head indicating that he was not among the crowd around the graveside. A hush fell on the crowd as Anatole France stepped to the rostrum, lined in black velvet. He began slowly, describing Zola's struggles as a writer, his immense creation, his goodness, his love of truth, which had forced him to take a stand for Dreyfus. "A sinister silence reigned," Anatole France cried. "It was then that Zola wrote that outrageous letter to the President of the Republic denouncing the false and the felonious...You have all heard the howls of rage and threats of death which pursued him even into the Palais de Justice during his long trial when he was judged with deliberate ignorance of his cause and with false witness accompanied by the clicking of swords." At this, a murmur rose from the crowd and several people shouted their dissent. Anatole France waited for them to settle before continuing: "The consequences of his act are incalculable. They are still spreading today with powerful and majestic force. They stretch indefinitely. They have determined a BOSON BOOKS

210

A Moment of Truth movement of social equity that nothing can halt...Because he did not despair of French justice, Zola deserved well of his fatherland. Do not pity him for having endured and suffered. Envy him. He honored his country and the world with an immense creation and a great act. Envy him. His destiny and his heart assured him of the greatest fate. He was a moment of human conscience, a moment of truth." "Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!" Cornette stood watching as the red roses piled up to swamp the coffin as the crowd filed past the tomb, placing their flowers on it. At the entrance to the cemetery several scuffles broke out between rival political factions; Noriot's mounted police swiftly dispersed the troublemakers and cleared a way for the crowd. Within half an hour only a handful of people remained with a detachment of his own men who guarded the tomb against attempts to desecrate it and even steal the coffin with its body. "Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!" From the Place Clichy, that cry reverberated, its echo losing itself among the vaults and headstones, and Cornette wondered if it would ever die. He had heard much talk about Zola and Justice. Justice. Wasn't that the gospel that death prevented him from writing? Justice in his case was going to mark time for six months or so. Until tempers had cooled. Then it would scribe in fat letters across the dossier on Zola's death: NON LIEU (NO CASE). Now they had buried him, and perhaps they imagined they would bury the truth with him. Yet they had not stifled his voice which still resonated along the boulevards. One day perhaps, the truth he had championed all his life would burst its way to the surface. "Germinal! Germinal! Germinal!" END

BOSON BOOKS

211

A Moment of Truth

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Not long before his death on May 24, 1928, Henri-Charles Buronfosse confessed to his friend, Pierre Hacquin, that he had blocked Zola's chimney the night before he died and cleared it early on the morning they discovered the writer dead. Mr. Hacquin waited another twenty-five years before revealing this information to Jean Guignebert, editor of the newspaper, La Libération, which printed fragments of the letter in the context of its inquiry but did not divulge the name of Buronfosse for legal reasons. Here, for the first time in any biography of Zola, is the full text and a photocopy of Mr Hacquin's letter giving the name of the man who claimed to have assassinated Zola: St-Martin de Seignaux, June 15, 1953 Monsieur, What follows will surprise you for it concerns a fact which you cannot know, the exact cause of the death of the great writer coupled with a brave man, Émile Zola. A reader of Libération, I read your article on him to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, and I looked in vain for some doubt about the way he died. Now, as far as I'm concerned, I know for sure that if Zola was asphyxiated which is verified, he did not die accidentally but was the victim of a political assassination. Let me explain: After the 1914 war, I was in Sarcelles where I had my home and around 1921 was maneuvered into being president of a committee of National Union, alas! There I met a man named H B, who later became vice-president of the committee and also a friend. Having a house in Sarcelles, he spent almost all his time there, but he also had a domicile in Paris and a heating and chimney-sweeping firm in Rue de l'Arsenal just by Boulevard Bourdan. One day when I accompanied him there, he showed me a post which he claimed was the execution post of Mata Hari. I didn't think much of this type of macabre collection and wondered by what police protection it had wound up there. Time went by, but one day in March or April 1927 when we came to speak about Zola, he was seized with the need to confess. (Did he sense that he was going to die? He must have died a month later.) Here is what he said to me: "Hacquin, I am going to tell you how Zola died. I trust you, and anyway there will be prescription. "Zola was asphyxiated deliberately; it was us who blocked the chimney of his apartment and here is how: in a neighboring or adjoining house; (I don't BOSON BOOKS

