The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  The Disappearance of Émile Zola

  Love, Literature and the Dreyfus Case

  MICHAEL ROSEN

  To Emma, Elsie and Emile

  In memory of Oscar, Rachel and Martin Rosen who perished as a result of a time in France when Zola’s words on anti-semitism were rejected by those in power.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1. ‘Coward!’

  2. Grey Suit and a Légion d’Honneur Rosette

  3. ‘Other affections’

  4. ‘I don’t bloody care!’

  5. The Haunted House

  6. ‘A little corner of life’

  7. ‘The Republic of Letters’

  8. ‘Nothing is decided’

  9. ‘Here we have, alas!, no Zolas’

  10. ‘Grossest bad taste’

  11. ‘Cheque delayed. Invoice received.’

  12. ‘A frightful catastrophe’

  Postscript

  Appendix I: Angeline

  Appendix II: J’Accuse

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  ‘J’accuse’: Zola’s open letter published on 13 January 1898. Getty/SSPL

  Captain Alfred Dreyfus, before his arrest and imprisonment in 1895 for the alleged crime of treason. Getty/Popperfoto

  Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. Getty/Universal Images Group

  Le Petit Journal reports Zola’s departure from the trial at Versailles, 18 July 1898. Getty/Hulton Archive

  M. Labori, Zola’s lawyer who advised him to flee the country. Photo: V. R. Vizetelly

  ‘Le Roi des Porcs’: anti-semitic cartoon depicting Émile Zola in relation to the Dreyfus Affair.

  Zola with Jeanne Rozerot and their children, Denise and Jacques, in 1899. Alamy

  Zola’s wife, Alexandrine, with Zola in the 1880s. Bridgeman

  The front of ‘Penn’ in Weybridge, Surrey, with Denise, Jacques and Violette Vizetelly, August 1898. Photo: Émile Zola, © Association du Musée Émile Zola

  Zola writing Fécondité, at ‘Penn’, 1898. Photo: V. R. Vizetelly

  Ernest Vizetelly, Zola’s translator and friend.

  Zola in England (front cover), by Ernest Vizetelly.

  Jeanne with Denise and Jacques at ‘Summerfield’ in Addlestone, autumn 1898. Photo: Émile Zola, © Association du Musée Émile Zola

  The Queen’s Hotel in Upper Norwood, where Zola moved in October 1898. Photo: Émile Zola, © Association du Musée Émile Zola

  Alexandrine in the window of the Queen’s Hotel. Photo: Émile Zola, © Association du Musée Émile Zola

  Jasper Road off Westow Hill in Crystal Palace, south-east London. Photo: Émile Zola, © Association du Musée Émile Zola

  Mme Zola near the bottom of Hermitage Road, Upper Norwood, November 1898. Photo: Émile Zola, © Association du Musée Émile Zola

  Zola ‘in his English garden’, 1898. Photo: V. R. Vizetelly

  Zola with his children, Denise and Jacques, not long before his death. Getty/Corbis

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased rectify any omissions or errors brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.

  Acknowledgements

  This book arose out of the collaboration between me and Emma-Louise Williams when we made a radio programme for BBC Radio 3 together about Émile Zola’s time in Britain. Her work as producer selecting passages for broadcast, talking about what was poignant, affecting or striking, is an invisible hand behind many parts of the book. The details of the programme are in the bibliography. We interviewed Alain Pagès, Evelyne Bloch-Dano and Martine Le Blond-Zola and so thanks are owed to them for crystallising for us in conversation what they have edited, written or talked about elsewhere.

  The fact that I can speak French is a result of my parents, Harold and Connie Rosen, taking me and my brother Brian to France many times when we were young, and encouraging us as a family to talk about France and French culture through out our lives. Our father was still going to French classes in his late eighties and discussing his homework with me. I would like to thank my French teachers at my secondary schools, in particular Mr and Mrs Emmans who were so enthusiastic and thoughtful about French literature in the Sixth Form at Watford Grammar School.

