The Disappearance of Émile Zola Page 11

  Would Zola have been on his own at these moments, or should we think of Alexandrine sitting with him in the hotel lounge as the boy from Reception brought him the latest letter from Jeanne on a little silver tray? Either way, as we read Zola’s letters to Jeanne, we can hold in our minds the sense that Alexandrine must have been aware of the letters passing between Zola and her one-time maid, mother of Zola’s only children.

  On 30 October, Zola told Jeanne that he was delighted to hear that there had been progress in the Dreyfus case and he was sure that this would end up with ‘poor Dreyfus’ being acquitted. Even so, he said (again) it would be two months before he could get back to Paris. This period of waiting would at least enable him to make progress with his novel. Apart from that, he didn’t have anything interesting to tell her. Well, yes he did. ‘Even so, one bit of news: I’m not alone. Ce qui devait arriver, est arrivé!’ – ‘What had to happen, has happened!’ or, ‘What had to arrive, has arrived!’ This was the coded way in which Zola informed Jeanne that Alexandrine had joined him. The exclamation mark possibly marks the fact that in French ‘arriver’ can be a pun, meaning both ‘to happen’ and ‘to arrive’. While he was trying to reassure Alexandrine that he wanted to be with her, loved her, and that they could be happy together, was he simultaneously telling Jeanne that the relationship with Alexandrine was an obligation, in some way beyond his control? The anonymity here – no naming of names – was a consequence of the constant fear that the letters were being opened by the police: Zola was still on the run, and both Jeanne and Alexandrine were under surveillance. All the same, wasn’t anonymity, in its own way, rather convenient, as this enabled Zola to position Alexandrine in his correspondence with Jeanne as an external and inevitable duty, as if he had played no part in enabling ‘it’ to have happened/arrived? If so, it could have been one way he thought he could reassure Jeanne that the marriage with Alexandrine didn’t really have any loving emotion left in it, whether this was true, half-true or untrue.

  At this point, the Dreyfusards had cause for optimism. The Supreme Court of Appeal agreed to conduct an investigation into the Affair. Labori, the lawyer for Dreyfus and Zola, warned Zola against coming back to France just yet, though. He wanted the procedure of the Supreme Court to take its course. Again and again in this period, those who wanted Zola to stay in Britain pointed out to him that to return to France would jeopardise the attempt to free Dreyfus. At moments like this, we are reminded that, though we say it was Zola’s exile, in fact it was his friends who had exiled him. To soften this, Labori lavished praise on Zola’s role in the case: thanks to Zola, the hour of justice was beginning to dawn.

  I don’t want to let this day go by without sending you an expression of my admiration and profound affection. Your exile must seem to you to be too sad and too long. But what a piece of work you have done! You will have not only saved an innocent man; you will have saved, I still hope, France herself, and in any case, you will have thrown an incomparable and glorious light on the years of decadence.

  The players in this drama were seeing themselves as national heroes.

  Letters to and from Denise and Jacques cheered him up, and the children each in turn always drew from Zola very different and contrasting concerns and tones of voice. He told Denise that he was very happy to see that his darling hadn’t forgotten him. He would have liked to have come back to Paris with them but what a party they would have when he did get back and what a nice cup of tea she and Jacques would make him. He knew that she had got herself a silver medal for playing the piano. ‘Next year, you must get the gold.’ Violette, Vizetelly’s daughter, was well and sent kisses to them. He closed with, ‘My dear Denise, love me well, just as I love you with all my heart. Your Papa kisses you tenderly.’ On the other hand, in his letter to Jacques, Zola told him that now that he was going to the lycée, he was a man, and that he (Zola) was going to keep Jacques’s letter as a souvenir of his first step in the world. But now that he was a man, he had to be good, work at school and above all not play about at mealtimes.

