The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  We can get a picture of Alexandrine’s role in the relationship when she warned Zola on 30 March to rely more on his own intuition and not just listen to political friends. ‘For all your life long you have always done things your own way. Why don’t you carry on now? … Don’t take political friendship for any more than it is …’

  Then, by way of reversal of the situation in which Alexandrine sat in a hotel while letters arrived from Jeanne, now – and on his birthday – a basket of roses arrived from Alexandrine. He told her on 2 April that he was delighted to receive them but it was hard, after nearly nine months of exile, torn from his country, on the end of all the relentless hatred. ‘All I wanted was justice, not all these insults they’ve showered me with. All this comes back and smothers me on a day like this.’

  Alexandrine replied, ‘Listen, Monsieur Wolf-Cat-Dog, Dog-Cat-Wolf, or Cat-Wolf-Dog, I am going to give you a good telling-off for being so sad. I am sorry to see that even your dear little ones being there doesn’t get you out of this frame of mind.’ Perhaps this implies Alexandrine was acknowledging that Jeanne had a role of lifting him out of his depression too.

  Jeanne and the children travelled back to Paris on 11 April, so from then on, it was back to living in the shadow of the Dreyfus Affair. Mathieu Dreyfus advised Zola not to come back yet and Alexandrine pointed out that the enemy were feeble and disorientated, so it was vital not to give them a distraction.

  On 12 April Zola wrote to Jeanne to tell her that the days when they were with him made him feel yet again how alone he was, torn from everything he cared about, though the presence of Denise and Jacques had cheered him up: ‘Tell Denise and Jacques how nice they were when they came to stay with me, and their Papa loves them even more.’

  In a similar vein, three days later, he told Jeanne that he would carry the memory of them all on his walks and wherever they had been together. ‘And I say to myself, I’ll see you all again soon, whenever it turns out to be the end of the Affair. If it’s a victory, we’ll enjoy it. If it’s a defeat, even so, we won’t be separated any more.’ But he had to warn her that there were still five or six weeks to go before he could come back.

  The following day, he was starting to fantasise about being reunited with French food … if the new cook could make a good ragout and a good sole au gratin …

  On 18 April, Alexandrine wrote: ‘Thank you dear Loulou,* for the beautiful violets that brought me your dear kisses, and I have waited by them thinking that our dear comrades are there on this little table next to you.’ This was also the day that Zola went back to the Queen’s Hotel. Presumably, he had stayed at the Crystal Palace Royal to spare Alexandrine’s feelings. Or was it to spare Jeanne’s? Or was it just to avoid being turned away by the hotel management at the Queen’s? No one would be allowed two wives, even if cohabiting on different occasions. Meanwhile the Sunday Mail and the Daily Telegraph were bombarding Vizetelly with requests for articles from Zola but he wouldn’t play ball. By the 20th his food fantasies were turning to poulet roti and pommes de terre frites. Jacques had to work harder and Denise only had one spelling mistake in her letter to him.

  On 27 April he had to handle the tricky matter of a request from the anarchists to publish Germinal in their newspaper for little or no fee. Zola thought not but would see if there was a way they could arrange things for when he got back to Paris. Meanwhile, in a letter to Jeanne, he was back to talking about the women on their bicycles who, amazingly, went out on them in the rain. He was dreaming of Verneuil … he had spent the last eight days seeing no one at all, not even a word to the staff at the hotel. But then Vizetelly came for a chat, before he lapsed back into silence again. Now, there was only one chapter left of Fécondité to write. ‘Our life will remain complicated but we will eventually be reunited and we won’t have the weight of the horrible Affair weighing on us …’

  On 30 April he had some domestic news for Jeanne:

  Yes, I’ve had to buy some shoes and socks, because they were in tatters. But best of all, I’ve bought some needles and some black and white thread because all my clothes were coming apart. So, I’ve started sewing, and that’s quite a spectacle, I can tell you. I’m not very neat but my buttons are sewn on really well.

