The Disappearance of Émile Zola Page 10

  On this day he wrote to his ‘beloved wife’ again. He hardly had a minute to himself, he wrote; the list of what he had to do was frightening. He wasn’t used to this kind of life and it was tiring him out greatly. He said that he would be back in Paris by Sunday evening, so could Jeanne tell Denise to prepare a good cup of tea and some nice cakes for her Papa, and that he very much wanted to kiss Monsieur Jacques?

  He had been received like a prince, he said, but of course Le Figaro, which didn’t really like him, was hardly saying anything about it. The newspapers in Britain, though, had been full of it for some eight days now and he hoped that the echoes of it would reach the French ones. In any case, what had just happened would have enormous consequences for him, and this was making him very happy. He finished with a million kisses for his big Jeanne, his little Denise and his little Jacques, all three of whom he was carrying in his heart.

  On Thursday the 28th, he was taken to the Greenwich Observatory and the Naval College in the company of the Irish novelist George Moore, who had been Zola’s greatest champion and imitator in Britain up to that point. That evening, Zola was the guest of honour at a dinner hosted by the Authors’ Club at the Whitehall Rooms of the Hotel Metropole. This was the most literary of the dos and bashes that Zola was taken to. Here, he was fêted again, this time specifically as the great French novelist and literary giant. The list of invitees included Walter Besant, George Moore, Thomas Hardy, Jerome K. Jerome, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Vizetelly and Andrew Chatto, though Doyle, Wilde, Hardy and Moore do not appear on the list of those who actually attended.

  In his address, Oswald Crawfurd, director of the daily illustrated paper Black and White, made a clear reference to the upheavals of the past when he mentioned the ‘great resistance’ that Zola had met prior to this day, but now he was being received as the ‘imperator litterarum’. He was more than a literary artist, Crawfurd said. By being the apostle of realism, writing under the banner of ‘Reality is truth’, Zola was also a philosopher.

  Zola replied, modestly pointing out that the members were honouring French literature as a whole and he had only wanted to ‘disappear’, being no more than his colleagues’ delegate. He added that in the midst of all this applause, he understood that the critics had not changed their opinion on his work, but now they had seen the man himself, they had found that he wasn’t as ‘black’ as it had been claimed. ‘You have said to yourselves, that I struggled a great deal, worked a great deal and, by honouring my work, you have honoured the great working people.’ He said that he would never forget the royal welcome he, a simple French writer, had received in this enormous city of London. He then toasted the novelists of Britain and France, the good fraternity of writers in our ‘universal republic of letters’.

  It is interesting to note here that the ‘kingdom of letters’ of the Crystal Palace jolly had now turned into a republic. Once again, the papers wrote up the speech in the editions which appeared the next day, the 29th. Also on this day, Zola was taken to the National Gallery by Campbell Clarke, where he was excited by the Turners – oils and watercolours. Lunch was at the Nation Club with editor and publisher William Heinemann. Next stop was Westminster Abbey where he whispered to Vizetelly, ‘I did not know that this was still a Catholic Church.’ Vizetelly whispered back, ‘It is Church of England – Protestant.’ ‘Protestant?’ asked Zola, ‘Well, all that is very much like Mass to me.’ Then he shrugged his shoulders and led the way outside. A trip to see the Metropolitan Line followed, which by that time was thirty years old.

  He wrote to his ‘adorable wife’ to remind her how, in two days, they would be together, after four months of separation (the Zolas had been away on holiday prior to this trip). What a joy it would be for him to kiss all three of them, his darlings, and to see them almost every day throughout the coming winter. He would see them on Monday. In the meantime, he would do all he could to make sure that he could spend two hours with them, and they would have a nice meal together, all four of them.