  Thanks too to the Miquel family who, since 1963, have sustained my interest in more aspects of French life, history and language than I can describe, in particular François who has been on hand literally and figuratively to offer support and expertise with this book.

  Special thanks are due to Miles Deverson who carefully copied many of the contemporary newspaper and magazine sources cited in the book, and to Seema Beeri who found and translated the Yiddish newspapers of the time. Donald Sommerville has been a superb copy editor, scrutinising, questioning and correcting hundreds of details of history, language, bibliography and more.

  Sarah Ardizzone translated the passage from Fécondité which appears on pp. 182–3.

  Acknowledgements are due to the following for passages reprinted with their permission:

  Éditions du Frisson Esthétique, for the message by Émile Zola from the cover of Le Docteur Pascal from p. 55 in Mes étés à Brienne by Brigitte Émile-Zola.

  Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, for use of a passage from a letter from Ernest Vizetelly to Macmillan Publishers, taken from p. 320 of Mon cher Maître, Lettres d’Ernest Vizetelly à Émile Zola, edited by Dorothy E. Speirs and Yannick Portebois. Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal also for use of extracts from letters from Émile Zola to Alexandrine, Jacques and Denise or letters from Alexandrine to Zola, taken from pages 225, 245–6, 250, 256, 259, 346 (Labori to Zola), 351, 369, 394, 438–9, 450, 451, 452, 460, 485i, 485ii, 488, 491, 492 of Correspondance d’Émile Zola, general editor B. H. Bakker, Volume ix, Octobre 1897–Septembre 1899 (L’affaire Dreyfus).

  Yale University Press for passages taken from pages xxvii, 73, 136–7 of The Dreyfus Affair, ‘J’accuse’ and Other Writings by Émile Zola, edited by Alain Pagès, translated by Eleanor Levieux.

  University of Toronto Press for passages taken from pages 26, 27, 27–9, 43, 58, 59–60 in Notes from Exile by Émile Zola, edited and translated by Dorothy E. Speirs and edited by Yannick Portebois.

  Éditions Gallimard for passages taken from letters on pages 200, 202, 207, 219, 221, 222, 225, 226, 234, 238, 240, 241, 241–2, 243, 245, 246, 253, 257, 263, 264, 268, 269, 274, 276, 279–80, 282, 287, 289, 290, 292, 293, 296, 297, 297–8, 298, 305, 313, 316, 318, 320, 322, 333, 334–5, 338, 340, 342, 355, 356 from Lettres à Jeanne Rozerot, 1892–1902, edited by Brigitte Émile-Zola and Alain Pagès.

  The author and publishers apologise if any person or estate has been overlooked. They would be grateful to be informed if any copyright notice has been omitted, or if there have been any changes of ownership or location.

  Preface

  Outside of France, people tend to know little of Émile Zola’s life, so it’s not surprising that they usually have heard little or nothing about his exile in London. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t exile, it was flight. The world-renowned novelist – as he was even then – fled from France, having been fined and given a prison sentence. This was not due to any of the usual writers’ transgressions – duels, crimes of passion, dissolution, immorality, or indecency in their writing. It was a political offence. On behalf of the disgraced army officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Zola took on the highest courts in the land an
d lost.

  As many thought at the time, how odd. Wasn’t this the novelist of the gutter? What was he doing siding with a rich Jewish traitor? They had an answer: arrogance, vanity and a probable secret allegiance to the ‘syndicate’, the mythic conspiracy that bound ‘the Jews’ together. Then, rather than face justice, he turned tail and escaped his due punishment. He was a coward too.

  All this would be not much more than a scandal but for the fact that these events split France down the middle, brought the fundamental nature of the French state into question, and have left their marks on France ever since. Yet, at a crucial moment in their unravelling, Zola was sitting in suburban houses and hotels in South London, pottering about on his bike, and taking photos of shops and trees.

  Reading a brief account of this period, it’s easy to get the impression that he was in some kind of isolation ward or house arrest and that life stood still while he was in England. In actual fact, it was a time of turmoil, change and stress on three fronts: political, literary and personal. Reading what he wrote at the time in his incomplete memoir and his many letters, you can feel these three zones in his life tumble over each other.