  He noticed that Jeanne had hired a cook who was against the retrial of Dreyfus. He wondered if the Affair was landing in the washing-up water. Soon, before hiring a servant, would they have to ask their opinion on whether Dreyfus was innocent or guilty? He explained he was joking but it did bother him a bit and that they had to be very wary about who Jeanne brought into the house.

  On 4 May he told Jeanne that he made a fire every day to keep him company. ‘I feel less alone when there are flames going up the chimney.’ A few days later, his mind turned to ragout de mouton and sole au gratin again. He could see the pair of them having tea together once more like young lovers. Jeanne should tell Jacques that if he worked harder they would love him more; and that Denise wasn’t to be jealous of her mother, because she was as beautiful as her mother, with a beautiful dress, a beautiful hat and beautiful hair. ‘Tell her that she would be even more beautiful if she made fewer spelling mistakes.’ He had gone out that day to take some photos and took one of the hotel that they had stayed in. ‘I’m sewing without a thimble, and I’m sewing very well.’

  A short while later he apologised to her for being depressed when she was there; it was because he thought that there was going to be a bad outcome to the Dreyfus case. If she could see him now, they would be having a much nicer time. But no need for recriminations, they would get all that back when they went for their next holiday. ‘You’ll see me on 10 June, or earlier.’

  On 14 May he asked Jeanne to tell Jacques that he had taken a photo of where he saw ‘Papa’s artist’. The light was bright and it was just where the poor man was doing his drawings. He had other photos of the old poor people they had seen – he gave them a penny or two. He had many photos to show them. Taking photos kept him amused and they would see what a beautiful album of his days of exile he would give them.

  In his letter to Jeanne on 18 May he told her he was noticing the lilac and chestnut blossom, the greenness everywhere, the magnificent avenues. On 21 May he wrote to Denise saying, ‘I hope I’ll be back in three weeks’ time. We will go out for beautiful walks, we’ll go to the woods in a fiacre automobile [an electric landau], it will be a fête every day.’ Not so cheerfully, he told Jeanne that stuck in his hole, he thought he was losing his memory. On 25 May he could tell her that he had a date: he would leave England on 6 June. Finally he would be able to kiss them all.

  On 27 May Zola finished writing Fécondité and on the next day wrote to both Jeanne and Alexandrine with the news. Denise remembered him telling Jeanne: ‘I am counting on all honest women, all wives and all mothers being on my side,’ while he told Alexandrine, ‘I started this novel alone on 4 August 1898 and I have just finished it alone on 27 May 1899, 1,006 pages in my handwriting.’

  Finally with a great sense of relief, he wrote to Jeanne:

  When you get this letter, you won’t have to write to me any more. And how nice it is, isn’t it, to stop getting these cold letters, and to find ourselves together again? …

  Get out the teapot, order a cake from Mademoiselle Louise. This will be a day of celebration for all of us which we will enjoy to make up for the ones we missed because of us being apart.

  Ten days more, then it will be the big, beautiful day.

  On 31 May Alexandrine told Zola that she was delighted at how pleased he was that he had finished Fécondité. It wasn’t unalloyed pleasure, though:

  I think it’s sad for us that at the moment you wrote the word fin [end], we’re not sitting beside each other, with me reading your last page and you chatting loudly and excitedly about your new work, thanks to the relentless effort you put in.

  She also had some words of warning. Their misery might be coming to an end but in Paris there was nothing but bother:

  The frontier
s are under surveillance, people here will want to cheer you, our door is guarded again. You don’t have the right to be your own person any more; the public take you as their thing; your wishes, your desires will have to count for nothing in the face of this public, who don’t understand and don’t think that after your exile of eleven months, you must want above all to come back home in peace.

  On 1 June he met up with George Moore and he had time to write to Jeanne: he told her that he was amazed to write that they were going to be victorious. ‘I think, in the end, we will, all four of us, ride our bikes in the woods of Verneuil. We must order the beautiful bicycles.’