  In England, he told her, it felt like a dream, what with all the honours that were being bestowed on him, where ten years previously they hardly liked him at all. He had conquered England; in this enormous city they were talking of little else but him. Happily, though, it was now over, as he was terribly tired. It was beautiful weather now, but changeable, sun, rain, fog. Yesterday, he had had a very interesting walk beside the Thames. It was an immense river, where boats passed all the time, like vehicles on an enormous street. He was sorry that he would not be bringing back any little presents as there was nothing more difficult than trying to make oneself understood in a shop. And, anyway, he was hardly free, but he would try to bring a little souvenir of London for her. He sent his three darlings a million kisses. He knew that they were waiting for him and he could do no more than put his heart into the letter. They were three darlings whom he adored …

  On Saturday 30th, a long article about Zola appeared in the Daily Graphic, written by its editor, Lucien Wolf. Wolf had done the formal inviting of Zola, in part because he was bilingual, having been educated in Brussels and Paris, and he played a key part in organising Zola’s itinerary.

  The article in the Daily Graphic came headed by an illustration of Zola sitting at a bureau in his room at the Savoy, with Alexandrine standing over him with a book in her hand, looking attentive and dutiful. Out of the window, across the balustrade of a balcony, the towers of the Houses of Parliament were sketched in. Wolf wrote that the expression on Zola’s face was

  severe with a touch of pain about the wrinkles in his forehead but his mobile features respond easily to the quiet gaiety of his conversation, and, although the brow never smoothens, the grey eyes are frequently lit up with pleasant smiles. Madame Zola is in this respect very much like her husband. In repose her face is grave, almost melancholy, but it takes little to make her smile and even laugh outright.

  Zola told Wolf that he was struck by the number of towns there were in London, each one stretching over a vast area, and each one possessing some definite and peculiar characteristics. He noticed that the parks were primarily recreation grounds rather than beautiful gardens, but the lawns in London were unequalled anywhere.

  On his day at Greenwich, he discovered the secret of the importance of London as he passed east of London Bridge; the greatness of Britain, seemed to be laid bare to him. The immense waterway, with its endless life and traffic, its wonderful quays and wharfs, in direct touch with every part of the world, explained everything to those who marvelled at the power of the British Empire. Between London Bridge and the sea was ‘the stomach, the heart of England’. Hatfield House, Zola thought, expressed something of the concessions that the aristocracy had made in Britain, thereby avoiding the political convulsions of a revolution. He hoped that one day he could return to England and live incognito, revealing his presence to just a few friends.

  He was sorry that Thomas Hardy had not been at the dinner of the Authors’ Club. He had heard so much about him. ‘I am going to interest myself in getting some of his works translated into French,’ he said, ‘especially “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”.’ He had been very glad to meet George Moore whom he had known for fifteen years. They had met for the first time at a gigantic costume ball given for the hundredth performance of L’Assommoir. All the women were dressed as washerwomen and Moore, Zola thought, was dressed as a cook. Manet the painter had introduced Moore to Zola.

  He likened the Académie Française to the House of Lords, a ‘collection of old Tories’; it disliked all new departures, and the founders and leaders of new schools of thought. Hugo, Taine and Renan had each been refused admittance many times. ‘In a few years I shall enter,’ he said. ‘They tell me I am a man of enormous talent. When they have habituated themselves to this way of thinking they will vote for me.’

  Wolf closed the article by telling his readers that at this point in the conversation Madame Zola came into the room, gloved and bonneted ready to leave for anoth
er outing.

  The day the article in the Graphic appeared, Zola headed to the East End of London in the company of two editors from the London evening paper The Star, where, according to Vizetelly, he visited the ‘Rowton lodging-houses, Rothschild almshouses, various sweaters’ dens, sundry Jewish homes of Whitechapel, and Italian ones at Saffron Hill’. Zola observed to Vizetelly that he thought that the poverty of Parisian ragpickers was worse. (In passing, I can’t help but note that at this very time several of my own great-grandparents were living in ‘sundry Jewish homes of Whitechapel’!)

  In the evening, Zola had a function to attend at the Press Club in Fleet Street with Herbert Cornish, the secretary of the Institute of Journalists. This time, Zola’s speech reflected on his career, how he had surmounted great difficulties, how he had been very poor and that it was through irregular paid work as a journalist that he could earn a living while he began his literary career. Some, he said, suggest that journalism spoils the writing of a person wanting to be a literary writer: he disagreed. Later that evening, the Zolas played host to Lucien Wolf, Ernest Vizetelly, George Petilleau from the Society of Teachers of French, and their wives at an intimate dinner at the Savoy.

