The Disappearance of Émile Zola Page 2

  Then, in a scene typical of a Zola novel, it related how M. Mouthiers, the ‘huissier’ (the official who served law papers from the court):

  … knocked first at the door of one pavilion and then at that of the other without obtaining an answer. There were lights in the windows and he could see in a kitchen two women and a man servant. He went to the door nearest to the kitchen and rang and rapped till he was tired.

  At last a woman came to a window and asked what he wanted.

  ‘Are you one of the household?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I am only a neighbour. Some other neighbours are with me. We had leave to come into the garden to eat cherries, and I, seeing the kitchen open, entered the house.’

  ‘Is M. Zola there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Madame Zola?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is there a servant?’

  ‘No, there’s nobody.’

  The huissier then said who he was, and why he came. He said he was sure the woman at the window was lying, and that he would write on the original of the notice: ‘Served a copy on a servant, who was looking from a window.’ When he thrust it under the door, however, the others joined her, and declared she told the truth.

  Mouthiers then went to the Mayor of Médan, informed him how things stood, and in the name of the law required him to send the notice next day by the rural policeman. He would be sure to know who were servants and who were not.

  If nothing else, this report shows us Zola’s situation: he was a fugitive, with spying journalists and officers of the state tracking him.

  By the 25th the Morning Post gave its readers a different story altogether:

  M. Zola found. – While Correspondents have been announcing the simultaneous appearance of M. Zola in Brussels, Geneva, Berlin, Rome and elsewhere, the novelist has been quietly hiding at Verneuil, a village in the environs of Paris. He is residing with friends whose garden is enclosed by a stone wall 6ft. high, over which occasional peeps of Zola have been obtained by enterprising reporters. I am told that M. Zola intends to leave Verneuil for London.

  However, on the 27th the same paper said: ‘It appears that at the last moment M. Émile Zola abandoned his intention of proceeding to London, and that he is still residing at Verneuil.’

  Meanwhile, on the 28th the Pall Mall Gazette sought to amuse its readers:

  A Swiss Church paper, the ‘Kirchenblatt’, has started a veritable press polemic about the [Zola] trial. Bâle the Protestant has been praying publicly in the churches for M. Zola … the ‘Indépendence Belge’ [a Belgian newspaper] adds that Belgian and Dutch preachers are praying too.

  Le Jour, one of the French papers, is reported as replying, ‘It is not of the smallest importance to France whether all the curés, the rabbis, and the Protestant pastors of Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland are praying for Dreyfus.’

  What’s more the Pall Mall Gazette reported, the Volkstheater in Zurich was advertising for a ‘dozen gentlemen, washed and dressed in long black coats, to represent the jury in the Zola trial. Salary one franc per night. Duties – to listen to the evidence and look wise.’

  Leaving aside the pantomime element that was creeping in, the stories about Zola’s whereabouts were all wrong. Whether that was because Zola’s followers were leaking false reports or that the journalists and editors invented stories to make up for what they didn’t know, is not clear.

  Ernest Vizetelly was one of Zola’s translators and wrote a memoir, With Zola in England. He says that on 25 July,

  … our own ‘Daily Chronicle’ announced M. Zola’s presence at a London hotel, and on the following day the ‘Morning Leader’ was in a position to state that the hotel in question was the Grosvenor. Both ‘Chronicle’ and ‘Leader’ were right; but as I had received pressing instructions to contradict all rumours of M. Zola’s arrival in London, I did so in this instance through the medium of the Press Association. I here frankly acknowledge that I thus deceived both the Press and the public. I acted in this way, however, for weighty reasons, which will hereafter appear.

  The tales that Vizetelly claimed he fed the press include those about Zola heading to Norway, Switzerland or Hamburg. The Norway story was embroidered, he says, to include Zola trying to meet Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who was in Norway at the time, but that the Kaiser had refused.

  What really happened on 18 and 19 July? We should start in Versailles.