  And to Denise:

  If your dollies get indigestion when they’re having tea, you’ll have to take them for electric treatment with Doctor Delineau, or you could get electric treatment for yourself, in their place. Maman told me that you would really like that. See you soon, my good little Denise. Be very good, and you will see how we are going to have a feast together, all four of us, Maman, you two and me.

  On 2 June, in Paris, there was a conference at the office of Le Radical: Clemenceau, Jaurès and several other leading Dreyfusards put their heads together and decided that it was all clear for Zola to return.

  Zola wrote to Alexandrine:

  Ah my Loulou, my poor Loulou, it all seems like a dream. I can see the jostling crowd [‘bouscoulade’]. But we will be together and we will struggle on together, if needs be. A million kisses, dear wife, with all my heart which is beating really hard.

  On 3 June the Supreme Court of Appeal in Paris overturned the verdict of 1894 and ruled that Dreyfus should appear before another court martial. This meant that the now starving, sick, not-far-from-death Dreyfus would have to take the journey back from Devil’s Island and face trial again. Alexandrine sent a telegram: ‘Cheque delayed. Invoice received. All goes well.’ This was code for saying that the three chambers had jointly quashed the 1894 guilty verdict but that Dreyfus was to appear before another court martial. This wasn’t a total victory: Dreyfus hadn’t been found innocent. That’s why the supposed ‘cheque’ was only ‘delayed’ not ‘arrived’.

  There was also Zola’s own case to think about: he wrote to Labori, his lawyer: ‘I’m being threatened with arrest at the frontier but I’ll come back all the same.’

  On his last evening in England, Zola had dinner at the Queen’s Hotel with Vizetelly and the Fasquelles, then at 9 p.m. on 4 June, Zola left London through Victoria Station, accompanied by the Fasquelles.

  It was over.

  * This seems to be a nickname they called each other. It was also a nickname for the Pomeranian dog they owned, ‘M. Pinpin’. It can mean ‘darling’ or ‘rogue’.

  12

  ‘A frightful catastrophe’

  Zola arrived back in France at 5.38 a.m. on 5 June. As he didn’t reach home till the evening, he may well have gone first to Jeanne’s apartment at 3 rue du Havre. While he was in England, he had prepared an article which would explain his position. This was ‘Justice’ which appeared in L’Aurore, 5 June 1899. ‘All I’ve done is be a good citizen, devoting myself to being this, even so far as going into exile, a total disappearance. I agreed to be no longer active for the sake of the peace of the country, so as to not take part purposelessly in the arguments around this monstrous Affair.’ He added that he had only one wish: to resume his place again ‘in his national home’ – peacefully, so that no one could take up his time any more.

  Denise recollected this, but more important for her at the time: ‘The bicycles that he promised us in England, my brother and me, he immediately gave us as presents.’

  Zola also had to sort out his own case. On 9 June, he challenged the Versailles verdict that had found him guilty of libelling the military court. The Versailles sentence of 18 July 1898 was served upon him at his home in the rue de Bruxelles. On 31 August he was summoned to appear in Versailles on 23 November. On that day, however, his trial was postponed to some unspecified date.

  Meanwhile, back in London, between 7 and 29 June the Evening Standard ran Vizetelly’s memoir ‘Zola in London’, published later in a short book as With Zola in England: A Story of Exile.

  On 20 July Zola wrote to Vizetelly, enclosing some photos:

  You can’t imagine the bother I’m being assailed by. I have often missed the peace of the Queen’s Hotel. Even so, everything’s for the best, the happy dénouement is approaching, and I will get set up on Tuesday at Médan so I can rest …

  I read your articles on my stay in England in Le Matin. They are very good and sensibly stay within the limits that I asked you to stick to.

  This referred to Vizetelly keeping quiet about the Dreyfus Affair.

  In late July, in an interview with Philippe Dubois, Zola gave notice that he wasn’t going to put the Dreyfus Affair into one of his novels: ‘It would be base and ugly on my part to exploit the Dreyfus Affair.’ (That’s what he said. What he did was another matter.) Dubois asked him about the photos he was developing. Zola told him that they were photos of England, photos of pubs, houses and streets in London, as well as ‘poor ragged cripples, hideous, pitiful devils. One sees many like that over there, alas.’

