The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  Though he doesn’t mention it, on 16 January Zola would have had the satisfaction of seeing ‘Angeline’, the ghost story he had written in the early days at the Queen’s Hotel, translated by Vizetelly and illustrated by Sir James Linton, published in The Star.

  On the 17th Alexandrine wrote to a friend to tell her that she was getting better and had gone out for half an hour. The violent coughing that had floored her wasn’t so bad; rubbing herself with turps(!), and taking a malt and cod liver oil mixture must be doing her good. Outside, though, it was pouring with rain, with constant wind. Morale was low.

  On the 18th Eugene Semenoff, a Russian journalist and friend of Zola, came and spent the afternoon with him. The bad news was, according to Semenoff, that it was unlikely the court would send the judgment to a new council of war (a new council would be more likely to quash the original judgment). On the 19th, in his letter to Jeanne, Zola questioned his idea of coming back to Paris because he would have to stay at home, or only risk going out in a car or carriage. So it would be better to carry on making this sacrifice all the way to the end. ‘So I dare not fix a date for when we’ll be back together.’

  Zola could see from Jeanne’s long letter that being alone was weighing her down and the afternoons were empty. ‘I’m pleading with you, try to entertain yourself as much as possible. Think up something to occupy yourself with, go out a lot, arrange to go to the theatre in the evening sometimes.’ In the three months since she had left England and been back in Paris, he had worked every morning, but he was getting tired and he might have to give up for a few days, if he wanted to avoid getting ill again, as he had in the last weeks of Jeanne’s stay with him. When he got down to work, he was getting headaches and dizzy spells. She had to tell Denise, he said, that each time she finished first, he would pay her. And if Jacques worked well, he would give him something too.

  On the 22nd – Sunday as usual – Zola’s letter took on the quality of a prose poem:

  You can’t have an idea of weather like this, the wind hasn’t stopped blowing since the day before yesterday. There’s a torrential downpour and it seems as if the house I’m living in is going to be carried off. The nights are especially shocking, the roaring of the wind in the chimneys sounds like thunder, while the windows, those windows you know are so practical, are shaken about as if someone wants to rip them off. And even though the sun has reappeared a little, today, Sunday, the wind hasn’t stopped, it’s still moaning.

  On a long walk he had taken yesterday (Can we assume he did it with Alexandrine? And if we can, would Jeanne have assumed it too?) he had noticed little green shoots on the lilac trees and had the sad thought that he might yet see the leaves grow and even the flowers coming out.

  He had had to give up studying English. He was too tired and working in the morning was giving him problems. He was struggling to read the papers. It was better to do nothing, rest for a bit – he needed that a lot – because in the end, what with all these shocks, he would end up not being so strong.

  But the worst was the food. The perpetual badly cooked meat and boiled potatoes made him want to heave, even just looking at them. There were days when all he could eat was fruit and jam. He missed the cooks they had had at Summerfield and ‘Penn’ and eating at Bailey’s Hotel. The only reason he was staying at the Queen’s was because it was out of the way, in a quiet place, and the little apartment was convenient. Nobody saw him, and he didn’t see anyone. Good old Vizetelly was coming to see him from time to time but Vizetelly was in a state. His wife had confided in Zola. She was unhappy. Mr and Mrs Vizetelly had sent Violette to another boarding school, but he feared that the poor little girl would have a hard life.

  On the 26th he had to reassure Jeanne that he hadn’t been deliberately deceiving her by saying that he would be back in a month or in six weeks. The truth was that he was saying these things in good faith but it wasn’t actually possible to fix a date. Maybe they would be able to see each other in a foreign country somewhere … that’s why he had mentioned Italy. His dearest hope was that they would be able to spend two good months together in August and September, in some little out of the way spot.

  Then came a moment in the letter where it’s possible to see that Jeanne very much had her own ideas about what Zola had been saying about the children. ‘As you say,’ he wrote, ‘maybe we will make something very good with our Denise and that we should let our Jacques just sort himself out at school before asking him to be top of the class.’