  The following day, Sunday 1 October, the Zolas returned to Paris. Straight away, he was interviewed and was delighted to report on what felt to him like a transformation of opinion: from the hostility that had greeted the publication in Britain of La Terre to the heroic welcome he had just received. He was full of awe and wonder at the size of London, the hypnotic presence of the Thames and even spoke of how, one day, he would like to write a novel set in London, with the city itself as a presence, and with the Thames as the soul of the work. The protagonists would be French, with just a few English people sketchily represented. Yes, he was tempted by such a project. He had dreamed of a series of novels based in the capital cities of Europe. For the time being, he was taken up with a much shorter series called The Three Cities: Lourdes (looking at religious faith), Rome (looking at the attempt by the Catholic Church to reconcile itself with science and modernity) and Paris (where he would look at the socialist movement, based on labour and justice). Perhaps, he would return to London for a longer visit when he would be freer to go where he wanted to without having to attend official functions.

  Scholars have noted that the visit marked a moment when a great European writer made an impact on the British literary scene. It silenced those who had pilloried, persecuted and imprisoned Henry Vizetelly for publishing Zola. It was a moment when the idea that a novelist could write about contemporary life and politics and could try to grasp the essence of an epoch (as Zola had done with the great Rougon-Macquart cycle especially) started to be appreciated. Personally, Zola could be seen by many at this point as a man of massive persistence and devotion, a risk-taker, someone independent-minded enough to put his literary efforts in support of reform, and against the social and sexual constraints imposed in particular by religion.

  This welcome affirmation must have contributed to the choice of London that Zola and his friends made when they were picking somewhere for him to flee to five years later. By and large, the same newspapers who had acclaimed Zola in 1893 supported him in his stand against the anti-Dreyfus camp in 1897–8.

  The 1893 visit was not universally welcomed, though. The Bishop of Worcester rose to speak at the Church Congress in Birmingham to declare: ‘Zola has spent his life in corrupting the minds and souls not only of thousands of his fellow countrymen and especially of the young but also, by the translation of his works, thousands and hundreds of thousands of young souls elsewhere.’ This view was publicly shared by the headmaster of Harrow School and the Bishop of Bombay, while the Bishop of Truro complained bitterly that Zola’s horrible books were sold at railway-station bookstalls, which, he said, would never have been allowed in the lifetime of that ‘good man, Mr. W. H. Smith’. This controversy then moved to the correspondence pages of the newspapers where Zola – or at least the Vizetellys for translating and publishing him – found a defender in one ‘Mr A. T. Quiller-Couch’, better known today as Arthur Quiller-Couch, or even just ‘Q’, novelist, anthologist, academic, and credited with being a key figure in the invention and development of the study of English literature as an academic subject in universities.

  Zola came away from London in 1893 glowing with pride, sure that it would be a platform for achieving yet greater recognition and honour in France. He had juggled his personal life, appearing in public as one of a bourgeois couple, whilst reassuring Jeanne that his love was constant and his devotion to their children was total. He had delighted the writing milieu, though the aristocracy of the churches thundered their disapproval from their conferences, something that Zola would only know of as filtered by Vizetelly or Chatto.

  Though he didn’t note it in his diary, and Vizetelly doesn’t mention it either, it seems as if he met up with Henry James in London. They chatted about travel and what Zola was working on. As in all his interviews, Zola was happy to tell James that he was embarking on the Three Cities trilogy and James was pleased to hear that Zola was at the height of his powers.

  The visit had even given Zola a vision of how he could spend time in London, moving about unknown and unnoticed, absorbing a feel of the place as a possible backdrop for one of his novels. That pleasing cosmopolitan scenario didn’t ever materialise, though a bizarre version of it was what unfolded five years later.