  Before the court’s decision had been finalised, Zola and his lawyer, M. Labori, had an urgent discussion in an office in the court building. Labori put it to Zola that he should flee. Zola favoured prison. The issue was: which of these two courses of action would benefit Dreyfus the more? Then, if he didn’t flee, would Zola be able to cope with imprisonment? Either way, Labori was anxious they should leave the building before the court’s decision was served. The chief of police told them a coach was ready, but as they left they were spotted by the crowd. According to Zola, it took the cavalry to keep them back.

  The coach took the route through Saint-Cloud and the Bois de Boulogne. After some silence and the sharing of a bit of bread that Zola had remembered to bring in the morning, Labori urged Zola to leave the country. The coach dropped them off at the house of Zola’s publisher, Georges Charpentier, at 11 rue de Grenelle where participants in the discussion included Georges Clemenceau, Clemenceau’s brother Albert (a lawyer, who had defended the owner of L’Aurore), and Fernand Desmoulin, artist and close friend of Zola. Desmoulin went off to the Zola residence at 21 bis rue de Bruxelles to fetch Alexandrine, Zola’s wife. There was a heated discussion. The outcome was that it was thought best that Zola should flee, thereby avoiding having the sentence on him put into effect. Labori would demand a re-trial while Zola should go on the run to Britain. All this would keep the Dreyfus case in the public eye. However, clearly there were risks. If Zola were re-captured, he would bring a further charge on himself. In Britain, wouldn’t he run the risk of being extradited and brought back to France – all of which would distract from the Dreyfus case, diverting attention away from the revelations that the pro-Dreyfus camp had made public? The problem was that Zola was a very recognisable figure. Even in that pre-TV era, Zola’s appearance was extremely well known, his image having appeared in books, magazines, newspapers and on posters, whether to celebrate his achievements, describe scandals or to mock and caricature him for supporting Dreyfus. He was a celebrity.

  Alexandrine arrived, ‘very upset’ says Zola, bringing a night shirt and a few other things wrapped in a newspaper. With just these, she and Zola took a carriage to the Gare du Nord. Zola writes:

  I held her hand and squeezed it hard: we spoke only a few words to each other. Charpentier, who had followed in another carriage, bought a ticket to London for me, and he and my wife came with me to the train, where they stayed for fifteen minutes, waiting for the train to leave, shielding the window of the coach, which was the first one behind the engine. What a wrenching separation! My dear wife watched me leave, with her eyes full of tears and her hands clasped and trembling.

  At this point I should introduce someone else, someone who was not there to see him off: Jeanne Rozerot. Conventionally, she is called Zola’s mistress. It’s an expression that doesn’t do the work of describing Jeanne or her relationship with Zola or indeed with Madame Zola. Jeanne was the mother of Zola’s only two children and we can get a sense of how he thought of her from how he wrote to her. He opened many of his letters to her with ‘Chère femme’; the most accurate translation here is ‘Dear wife’, though of course she wasn’t (he began his letters to Alexandrine the same way). ‘Femme’ can also mean ‘woman’, but as his letters to Alexandrine show, in this context, in the modern era, it would usually be taken to have the legal meaning of ‘wife’. Somewhere and some time in the rush and confusion of leaving the court, driving to the Charpentiers’ and before Alexandrine joined him, Zola wrote a note to her, possibly slipping it to Desmoulin to take to Jeanne, on his way to fetch Alexandrine. This
kind of triangular dance was how Zola, Alexandrine and Jeanne had lived their lives for the previous few years. One question concerning the three of them at this precise moment was how they would manage this arrangement in the immediate future. It would require delicate negotiations. This is the letter Jeanne received:

  Dear wife, matters have taken such a turn that I am obliged to leave for England this evening. Don’t worry: just wait quietly for me to send news. As soon as I’ve been able to make some decisions, I’ll be in touch with you. I’m going to try to find a place where you and the children can come and join me. But there are things to be settled and that will take several days. Anyhow, I’ll keep you informed. I’ll write to you as soon as I am abroad. Don’t tell a soul where I’m going.

  My tenderest love to the three of you.