212

A Moment of Truth remember exactly which) we had to make good the roof and the chimneys. We took advantage of the continual coming and going in that apartment building to identify and block Zola's chimneys in the evening. We cleared them the next morning early. No one noticed us, and you know the rest." H B had an easy job maintaining the chimneys of several barracks and municipal buildings, for he was friendly with one or two councilors; he wasn't boastful and didn't open up much with people and it is only because of the trust he had in me that he made this declaration, the importance of which you will understand. One evening the following May, I was with Mr Z and two employees going home from Sarcelles station when I found him (H B) dying on the station boulevard. Despite our efforts and those of Dr C, H B died a few minutes later. Why, you may ask, didn't you say sooner what you are telling me now? At the time I couldn't mention this drama to the political friends around me...they would have laughed in my face. In addition, as father of five sons, I had a great deal of worry. Today I am sixty-eight and near the end of my life and have to fulfill a duty which I believe has become a necessity. Neither the revolver shots against Maitre Labori nor the top hat jammed over the eyes of Loubet (the French President) were enough to quell the hatred unleashed by “J'Accuse”—it needed something better! I am staying here for two more months with one of my sons before returning to Tessy-sur-Vire where I live. If you have something to ask me about what I have written I am at your disposal. I am etc, P Hacquin H B must have been about ten years older than me, therefore 27 or 28 in 1902. P. S. I have only put initials on the above letter but here, for you personally, the exact name of the person—Henri Buronfosse—he had a house in Sarcelles, Rue du Petit Chaussy and a heating firm 5, Rue de L'Arsenal, Paris. *** For this letter, which clears up the puzzles surrounding Zola's death and confirms Superintendent Cornette's suspicions, I am indebted to Monsieur Jean Bedel, the journalist who carried out his own inquest for La Libération in 1953 and reached the same conclusions as I did. He made his voluminous files available to me with great generosity. Monsieur Hacquin erred in one point: Buronfosse died at Sarcelles on May 24, 1928 and not the previous May. In 1921, several years before the Buronfosse confession, Chief Superintendent Cornette—then retired thirteen years—revealed to a friend that he was convinced Zola had not died accidentally; but he felt that in a touchy political situation, someone in higher authority had evidently decided it was better to close the case BOSON BOOKS

213

A Moment of Truth quickly with a formula that would not stir up more agitation than the names Dreyfus and Zola had already provoked. For the other facts about Zola's death I was accorded the exceptional privilege of consulting the sixty-six items in the dossier of Judge Bourrouillou. I was also permitted to study Bourrouillou's personal file; then, to fill out my conception of the man, I managed to trace and interview a grandson in Paris. A curious choice, Bourrouillou, to conduct the official investigation into Zola's death. For his sympathies would seem to have lain with Zola's arch enemies— people like the Catholic, royalist and ultra-nationalist, Charles Maurras who preached a brand of fascism in his newspaper, l'Action Française. Maurras praised Bourrouillou, calling him a "real magistrate...a magistrate with a head and a heart, " after the judge refused to try him for allegedly using insulting words and behavior. That action probably cost Judge Bourrouillou his coveted promotion to counselor of the appeal court. Those people who answered my questions, unearthed books, files, documents and details about Zola would fill too many pages; but I would like to single out certain of them who lightened the burden of reconstructing Zola's character and life. The Paris Police prefect and Madame Jeanne Hamburger, head of police archives; Mr Patrick Hurley of Marseilles city archives; Jean-Claude Le BlondZola; Jean-Dominique Guelfi and the staff of the Méjanes Library, Aix-enProvence; Mademoiselle Berthe Coste. Finally, no biographer of Zola can fail to acknowledge his debt to Zola himself. In his immense journalistic and critical output, in his letters, in the notes and comments he garnered in the dossiers for his novels, Zola has told so much of his own story. Then, in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, central to the serious study of Zola, he has delineated, consciously and sub-consciously, his own character and the personalities of so many of his friends and enemies. In so much of my narrative, I have merely had to put Zola's own words and thoughts into dialogue to give the book the form that I fancy he himself might have given it had he been writing his own life. Footnote: French law on prescription erases responsibility for crimes after ten years.