  8

  ‘Nothing is decided’

  Vizetelly closely observed Zola’s arrangements at the Queen’s Hotel where most of his nigh-on eight-month stay was spent in the topmost rooms. At the outset, he and Wareham promised Zola that he would have a French-speaking waiter to attend on him but that turned out not to be possible. The one provided could speak one or two words of French, though, and was, Vizetelly says, ‘very intelligent, very discreet, very willing to oblige – a waiter of the good old English school’.

  Vizetelly sets the scene for us for the next episode in Zola’s stay, as if he were describing a stage set. The sitting-room at the Queen’s, he tells us, was where Zola wrote much of Fécondité. It was spacious and low-ceilinged with three windows overlooking the road and a very large gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece where there were two or three little blue vases. The walls were covered in a light-coloured paper with a large, flowing arabesque pattern and broad frieze; but there were no pictures at all.

  Opposite the mirror there was a small sideboard; on the other side of the room there was a sofa and half a dozen chairs. The room was ‘rich in tables’(!) – five in all. A folding card-table in one corner was where Zola kept his letter-paper, his weighing-scale for letters, his envelopes, pens and pencils. In front of the central window was where he sat at another table and worked every morning. Whenever he raised his eyes from the page, he could see the road below him, and the houses – which are still there – across the way. On a similar table, at another of the windows, he kept the books and reviews that were arriving from France. No chaotic, bohemian, disordered life for Zola, then. There was a small round dining table and, by the fire, next to Zola’s favourite arm-chair, was a ‘little gypsy table’ where he kept the day’s newspapers.

  In the centre of the room there were brand-new electric lights – fitted for the first time at the Queen’s even as Zola was staying there. Before that, it was paraffin lamps. Zola used the hotel’s inkstand and alongside that he kept a few paper-weights which stood on his ‘memoranda’, written on the Post-its of the day, small pieces of paper, three inches square. He used a ‘yellowish’ newspaper as a blotter, a pen with a ‘j’ nib and a heavy ivory handle. Vizetelly’s long experience of translating Zola seems to have had the effect of letting the Naturalists’ method of writing seep into his own here but it serves to give us Zola’s eye-view as he spent many gloomy hours in this living-space.

  There was a bedroom leading straight off the sitting-room where there was a chest of drawers; on top of that stood a pair of life-size, maroo
n-coloured porcelain cats, with sparkling yellow glass eyes and yellow spots. Zola had bought these as a souvenir of England and English art, as he had found them particularly odd. He had been tempted by some white ones with coloured landscapes printed over their backs and sides but, in the end, he decided it just had to be the yellow-spotted, maroon ones. One of Vizetelly’s daughters was startled by them and thought that Tenniel must have seen them before he drew the Cheshire Cat, while Vizetelly predicted that Zola’s artistic friends back in Paris would greet the cats with laughter and derision.

  Zola was amused by the way Vizetelly would lean out of the window and talk to guests arriving in their broughams and landaus on the gravel sweep of the drive, and surprised that some wedding guests arrived with yellow flowers. In France, Zola pointed out, yellow was associated with jealousy and conjugal infidelity. ‘If those flowers are to be taken as an omen,’ he said, ‘that happy pair will soon be in the Divorce Court.’ No surprise that such thoughts should be in Zola’s mind: throughout Alexandrine’s first stay at the Queen’s Hotel, Zola kept up his correspondence with Jeanne.

  Two days after Madame Zola arrived, Zola’s letter to Jeanne shows that he had become very agitated about Jacques’s health. These were the first signs of Jacques’s osseous tuberculosis that would last several years. Zola also warned Jeanne that he might not be able to return to Paris for at least another two months as they were waiting on the appeal court to call for an inquiry into the Dreyfus case. The date of Zola’s possible return was a bell-like refrain that was sounded in almost every letter he sent, but with each letter the date moved. Time and timing became agonisingly important for Zola in this period. For the first time in his adult life, he had no control over when things happened. This was a loss. He was dependent on political events far away, minders, hotel timetables and colleagues’ instructions. The daily routine he had devised to live in two households had to be discarded. Jeanne’s letters, he told her, arrived the day after she posted them, just as they were serving him his cup of tea, an event that happened, on the dot, every day at half past four.