  He had been for a long walk along magnificent avenues which would surely look superb in summer, with their big trees. ‘How nice it would be for us to cycle along them!’ Perhaps Zola knew that Jeanne would think that it was likely he had been out with Alexandrine and that was why he popped in the thought of how nice it would be if he and Jeanne were cycling there, just as they had done at ‘Penn’ and Summerfield?

  By the 29th, he was saying to Jeanne that he couldn’t go on much longer living without her and the children. They would have to come and set themselves up nearby. He was telling her this, he said, not to make her anxious, but to convince her that he wasn’t deliberately separating himself from them. He wanted them to be with him wherever he was.

  He was very pleased to hear that their good little Jacques had come first in reading and, if he had done it once, he could apply himself to do it again. There was more good news coming from Denise. She was a very good little girl, at heart very sensible. And even if she was a bit dizzy, without much of a memory for things and a not very good attention span, she would end up all right because of her regular getting down to work. He thought she was on the right track both for piano and for French. It would be really awful if these events would force all this to be messed up. It was good news that Jeanne had been out for a walk in Versailles and he thought that their friend, Madame Alexis, could come to dinner with her. ‘Go to exhibitions, go shopping, run about a bit in Paris.’

  He was feeling stronger and doing his five pages, every morning. This week, friends from Paris were coming. ‘I miss you all so much, my three darlings, and there are days, like today, when I am so sad.’

  He asked Jacques whether he had enjoyed the champagne at the party and told him that he had to work hard – ‘it’s the only way to be happy and to make Mummy and me very pleased’. It was also a good idea to play the piano well. ‘You’ll be able to get the girls dancing.’ When he got back, Zola would pay him really well for all the times he came first.

  Other than Jeanne’s mild plea to lay off Jacques and just let him get on, we don’t ever find out how the boy took this relentless stream of requests to work hard, constantly intertwined with the rationale that it would make Mummy and Papa very happy if he came first. Here, though, is the heavy point that work was the only way to be happy. Clearly, Zola thought this of himself, and that working away at the novel every morning was saving him – just – from depression and a nervous breakdown.

  On 2 February Zola returned to the idea of bringing them all out to England or going to Switzerland or Italy. They had to think about the possibility of defeat over the Dreyfus Affair. In which case he wanted her to consider the possibility that they could all end up in exile somewhere. They would know one way or another in six weeks. He told Jeanne that he was going out on his long walks in his cardigan and the cape she knew well and he was keeping very warm. ‘Let’s hope that this summer, in spite of everything, we will be free again to courir en pleins champs’ – a phrase that means literally to run about in open fields. It was a phrase he also used in the book he was writing.

  On the same day, he wrote to Alexis (the friend who had asked him to send a few lines for the anniversary banquet) thanking him for the news that it had gone so well. He was very touched. Zola wanted him to thank everyone who was in sympathy with what he had done.

  On the 5th he told Jeanne that those of his friends who were in the know were certain that Dreyfus would be acquitted. The court had established clearly that he was innocent and, wh
en this was made public, there wasn’t a tribunal in the world that would be able to condemn him again. That’s why the ‘bandits’ were doing all they could to suppress the court’s investigation. Victory was certain. ‘Alas! yes, the violets will be finished before I’m back with you, and I will perhaps see the lilacs bloom. Yet more weeks and weeks of kissing letters.’

  On 9 February Zola was flip-flopping: he felt he had to explain again that he could not return to France if Dreyfus was not found innocent and that he would have to wait two, three or four months for it all to be settled. But now, he was going off the idea of Switzerland or Italy. That should only be an option if France was closed to them. And he had also gone off the idea of them coming out to England again. They wouldn’t be happy. The Vizetellys wouldn’t be able to help out. Yet, if they did come, he could work something out. But then, for the sake of the children’s studies, it would be better if the separation continued. His friend Octave Mirbeau had written to say that the worst outcome was possible. The wind was blowing violently.