  We can see here that Jeanne and the children are not living a life separate from Zola. They haven’t been tidied away to another town. They are not living hidden from Zola’s companions. In fact, wherever Zola and Alexandrine live or go, Jeanne and the children, Jacques and Denise, are not far away, whether that’s in central Paris round the corner from the Zolas at 66 rue St-Lazare, at the house in Médan, or on holiday. In the meantime, it’s clear that Zola has every intention of carrying on the triangular arrangement while he’s in England. Quite how it would be manoeuvred into place was another matter. However or whenever that might be, Zola makes clear in this little note that he wants Jeanne to believe that he would like her and the children to come and stay with him.

  In short, the delicate situation of being a fugitive had just got more delicate. The train journey gave him time to think:

  All the way to Calais I was alone in the compartment. Since that morning, I had hardly had time to think. My chest was tight with anxiety, and my hands and face felt as if they were on fire. I opened the train window and pulled the shade on the lamp; in the darkness with a cool breeze coming in, I was finally able to calm down, to cool off, and to think a bit.

  And what thoughts! To think that, after a lifetime of work, I would be forced to leave Paris, the city which I’ve loved and celebrated in my writings, in such a way! I hadn’t been able to eat at Charpentier’s. The day had left such a bitter taste in my mouth that even a piece of bread would have choked me. Now that I was a bit calmer, I was ravenously hungry and, luckily, at Amiens I was able to buy a roll and a chicken leg.

  After that, all the way to Calais, I remained wrapped in my thoughts. I admit that they weren’t particularly happy: my heart was overflowing with sadness and anger.

  Part of Zola’s attitude to the Dreyfus Affair was informed by a sense of outrage and despair that the French ruling class could reject reason and truth. Leaving France, running to England on his own, filled Zola with bitterness: this was a punishment being meted out on him, and not on the true criminals of the piece. It is significant that he invokes Paris in this passage. He is berating the inanimate, saying in effect, ‘Paris, look what I’ve done for you! And yet this is how you treat me!’ Both at the time, and in retrospect, Zola did indeed do a lot for Paris. His huge cast of characters throngs through its streets, dwellings and shops. Some act out their tragedies beneath the city in its sewers. He lent Paris a texture and taste to hundreds of thousands of people, in France and around the world, to many who had never been there.

  In fact, Zola wasn’t brought up as a Parisian. He was a provincial from Aix-en-Provence, the son of an Italian engineer who designed the town’s water supply. Paris became his home when he was a late teenager and what with him being both Italian, as some said, and from the Midi (the South), enemies could portray him as an outsider and doubly so. But from that time till this point heading to England at the age of fifty-eight, Paris, with its bohemianism, its theatre, its painters and, above all, with its writers, was the milieu he belonged to, owned and adored. The consequence of his writing about it was that the world read about it in his books, serialised in newspapers, re-issued in cheap paperbacks, with many copies circulating in libraries or dramatised for the theatre. In this passage, we can hear him pointing out that this wasn’t a desiccated lawyer defending Dreyfus, nor someone with a partisan interest in making the case for his innocence, it’s me, Émile Zola, with nothing to gain, everything to lose by taking up this cause.

  In the meantime, Zola had more pressing and mundane things to do: he got on board the ferry.

  Finally, I found myself on the boat, leaving the dock. And that was that: I was no longer in France. I looked at my watch: it was half past one in the morning. The sky was clear, although there was no moon, and it was very dark. There couldn’t have been more than thirty passengers on the boat, all of them English. And I stayed on the deck, watching the lights of Calais wink out in the darkness. I confess that my eyes filled with tears and that I had never in my life experienced such deep unhappiness.

  Of course I didn’t expect to be leaving my homeland for ever – I knew that I would be back in a few months, that my leaving was only a tactical move. But nonetheless, what a terrible situation – to have striven only for truth and justice, to have dreamed only of preserving in the eyes of her neighbours the good name of a generous and free France – and to find myself forced to flee like this, with only a nightshirt wrapped in a newspaper!