  And history didn’t stand still. Zola was constantly observing what was going on around him in the incongruous surroundings of a London suburb. Meanwhile, people in Britain had a view of him. Zola as novelist, Zola as purveyor of filth, Zola as champion of justice, were all images that preceded him and surrounded him – even if he hardly acknowledged this at the time of his exile. Just occasionally, we hear from him his regrets that he is not being fêted as he had been only five years earlier when he had paid a quick visit to England as a guest of honour. There was a contrast of enormous proportions between the Zola in England of 1893 and the Zola in England of 1898.

  1

  ‘Coward!’

  On the evening of Monday, 18 July 1898, Émile Zola disappeared.

  Earlier in the day, Zola had appeared in a court in Versailles. Zola’s lawyer, M. Labori, had tried to claim that the case could not be brought. The judge ruled against; Labori appealed. The judge said the case would continue. Zola and Labori met to discuss matters and then left the court and the building. Outside, the crowd shouted at Zola, ‘Go back to Venice!’ (his father came from Venice), ‘Go back to the Jews!’, ‘Coward!’ Zola was escorted through the crowds by soldiers and got into a coach. According to the radical journalist and politician Georges Clemenceau the crowds were: ‘hurling stones, hissing, booing, shrieking for his death. If Zola had been acquitted that day, not one of us would have left the courtroom alive. This is what this man did. He braved his times. He braved his countrymen.’

  As far as the world was concerned, this was his point of disappearance.

  Zola had arrived at this extraordinary stage in his life as a consequence of two major events, the one sitting inside the other: the Dreyfus Affair and Zola’s role in it as a campaigner for Dreyfus’s innocence. The Dreyfus Affair was in its narrowest terms a question of justice. An army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of passing secrets to a foreign power, Germany. He was found guilty, stripped of his rank and sentenced to imprisonment on Devil’s Island. Dreyfus was Jewish. In its widest terms, the Affair was a matter concerning the French Army, the government and powerful and very popular anti-Republican, pro-Monarchist and antisemitic movements ranged on one side and, on the other, Republicans, liberals, socialists and pro-Jewish groups. The two sides were far from being united, unanimous, monolithic blocs, though at times it was in the interest of either side to characterise its opponents as precisely that.

  Émile Zola did not immediately join the group which claimed that Dreyfus was innocent, but when he did, his intervention was decisive. He wrote – though it is probably more correct to say co-wrote – an open letter to the prime minister about Dreyfus. This was published on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore, edited by Georges Clemenceau, with the headline ‘J’Accuse’. In essence, the letter claimed that Dreyfus was innocent; that it was not Dreyfus who had prepared the ‘bordereau’, the incriminating piece of paper on which military information to be given to the Germans had been written, but one Major Esterhazy. What’s more, the accusation was that the army and the government were guilty of various crimes: illegality in the various trials, cover-ups, a campaign to mislead public opinion, and corruption. (All of these accusations were essentially true.) Zola also claimed that it was a crime to poison people’s minds with anti-semitism and that liberal France would die of this disease unless she was cured of it.

  This brought together in one place all the discoveries and allegations that the pro-Dreyfus camp had collected and put them before the French public. Its prime purpose was to corner the government and the army in order to secure the release of Dreyfus. Zola and his companions anticipated in ‘J’Accuse’ that Zola would be accused of libel. ‘J’Accuse’ even directed legal-minded readers to exactly which law, and which clauses of that law could be cited! And, as if in reply to himself, Zola stated that in so doing, he knew that he was voluntarily exposing himself to the justice system. This would necessitate the case against Dreyfus being heard in court and then shredded by the lawyers for the pro-Dreyfus camp. Or so they thought. After all, surely if one was accused of libel, all one needed to do was show the truth, and the libel case would fall.