BOSON BOOKS

214

A Moment of Truth

BOOKS, DOCUMENTS AND SOURCE MATERIAL FRENCH ZOLA, Émile. Oeuvres Complètes. Paris, Cercle du Livre Précieux. 1966-9. These eighteen thousand pages contain the integral text of the twenty RougonMacquart novels, the five early novels, the Three Towns, three of the Four Gospels, the short stories, plays and most of Zola's correspondence. Each work carries a preface and notes by Zola specialists. ZOLA, Émile. Manuscripts and dossiers of Zola's novels in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, and at the Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence. ZOLA, Émile. Police files from 1866 to 1908 in the Paris archives of the police prefecture. Inquest papers in the Paris city archives prepared by the Examining Magistrate who investigated Zola's death. Personal dossier of Monsieur le Juge Joseph Bourrouillou in the National Archives. Archives of Marseilles city, Aix-enProvence and the Bouches du Rhone Department relating to Zola and his parents. AFFAIRE DREYFUS. Le Procès Zola. Compte rendu sténographique. Paris 1898. ALBALAT, Antoine. Gustave Flaubert et ses Amis. Paris, Plon 1927. ALEXIS, Paul. Émile Zola, Notes d'un Ami. Paris, Charpentier 1882. ANTOINE, André. Mes Souvenirs sur le Théâtre Libre. Paris, Fayard 1921. BACHELARD, Gaston. La Psychanalyse du Feu. Paris 1937 BAILLOT, Alexandre. Émile Zola, l'Homme, le Penseur, le Critique. Paris, Société Française d'Imprimerie et de Librairie 1924. BARBUSSE, Henri. Émile Zola. Paris, Gallimard 1932. BATILLAT, Marcel. Émile Zola. Paris, Rieder 1931 BEDEL, Jean. Zola, a-t-il été Assassiné? Libération, Septembre-Octobre 1953 BILLY, André. Les Amours de Zola. Le Figaro Littéraire, May 1954 BILLY, André. Sur Madame Alexandrine Zola. Le Figaro Littéraire, June 1954 BRUNEAU, Alfred. À l'Ombre d'un Grand Coeur. Paris, Fasquelle 1932 CARIAS, Léon. France et Zola avant l'Affaire. La Grande Revue, Vol cxxiv 1927 CASTELNAU, Jacques. Zola. Tallandier, Paris 1946 CÉARD, Henri. Zola Intime. Revue Illustrée, Vol iii 1887 CÉZANNE, Paul. Correspondance. Éditée par John Rewald. Paris, Grasset 1937 CHABAUD, Alfred. Un Épisode Inconnue de l'Enfance d'Émile Zola. Mercure de France, Vol ccx 1929 CHAMPSAUR, Félicien. Les Hommes d'Aujourd'hui, No 4. Émile Zola. Paris, Cinqualbre 1878 CLARETIE, Jules. La Mort de Zola. Revue de France, Vol V 1922 DANGELZER, Joan-Yvonne. La Description du Milieu dans le Roman Français de Balzac à Zola. Paris, Presses Modernes 1938 DAUDET, Alphonse. Trente Ans de Paris. Paris, Marpon et Flammarion 1888 BOSON BOOKS

215

A Moment of Truth DAUDET, Mme Alphonse. Souvenirs Autour d'un Groupe Littéraire. Paris, Charpentier 1910. DEFFOUX, Léon. La Publication de l'Assommoir. Paris, Malfère 1931 DELHORBE, Cécile. L'Affaire Dreyfus et les Écrivains Français. Paris, Malfère 1931 DREYFUS, Maurice. Ce qu'il me reste à dire. Paris, Ollendorft 1912 DUMESNIL, René. La Publication des Soirées de Médan. Paris, Malfère 1933 EUROPE (Magazine). Numéros Speciaux sur Zola 1952 et 1968 EUVRARD, Michel. Émile Zola. Paris, Editions Universitaires 1967 FLAUBERT, Gustave. Correspondance. Paris, Conrad 1926-33 FRANCE, Anatole. La Vie Littéraire. Paris, Calman-Levy 1889-1949 FRÉVILLE, Jean. Zola, Semeur d'Orages. Paris, Editions Sociales 1952. GONCOURT, Edmond de. Lettres Inédites à Émile Zola. Paris, Cahiers Naturalistes No 13, 1959 GONCOURT, Edmond et Jules de. Journal. Éditions de l'Imprimerie Nationale 1956 GONCOURT, Jules de. Lettres de Jules de Goncourt. Paris, Charpentier 1885 GUILLEMIN, Henri. Zola Légende et Vérité. Paris, Julliard 1960 GUILLEMIN, Henri. Présentation des Rougon-Macquart. Paris, Gallimard 1964 HALPERINE-KAMINSKY, Élie. Ivan Tourguéneff d'après sa Correspondance avec ses Amis Français. Paris, Charpentier-Fasquelle 1901 HUYSMANS, Joris-Karl. Lettres Inédites à Émile Zola. Geneva, Droz 1953 JOUVENEL, Bertrand de. Vie de Zola. Paris, Librairies Valois 1931 KRANSOWSKI, Nathan. Paris dans les Romans d'Émile Zola. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France 1968 LABORDE, Albert. Trente-huit Années près de Zola. La Vie d'Alexandrine Zola. Paris, Éditeurs Français Réunis 1963. LANOUX, Armand. Bonjour Monsieur Zola. Paris, Amiot-Dumont 1954 LANOUX, Armand. Cézanne et Zola. Revue de Paris Vol lxiii 1956 LARGUIER, Léo. Avant le Déluge. Souvenirs. Paris, Grasset 1929 LE BLOND, Maurice. Émile Zola, son Évolution, son Influence. Paris, Éditions du Mouvement Socialiste 1903 LE BLOND-ZOLA, Denise. Émile Zola raconté par sa Fille. Paris, Fasquelle 1931 LEPELLETIER, Edmond. Émile Zola, sa Vie, son Oeuvre. Paris, Mercure de France 1908 MALLARMÉ, Stéphane. Dix-neuf lettres de Stéphane Mallarmé à Émile Zola. Paris, Centaine 1929 MARTINEAU, Henri. Le Roman Scientifique; d'Émile Zola. La Médecine et le Rougon-Macquart. Paris Baillière 1907 MASSIS, Henri. Comment Émile Zola composait ses Romans. Paris Fasquelle 1906 MATTHEWS, J.H. Les Deux Zolas. Geneva, Droz 1957 MAUPASSANT, Guy de. Émile Zola. Chroniques, Études et Correspondance de Guy de Maupassant. Paris, Grûnd 1938.