  Soon, when I get back, I’m sure that Mummy will have nothing but good things to say about you, telling me that you’ve done all you can, both you and Denise, to help her forget my absence … I kiss you tenderly in the certain knowledge that I am going to be very proud to have a little boy like you: hard-working and sensible.

  In his letters to Jeanne, he was starting to get anxious about Jacques’s failure to pass into a higher class. He should have worked harder in the holidays. ‘Keep me up to date with him and with what they tell you at the lycée, in as much detail as possible.’ Then, reflecting on the pair of them, and trying to make the most of the fact that Jacques wasn’t advanced for his age:

  If he stays with children who are more advanced than him, he’ll be discouraged and he won’t do very well. I really want my little Denise not to do very much at all and that later she will be happy to be a good little wife [‘bonne petite femme’]. But I would be very sad if our Jacques was just lazy and ignorant.

  He told Jeanne that his work, writing Fécondité, was taking up the mornings and without it, his existence would be utterly abominable. He closed with: ‘My beloved Jeanne, I kiss your beautiful eyes, from so far away, alas! that I am only kissing shadows. So, when will I be able to be with you again, you and the children, in a hug that can embrace you all together with all my heart?’

  He attached two photos: a view of Summerfield, and the other of ‘Penn’ with all three of them in the picture.

  Was Alexandrine in the room when Zola was writing these letters? It’s hard to imagine that she could have been anywhere else. She couldn’t speak English at all, there don’t seem to have been any French people at the Queen’s Hotel and, anyway, the Zolas would have thought it was still too risky to talk to anyone in case their situation became too public. Alexandrine was only in England to support Zola in what she and their friends thought was a time of crisis for him and for France. They thought he was making a great sacrifice for the sake of truth, justice and republican values, but we can speculate about what Alexandrine might have thought and felt at these particular moments far from home, separated from the support that she had built up to enable her to cope with what had happened to her life. Sitting cooped up in draughty rooms in south London while her husband wrote to his other partner could not have seemed like the best way to spend her time.

  On Sunday 6 November he wrote to Jeanne, and his friends Paul Alexis and Eugène Fasquelle. He told his friends that he was finding exile very difficult, especially as winter was on the way. In a bout of recrimination towards Jeanne, he chided her for suggesting that he was getting along better because, according to her, he was back to his normal way of life. Her writing this, he said, made him extremely sad.

  How can you talk of ‘my normal way of life’, when you’re not here? I’m not getting along at all well; and I don’t know how I’ll summon up the courage to carry on with this to the end. My days are frightfully empty, since you and the children haven’t been here with me. When I finish my work each morning, I don’t know what else to do, I just hang about till the evening. Going out pleases me even less and I’m happy when it rains, so as to have an excuse to stay by the fire and despair. If this is going to last much longer, it will be awful. And you are not being fair to make it seem as if it’s all a bed of roses, you who, at least, are in your own country, in your house, with your children. I will not be happy, I will not be able to go back to ‘my normal way of life’ until I get back to Paris, when I’ll be able to see you all whenever I wish and to love you all with all my heart.

  He then restated why it wasn’t possible for the three of them to come and stay with him in England – the children being at school, in particular – and he asked her to give him courage rather than making him despair, as at this moment what he really needed was to be supported and loved.

  This recriminatory tone seems to have paid off, as he was able to tell Jeanne four days later that her latest letter
really cheered him up. He had explained that he needed to be supported and loved, he said, in order to get through the misery; he had run out of nervous energy after all the shake-ups he had had. The smallest of difficulties – ones that hadn’t bothered him in the past – could send him off-track.

  Jeanne knew that Alexandrine was with Zola throughout this time, but he told her that he went out as little as possible, one-hour walks only. He was studying the newspapers in order to see if there was the tiniest fact to suggest that he was coming back later or sooner, one way or the other. Vizetelly’s English grammar book was coming in handy because he was now reading the newspapers more and more easily.