  Too, certain vile newspapers had poisoned and misled France so completely that I could still hear people shouting at me, me, a man who had always worked for the glory of France and who had only wanted to be the defender who would show France’s true greatness among other nations. And to think that I had to leave like this, all alone, without a friend by my side, without anyone to whom I could talk about the horrible rancour which is choking me. I have already suffered a great deal in my life, but have never undergone a more terrible experience than this one.

  Even at this late stage in the Dreyfus Affair, with all its high-level corruption, Zola had not let go of the idea of ‘the glory of France’. There was for him a France (the Republic) that existed over and above the people who governed at a particular moment in time. And there is no avoiding a less glorious element to this rhetoric: a superiority. France had a ‘greatness’ that could and should be taught to other nations. Perhaps this was not just about Republican values but there was a hint of Napoleonic ones too. However, Zola had already discovered that a certain way to lose friends and win enemies was to take Dreyfus’s side. In fact, he had gone much further. Before being involved in the case, he had written a ground-breaking essay, ‘Pour les Juifs’ (‘For the Jews’ – or more strongly put by some, ‘On behalf of the Jews’) in which he had called for an end to anti-semitism. Then, as he joined those campaigning for Dreyfus’s release, in a series of articles and open letters (especially in one called ‘The syndicate’), he became increasingly forceful about what had grown into an explicitly anti-semitic movement, supported by popular newspapers and with political representatives.

  It’s worth remembering that what he was saying in these writings went way beyond homilies about being nice to Jews. He said that it was anti-semitism – and it alone – which had made the miscarriage of justice possible. He mocked the mind-set of the anti-Dreyfus camp: ‘A Jewish traitor betraying his country: that goes without saying … Well, he’s Jewish – isn’t that enough?’ What’s more, he said, the trial of Dreyfus meant that ‘It is anti-Semitism itself that is on trial.’ In his appeal to ‘Young People’ he invoked Republican values in this fight for justice – namely, equality and fraternity – and foresaw, in the century to come, something terrible in the mobs demonstrating against Dreyfus: ‘They will begin the century by massacring all the Jews, their fellow citizens because they are of a different race and a different faith.’ In his ‘Letter to France’, Zola went further, ‘Today it’s Jews who are being persecuted, tomorrow it will be the Protestants.’

  This kind of talk guaranteed that Zola was taking big risks with his reputation, his income and his life. He plunged himself into a storm of vituperation and danger. He had to resist deeply held
religious suspicions of the role of Jews in the death of Jesus, a conventionally held view that it was ‘the Jews’ who had been responsible for the financial disaster of the Panama Canal, and who were, through Captain Dreyfus, now responsible for treason and the betrayal of France. In these terms, Zola had sided with a sinister conspiracy that was strangling the country. In his own terms, he saw an ideology that was corrupting the founding principles of the Republic.

  Zola travelled on:

  The wind became very high, and I hadn’t brought an over coat. Nevertheless, I stayed on the deck, where the brisk, cool wind calmed me. The sea was hardly moving. During the short crossing, thin clouds covered the sky. The clouds lightened as the dawn broke. When I arrived in Dover, day was breaking, and the gas lamps in the small port paled as the skies brightened.

  I don’t know a word of English, and here I am in a foreign world, as if I were separated from mankind. I hate travelling. I am sedentary almost to the point of phobia, only happy in my own familiar surroundings. I don’t like being abroad. I feel horribly homesick, disoriented by all these new things which I don’t understand and which upset me. The first few hours of my stay in any country what soever outside France are especially trying for me: I experience a feeling of revolt, of distress at under standing nothing. It’s curious that when my enemies insult me, they call me the ‘foreigner’. Oh God! how foolish these people are and how little they understand what they’re saying!

  So here I am in Dover, where I can’t even ask for a glass of milk. I take refuge in a compartment of the train which will take me to Victoria Station. And I wait there. Half an hour, three-quarters of an hour passes, a horrible wait! I don’t know the reason for the delay. The dull day clears up, and, on the dock, the workers pass, dragging their feet. And not another sound – I feel as if I am alone in the train. An overwhelming feeling of being abandoned.