  ‘Where are we going? I’m not hiding from you that I know nothing and that there are times when I would like to have the courage to take you all to Italy, without waiting any more, so that we could at least live there in peace.’ He had just finished the twentieth chapter of Fécondité – twenty out of thirty. He needed three good months to finish it. He would write the last lines before the end of May. ‘Where will I be?’ ‘All I ask is for a little corner where we can live together.’ Did he mean ‘live together’ or live together in the way that they had lived before, nights with Alexandrine, afternoons with Jeanne and the children? It’s not clear. But then perhaps it wasn’t clear to Zola either.

  On the 12th Zola had to reply to Jeanne’s news that she was getting angry. ‘Alas! that won’t help anything apart from make me feel bad. You have an air of triumph, as you claim that you had foreseen that this separation would last six months.’ Today, he said, she was telling him that she didn’t want to come back to England. ‘Believe me, that makes me even sadder. In the end, if I have to stay, you have to come and join me here again.’ For the last two days, he told her, he had been in a state of great sadness. He was in the midst of a crisis that was as bad as the one that she had witnessed at Summerfield. That’s why they had to hold on to each other.

  Can we say then that during Zola’s exile in England he broke down twice?

  On the same day, he tried to reassure his friend Mirbeau. Mirbeau had been threatened on the street by a gang of anti-semites. Zola told him this shouldn’t make him dream of isolating himself as Zola was doing. Mirbeau told him that he didn’t feel as if he were at home; in France, he was in some kind of foreign and hostile country. He couldn’t even walk about freely.

  The letter to Jeanne of 16 February marks what was perhaps Zola’s lowest moment of the exile. The most recent events had given him a crisis, which he was coming out of little by little. The worst was that his work had suffered. He had also feared that he and Jeanne were breaking up:

  The truth is that over the last few days, I have been convinced that everything’s over for us, and I admit, I still think it … Even if the injustice and lies win out, we have to have the strength to go on living amongst the debris … For my part, I don’t know what I’ll do. I have to be on the side of a brave and honest man.

  He said he was spending his days banging his head against the wall, trying to find a solution in the face of invincible obstacles. There wasn’t any point in the family coming to England if it was just before he went back …

  Other news: it seemed as if Vizetelly was feeling worse and worse. His wife was suffering. Violette hadn’t gone off to school and was wasting time at home. Unhappy people, but it was their fault. The children were naughty to fight. ‘Tell them that if they carry on, I won’t love them at all, when I get back … It seems to me certain that I will be with you in six weeks.’

  That day, the 16th, he wrote to Vizetelly on the matter of keeping visitors away. Yes, he would really like to have seen Chatto and Spalding but both Alexandrine and he were ill. They would be poor hosts. Vizetelly also put off an Irish academic, William Graham, and the novelist George Moore. He told Zola that he wouldn’t let any Englishman he knew come and see him. Graham had come to see Vizetelly on behalf of the owner of the Observer, Rachel Beer. She wanted to meet Zola, and she had told Graham that she had many Jewish friends in France who would vouch for her.

  On the 16th a sensational piece of news broke. The anti-Dreyfusard President of France, Félix Faure, had died in the arms of his mistress, Madame Steinheil. Faure had always opposed any ‘revision’ of the Dreyfus trial. His death, and the appointment two days later of Émile Loubet, who was more sympathetic to Dreyfus, offered immediate hope to the Dreyfus camp as Zola was quick to tell Jeanne. Even so, he added, throwing in a touch of fatalistic determinism, ‘the days drag, nothing comes along, nothing is decided. It even seems as if events themselves were taking pleasure in prolonging things.’ He could see that being on her own for this length of time was disastrous for a woman of her age. At times of his greatest concern, this thought gripped his heart. (Or did he mean, but not say, it was disastrous for a man of his age in a relationship with a woman of her age?) ‘Today, a thick fog, no one on the road in front of my windows. You know the terrible Sundays here.’