  Ah! if you knew how I dream of my return and all the beautiful projects I have in mind for the day when we’re back together. I am getting to hate this country more and more – which is not fair. But everything’s becoming unbearable, though the weather’s good after a period of rain and storms. For several mornings, there’s been heavy fog.

  It’s at moments like these that Vizetelly’s details of the two hotel rooms – the wallpaper, the five tables and the porcelain cats, Zola’s fastidious laying out of papers – give a claustrophobic flavour to what Zola was saying. Then matters turned to the children again. Zola needed to know if Jacques was working well at school. ‘Our little boy must not be bottom of the class.’

  What a state of nerves he was in! Each of her letters, he told her, made his heart miss a beat, as he was always afraid that it would be bad news.

  Be patient, my adorable wife, our worst days are nearly over. Kiss my little Denise and my little Jacques tenderly for me. And you, my beloved Jeanne, I shut my eyes to see you, to remind me of you and to hold you in my arms as hard as I can and with all my heart.

  Writing to Denise, he was able to tell her that she was a big girl now as she had written to him in German. But it wasn’t just a matter of being first in German. She had to be first in French from time to time.

  Did the monkeys from the Zoo tell you and Jacques that when you’re lazy and lying, you become as ugly as them? Because you know that the monkeys are little boys and girls who haven’t done any work and who have lied. So, they were put in cages …

  Sunday came round again too fast. ‘My beloved wife, now this terrible Sunday is here again and I would have spent the day in a sad state if I hadn’t received your good and long letter yesterday.’ He was worried that Jacques came home hungry from school and he was concerned that the boy was shy; it wasn’t good that he was keeping himself apart from the other children. He hoped that Denise was becoming a little less scatterbrained.

  In a few of the letters between the pair there was also a conversation going on about their photos, in particular the portraits that Zola had taken of her and the children, or the photos that Jeanne had taken of the children in Paris since they had been back. He planned to get these framed and placed opposite each other in the hotel room. With his usual caution over his marital arrangements, though, he asked Jeanne specifically not to send any pictures of her with the children: too painful for Alexandrine, we can assume: ‘You know how happy I would be to get them, but what would be the point, if I can’t put them on my table where anyone could see them?’ He offered Jeanne New Year’s Day as a possible return date since good news seemed to be coming from the court. On the children front, it was essential that Jacques did not terrorise her or Denise. It was very naughty of him to make a scene when he got in from school. Zola wasn’t too worried about it, he said, but he pleaded with Jeanne not to let the boy have his own way, as that would do him no good at all. There were domestic concerns, too. ‘The food continues to be revolting, their vegetables are always cooked without salt, and they wash their meat after they’ve cooked it. I am so sick of it, I would give you a hundred francs for a steak cooked by Mathilde.’

  On Sunday 20 November he ticked off Denise for making too many mistakes in her letter – fourteen in all. He wasn’t too upset about it, but she should try as hard as she could. ‘If you work, you end up not making any more mistakes at all.’ Violette, Vizetelly’s daughter, was back at school. Her mother had bought her a beautiful bicycle with the present that Zola had given her in Denise and Jacques’s names. ‘Tell Jacques that he’s a little lazybones for not writing to me. Be nice to him and play well together.’

  The news coming out of France by 24 November made Zola suggest to Jeanne that he would probably have to stay in England for the whole of winter. The weather was awful. The thick fogs were making it necessary to put the lights on in the middle of the day and the wind was pulling trees up. The bad weather had also prevented the newspapers arriving from France. What’s more, it was as cold as hell (‘un froid de chien’) and he was shivering in these foul rooms (‘chabraques de chambres’) where the big windows shut so badly.

  There’s no use having big fires; while I roast my feet, my back’s frozen. In the mornings it’s death to have a wash. As for the food, it’s more and more revolting. See how furious I am! But what’s the point? I always end up being resigned to it, still glad that I can work. On this front, at least, things are going well, my novel is coming along. It’s my only consolation in the midst of the uncertainty that’s torturing me.