BOSON BOOKS

216

A Moment of Truth MITTERRAND, Henri. Zola journaliste. De l'Affaire Manet à l'Affaire Dreyfus. Paris, Armand Colin 1962 PSICHARI, Henriette. Anatomie d'un Chef-d'Oeuvre: Germinal. Paris, Mercure de France 1964 REUILLARD, Gabriel. Zola assassiné? Le Monde, June 1, 1954 REWALD, John. Cézanne, sa Vie, son Oeuvre, son Amitié pour Zola. Paris, Albin Michel 1939 ROD, Édouard. À Propos de l'Assommoir. Paris, Marpon et Flammarion 1897 ROMAINS, Jules. Saints de Notre Calendrier. Paris, Flammarion 1952 TOULOUSE, Dr Édouard. Enquête medico-psychologique sur les Rapports de la Supériorité intellectuelle avec la Névropathie. Émile Zola. Paris, Société d'Éditions Scientifique 1896 WALTER, Rodolphe. Zola et ses Amis à Bennecourt 1866. Les Cahiers Naturalistes No 17, 1961. XAU, Fernand. Émile Zola. Paris, Marpon et Flammarion 1880 ENGLISH BROMBERT, Victor. The Intellectual Hero. Studies in the French Novel 18801895. Philadelphia and New York, Lippincott 1961 BURNS, Colin A. 'Émile Zola et Henri Céard' Les Cahiers Naturalistes, No 2 1955 GOSSE, Edmund. French Profiles. London, Heinemann 1905. GRANT, E. M. Emile Zola. Twayne Publishers, New York 1966. GREGOR, Ian and NICHOLAS, Brian. The Moral and the Story. London, Faber 1962 HAMILTON, George H. Manet and his Critics. New Haven, Yale University Press. 1954. HEMMINGS, F.W.J. Emile Zola. Oxford University Press 1953 and revised edition 1966 HEMMINGS, F.W.J. The Life and Times of Emile Zola. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons 1977 JAMES, Henry. The House of Fiction. London, Hart-Davis, 1957. JOSEPHSON, Matthew. Zola and his Times. New York, Macaulay 1928 KANES, Martin. Zola's 'La Bête Humaine,' A Study in Literary Creation. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press 1962. LAPP, J.C. Zola before the Rougon-Macquart. Toronto, University of Toronto Press 1964 McLEAVE, Hugh. A Man and His Mountain: Life of Cézanne. New York, Macmillan 1977 MOORE, George. My Impressions of Zola. English Illustrated Magazine Vol xi 1894 NIESS, Robert J. Zola, Cézanne and Manet: A Study of L'Oeuvre. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press 1968 PATTERSON, J.G. A Zola Dictionary. London, Routledge 1912 PRITCHETT, V.S. Books in General. London, Chatto and Windus 1953 BOSON BOOKS

217

A Moment of Truth RUFENER, Helen La Rue. Biography of a War Novel. Zola's La Débâcle. New York, King's Crown Press 1946 SHERARD, Robert Harborough. Emile Zola: a Biographical and Critical Study. London, Chatto and Windus 1893 TRILLNG, Lionel. A Gathering of Fugitives. London, Secker and Warburg 1957 TURNELL, Martin. The Art of French Fiction. London, Hamish Hamilton 1959 VIZETELLY, Ernest Alfred. With Zola in England. London, Chatto and Windus; 1899 VIZETELLY, Ernest Alfred. Emile Zola, Novelist and Reformer. An Account of his Life and Work. London, Bodley Head 1904 WILSON, A. Emile Zola. An Introductory Study of his Novels. London, Secker and Warburg 1965.

END

BOSON BOOKS

218