  In fact, the case was only allowed to proceed on the basis of the interpretation of one short passage in ‘J’Accuse’, the part where Zola employed the words ‘par ordre’ (‘by order’ or ‘on orders’). Any reference to the Dreyfus case itself was ruled inadmissible; it could not be brought before the court. With that expression, ‘par ordre’, Zola had accused the highest military court in the land of behaving corruptly – that is, under instruction from the General Staff. More precisely, Zola accused a first court martial of sentencing someone (Dreyfus) on the basis of a document which had been kept secret, meaning that the court had acted illegally. A second court martial, Zola claimed, had covered up the first trial’s illegality and then had knowingly ‘by order’ acquitted a guilty man. This was Major Esterhazy. Zola claimed it was Esterhazy who had written a paper outlining French military secrets and passed it to the Germans, and it was not, as the army had alleged, Dreyfus – but this counter-accusation could not be heard in court. It was for making the specific charge that the court martial had acted in these matters ‘by order’ of the General Staff – and only on this specific charge – that Zola was found guilty of libel.

  For a British audience at the time, perplexed as to how France could arrive at this point, there was the added question of how the French justice system could find someone guilty of libelling a public institution rather than a person, yet that was precisely how the Republic could and did defend its values in a court of law. It showed this by fining Zola 3,000 francs and sentencing him to one year’s imprisonment.

  Zola’s sentence was news in itself but his disappearance was sensational. Over the next few days, the newspapers carried stories telling the world what had happened to this international figure. In London, on the evening of 19 July, the Daily News said that Zola had gone on a tour to Norway. On the 20th the same paper tried to flesh it out:

  M. Zola has left Paris. What can be more natural in this torrid weather? He may have gone to Norway leaving M. Labori to deal as he thinks fit with his law affairs, or he may have only gone to stay at a friend’s place in the country. He ordered some days ago four excursionist tickets for Norway. It appears that he left Paris last night, but not for Médan [Zola’s country house]. The house in the Rue de Bruxelles is shut up. Anti-Dreyfusard papers announce ‘Zola’s Flight’ in gigantic characters …

  On the same day, the Pall Mall Gazette wrote: ‘Zola, accompanied by Madame Zola and her maid left Paris by the 8.35 train for Lucerne.’

  The Times ran a story that people were ‘hinting that he is about to join his good friend Ibsen …’

  By the 21st, the story had developed. In the Daily News it was now:

  M
. Zola’s flitting – a holiday abroad – to return in October

  From our correspondent

  I have seen one of the counsel in the Zola case, and learnt that M. Zola left for Amsterdam and Christiania [Oslo] last evening, but by the round about way of Switzerland. Cycles for him and his two companions were sent on to the last place the train was to stop at, on this side of the frontier. They were to cycle on some distance and enter Switzer land by Neuchatel or Geneva, according to the weather.

  On another page of the same newspaper we find: ‘M. Zola, our Paris Correspondent says, has left Paris for Holland and Norway … He and his family crossed the frontier on bicycles on Tuesday night.’

  The Pall Mall Gazette on the 21st gave it a comic twist:

  M. Zola has, in the language of the modern schoolboy, ‘bunked’. His action in so doing is, naturally, being variously judged by his foes and friends respectively. To the former it presents itself in the light of an ignominious flight – in fact, as ‘bunk’ the outcome of ‘funk’ – to the latter it appears to be merely a judicious strategic movement to the rear. For the moment the ‘funk’ theory has the best of it, because retirement to the rear is never a brilliant operation to look at. On the other hand, they laugh longest who laugh last, and M. Zola is probably quite right in believing that a good many things will happen before he returns to the fray in October.

  On the 22nd, The Times ran the story as: ‘He left Paris yesterday morning for Switzerland, and intends thence to go and stay with the novelist Björnson in Norway.’

  Also on the 22nd, the Daily News called it ‘M. Zola at Hide-and-seek’ and said that L’Aurore (the newspaper which published ‘J’Accuse’) which ‘really knows everything about it, says nothing’. Their journalists revealed that: ‘Madame Zola is at Médan, but she does not, nor do the servants, open her doors. They speak at the hall-door through a sliding panel.’