  Then it was the wisdom (or not) of asking the housemaid to take Jacques to school. Was this sensible? The roads that their darling had to cross were so packed with vehicles that Zola feared he would have an accident. And being in thirteenth place in a class of twenty-two wasn’t good enough. He had to do better. He should be in the top five; that wouldn’t be asking too much of him. He asked Jeanne to tell Jacques to work harder if he wanted to please his father.

  How it must make you feel bad about this little world, to be forever running about for them! But, on the other hand, what would you do, if you didn’t have this to occupy you, to distract and console yourself in my absence? You’re right to persist in getting Jacques to play the piano a bit. Later on, he’ll thank you for it.

  Sadly, he thought of not being able to have a meal with Denise or being able to kiss them all, every day. What with that and the news from Paris, he wasn’t happy. ‘No matter, have faith in the truth!’

  There was good news for the Dreyfusards on 25 November: Zola’s friend Eugène Fasquelle wrote to Zola to tell him that the experts in the appeal court had found that the paper used for the bordereau was exactly the same as letters seized from Esterhazy, same year, and probably from the same batch. It was impossible to manufacture the same paper in two different processes. Surely now, there was no reason for keeping Dreyfus on Devil’s Island? Wasn’t the whole edifice of the state, army and justice system, which had found him guilty and then conspired to prop up the judgment against him, collapsing?

  On 30 November the infuriating matter of the libel case reared its head again. This was over the attempt to smear and dishonour Zola with a concocted story about his father deserting the army and whether, in reply, Zola had libelled the man who had made the accusation. Zola had confidence in Labori but was concerned that some of the proceedings could take place before he got back. It was yet another burden for Zola to handle.

  On 1 December Zola raised the hope with Jeanne that he could be back by the end of the year. He had, he said, resigned himself to living like a monk. The only thing that made him suffer was her absence. If she were with him, he would be able to wait patiently for years. ‘Tell yourself that everything is for the best and that apart from our separation, we have nothing to complain about.’

  On Sunday 4 December Zola told Jeanne that, as of the next day, he would be alone for two or three weeks. Again this was his discreet (or furtive) way of talking about Alexandrine. Specifically, his wife was heading back to Paris. ‘The beautiful roads that we [Zola and Jeanne] noticed were so good for cycling, are nothing more than mud-lakes; even so, I meet women who cycle in all weathers in order to go shopping.’ (Zola was still showing great interest in the female cyclists.)

  My adorable wife, I see you alone, in the evening, when you
write to me, having put our darlings to bed; and I want to be next to you then, to kiss you and to say how much I love you! In the end, I think the greatest of our troubles are over and I’ll be back in a matter of weeks. We have certainly earned the right to be left to live our lives quietly and for ourselves.

  He told her that everyone was doing what they could to bring him back. He urged Jacques not to sit alone, away from his fellow pupils, otherwise people would think he wasn’t nice.

  Alexandrine left for Paris on 5 December.

  December 11th was a hugely special date for Zola and Jeanne. He must have made a note, in his mind or in a diary, some years earlier of what he thought of as the true starting point of their relationship. Sitting on his own in the Queen’s Hotel, Upper Norwood, wasn’t how he wanted to celebrate it.

  Dear beloved wife, I’m going to be so sad next Sunday, 11 December, not to be with you, not to be kissing you with all my heart in memory of 11 December 1888! That anniversary is as sweet for us as it has been throughout the ten years of our happy set-up [‘ménage’] since then. I would have wanted to celebrate the three of you, you and our two darlings, those two beautiful presents that you made for me, who have united us, the one to the other, for ever! Since last year, I have dreamed of finding a way of celebrating our ten years of happiness, of finding a way of perpetuating the memory of it for us. And here I am, far away, in exile, not able to bring about my wish, prevented even from bringing the three of you into my arms in one big embrace! I have never suffered more from being locked up here in this beautiful country which I am finding more and more abominable …