  In France on the 23rd, following the funeral of President Faure, there was an abortive attempt at a nationalist uprising. That it failed was good news for the Dreyfus camp. Zola wrote to Jeanne bemoaning the fact that he thought he would end up celebrating his birthday, 2 April, on his own in England:

  You can imagine how, from time to time, I’m seized by anger and sadness because there are moments when I am at the end of my patience. But what’s the point? The more I wait, the more it makes sense to me to wait some more. A year has been stolen from my life. At my age, that counts.

  Then, in one of his extremely rare pieces of news about Alexandrine, he told Jeanne that the weather had been really good these last three days: ‘I go out on my own all the time,’ followed by a sentence that is not easy to express in English ‘on est très malade près de moi’ (literally: ‘the one who is near me is very ill’). This is Alexandrine, who is hidden behind the word ‘on’ when Zola speaks to Jeanne about her in his letters. But in any case he had been for a long walk, thinking of Jeanne:

  How troubled our poor life is! Where are the days when I was so happy to come and have tea with the three of you, bringing you violets? I see your lovely apartment in a dream, when, even if I didn’t find you, I would be happy just to rest for a bit and wait for you. I got so much pleasure sorting out this apartment! It pleased me so much that it was on the lively rue du Havre! and we haven’t enjoyed it again. I’ve often been afraid, and I still am, that I won’t be able to come back and see you there. Here, the little leaves are sprouting, I thought of Verneuil [Jeanne’s house near Médan] on my long walk this afternoon. Ah! all that seems far away; will our peaceful life ever come again? – Yet, happily, I’m well, I’ve started working again, let’s hope everything’s going to be all right.

  News of Denise’s and Jacques’s studies was good – that was one care less for the future. Ten times, he had thought of bringing Jeanne out again, but it was the children’s schooling that prevented it happening. ‘When one has children, their needs must be put before the parents’ pleasure. In the end, the sacrifice is made and I hope that we will be compensated for it.’ (‘Compensated’?!)

  He also wrote to Denise that day, telling her that Mummy must be spoiling her by taking her to see the big wheel, buying confetti for Mardi Gras and doing whatever Denise wanted. So they mustn’t fight, that made Mummy and him feel bad.

  We don’t often get a glimpse of what Alexandrine was thinking at this time but she wrote to one of her friends on the 23rd, saying that she would much rather have been ill at home, where at least she wouldn’t die without help, which is what would happen in London. She said she would be back on th
e 27th, making it the fourth time since she had first come to this country that she would have been on that route – a country that had been so deadly (‘funeste’) for her.

  On the 26th, Zola told Jeanne that he would be alone again as of the following morning. Yet again, that was his way of reminding her that Alexandrine would be leaving and going back to Paris. This meant that it would be possible he would also be on his own till he came back to France. ‘You know that being alone doesn’t scare me,’ he said. He would go for long walks every day and think of Jeanne. The exile had been good for one thing: he had been able to write a novel.

  He was surprised that Denise was becoming so serious with her work, as she was so scatterbrained. Maybe she was going to stun them with her progress. As for Jacques, he was still very young and they shouldn’t ask too much of him – both things being precisely what Jeanne had written to him a few weeks earlier, though he didn’t acknowledge it.

  He wrote to Jacques that he was counting on him ending up on the honours board and it was making him feel bad that he wasn’t there yet.

  If you don’t devote yourself to study, there’s no reward and you end up being sad about it and making your parents sad too. If you are not careful about your homework and if you are not very good it would be utterly shameful. Mummy is very nice to have given you a book from the ‘Pink Library’ series, all the same. I hope that you’ve thanked her for it and that you love her with all your heart.