  I took some 300 with a little ‘jumelle’, 6.5 x 9, which I attached to the handlebars of my bike when I was going out and about. This ‘jumelle’ gave me photos that were marvellously sharp and clear. I’m going to bring all the photos together. I will make an album of exile. This album will be full of documents and interesting memories. Sadly, during the trip, four of the photos, already developed, were broken. They were of the flower shop where I went every morning, during the two months that my wife was ill, for the flowers that I took to her.

  Dubois finished with: ‘Zola added, with the melancholy that one always notices in cases like this, with all photographers, “The photos that are broken were of course the best in the collection.” When I took my leave, Zola went back to his laboratory.’

  On 13 October, in Le Temps, Zola talked about Fécondité and his life in England. This was his chance to give France the picture of what he had been doing. He explained that all his research for the novel was finished just as the second trial at Versailles took place and he had to leave. ‘I took the Calais train,’ he said,

  with my nightshirt, a flannel, and a piece of paper with four English words on it from Clemenceau. On the train that was carrying me far from rumours of death and also, alas! far from my home, I repeated the words, forcing myself to remember them in order to guide me through my first steps in London.

  He said that he didn’t stop in that huge, humming city, seeking out instead solitude and silence. He wrote to his wife asking her to find his papers in a corner of his study.

  Zola clearly wanted everyone to know that it wasn’t his choice to flee to Britain. ‘I had accepted my sentence and I was prepared to serve my year of imprisonment.’ Only guilty people were frightened of prison; he had nothing to fear, no remorse. The action he had taken came from his conscience. ‘I would have been able to say to myself, “Honour is secure” and I would have been able to fill my cell with sweet thoughts like that.’ Instead, he had accepted the tactical arguments that his Dreyfusard friends had put to him. So he gave in to the interests of the cause that he had already sacrificed so much for. ‘I obeyed as a soldier would.’

  In spite of the urbane way in which British people behave, he said that he felt surrounded with sympathetic but annoying curiosity. As a result, he chose an inaccessible place to stay in the middle of green fields and shade. He took on British servants who didn’t know him and couldn’t speak a word of ‘our language’. Reading British newspapers made him familiar with a few expressions that he could use in order to make himself understood.

  The final paragraph of the article is an extraordinary secular prayer to the future of France and how he saw his role in it, interweaving the Dreyfus case, his utopian novel, and his own life and beliefs.

  While my enemies relentlessly try to ruin me, I have gi
ven my very best to my country, the wisest of advice. I induced her to touch her wounds so that she could salve them. And with Fécondité, which confirms the existence and greatness of my country, I have exalted beauty. The budding flower is pretty, the open flower is beautiful. The virgin is not as beautiful as the mother. A woman gives off a perfume, shows off her whole soul, takes on her complete beauty when she achieves her natural end. This was a useful truth to put forward, just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau became an ardent apostle for his views. I hope that my book will have the same good fortune – not for me, but for my country – as that which celebrated the ideas of the philosopher [Rousseau].

  The Dreyfus case still had a long way to go. (According to some, it’s still running!) On 9 June one of the key figures who had done so much to prove Dreyfus’s innocence, Colonel Picquart, was released from prison after 324 days in detention. Most important of all, though, this was the day that Dreyfus left Devil’s Island on board the cruiser Sfax. He arrived in France on 1 July and was taken to a military prison in Rennes.

  On 18 July, in an article in Le Matin, Esterhazy admitted that he wrote the bordereau but stated that he wrote it ‘under dictation’ from his superiors. On 7 August the climax of the whole campaign arrived: Dreyfus’s re-trial by court martial at Rennes. Zola kept out of the way, he didn’t testify. On 9 September the Rennes trial ended: Dreyfus was found guilty but with ‘extenuating circumstances’. After everything that had been revealed over the previous year and a half, to the Dreyfusards it was beyond belief. It was a disaster.