The Disappearance of Émile Zola Page 20

  In contrast, everything thrown at Zola was, according to Barlow, ‘illegal’ because it was all based on what had originally been an illegality; Zola spoke ‘the absolute truth’ against someone like one M. Tessonnière, a candidate for the ninth arrondissement of Paris, who in his election address thought he could disprove the statement ‘I don’t know if Dreyfus is guilty or not,’ with ‘All Jews are traitors.’ In other words, argues Barlow, Tessionnière was saying that Dreyfus was guilty because he was a Jew.

  Barlow also reminded his British readers that Zola’s opponents in the Libre Parole called him the ‘Italian pig’ and revelled in the moment at the end of Zola’s trial when ‘thousands of throats wild with fury’ shouted ‘Down with the traitors! Down with Zola! Death to the Jews!’ Barlow quoted Libre Parole saying:

  Zola’s face is the colour of buttered eggs. He, so full of swagger when he left the Court, has now suddenly hidden himself at the bottom of the carriage. He is crouching quite down, and nothing but his head is visible, emerging from between the knees of the two Clemenceaus … The truth is marching along, and Zola is in flight, although, there are in the neighbouring woods such lovely branches … natural gibbets.

  An incitement to lynching if ever there was one.

  In supporting Zola against the ‘argument’ that his father was a deserter, Barlow countered that Zola had inherited from his father the ‘capacity for ceaseless toil in the face of giant obstacles, and an invincible tenacity of purpose’, a reference to his father’s struggle to build a harbour in Marseilles (unsuccessful) and to build a canal in Aix (successful). Barlow also wanted to show that Zola did not flee justice in July 1898: ‘It was not Zola’s object not to be tried. It was his object to be tried, but to be tried fairly, and in the course of a fair and public trial to bring facts to light which would make the revision of the Dreyfus case a necessity.’ Barlow quipped, ‘Therefore … M. Zola … retired for a season to the North Pole.’

  In Steevens, Zola is very much in the shadow of the main players, though seen as virtuous more by dint of backing a victim of injustice than anything said directly about him.

  So, though Zola’s reputation in Britain was in some ways inextricable from the Dreyfus case, it’s clear that by the time of the demonstration against the judgment of Rennes, Zola’s stand was widely admired and celebrated.

  The Hyde Park demonstration took place on Sunday 17 September 1899. Two days later, Dreyfus was pardoned by the President of France, Émile Loubet. Though this was a momentous decision giving Dreyfus freedom, it was in a narrow legalistic sense meaningless: a military court had found him guilty, so it was only a military court that could find him innocent. To date, this has never happened, neither in Dreyfus’s own life or posthumously.

  On 22 September Zola published another article in L’Aurore, in the form of a highly emotional and rhetorical letter to Madame Alfred Dreyfus. For him the pardon wasn’t enough. He wanted the judgment overturned in the Supreme Court of Appeal:

  The innocent, having been condemned twice, did more for the fraternity of peoples, for the idea of solidarity and justice, than a hundred years of philosophical discussions, and humanitarian theories … It is us, the poets, who have nailed the guilty parties to the pillory. Those whom we condemn will be scorned and booed by generations to come. The names of criminals, once we have heaped infamy upon them, will be no more than vile, human wrecks [‘épaves immondes’] for years to come.

  Fifteen months later, on 22 December 1900, another double-edged decision was made: the National Assembly passed an Amnesty Law that officially pardoned everyone who had been part of the Dreyfus case.

  Denise observed:

  When, in May 1900, the proposal concerning an amnesty law was put before the Senate, Zola made his opposition known against this measure, which would absolve the innocent and the guilty, the criminal and the just, without establishing any distinction between the two. He said, ‘The law to remove the case from the courts [‘dessaisissement’] has been a legal crime, the amnesty law will be a piece of civic treachery.’ Eventually, seven months later, on 22 December 1900, Zola wrote a last article, addressed to Émile Loubet, President of the Republic: ‘That’s more than eighteen months that I have been waiting for justice, having been given notice every three months, and knocked back every three months to the next session.’ Labori said of the amnesty law that it was a ‘law of weakness and powerlessness’; Zola couldn’t accept it without rebelling against it; he would have wanted the case to be heard again, as someone who ‘had accused others on the facts, which a Supreme Court enquiry had shown to be absolutely true’.

  The Dreyfus Affair was over but not over.

  Denise wrote: ‘From that time on, Émile Zola only wanted to live away from all this, having made up his mind to safeguard his peaceful working life as an intellectual.’

  On the domestic front, while all this was going on, between 7 October and 2 December 1899, Alexandrine stayed in Italy. In remembering this time, Denise’s memoir becomes emotional:

  My father, my dear father! The image of the garden in Verneuil, the big white house, the apartment in Paris, rises up before me, along with that of my parents! There at Verneuil, what beautiful outings I had next to them, on our bicycles through the woods in the summer of 1899. The bicycles that he promised my brother and me in England, he didn’t wait a moment to give those presents to us … My father took photographs with the passion he gave to everything. They remain as living testimony of our intimacy. Ah! the happiness of those years, between my father and my mother, in the tenderness of their relationship, so trusting and so faithful!

  My brother loved science and with great pleasure Zola watched his son’s interest in this grow; he found books on botany for him. Chantôme, our gardener, who loved his job, was almost a scientist; Jacques spent many hours asking him questions about the plants. My father did botany with us, and they ended up training me. We also knew an old sand quarry where fossils could be found. Zola talked endlessly about work, he never moaned about us, but he wanted to save us from laziness; he was very involved with our education, oversaw our holiday homework so that we didn’t neglect it.

  I was a very positive little girl, who wanted to get to the bottom of mysteries [‘fond des mystères’*]. Yes, I was very pious, the poetry of legends attracted me no end …

  My father enjoyed taking me through my learning of the catechism …

  And also, throughout this time, Zola was writing novels.

  On 24 October, in ‘A Visit to M. Émile Zola at Home’ in Le XIXe Siècle, he talked about his time in England, writing Fécondité and preparing to write Travail. He was looking forward to sketching out the ideal socialist city. The following novel, Vérité, would be based on science. ‘I never stop believing in science,’ Zola told the journalist. ‘Science gives us the morality and the aesthetics of the future society.’ While the Catholic doctrine said that work should be about punishment and suffering, he would show that work was a good thing, with a sacred function. It was only through work that we felt good and we found happiness. That was one of his most dearly felt beliefs, he said.

  Then, in his last book, Justice, he would throw himself into a total utopia. ‘It’ll be a dream, a lyrical apotheosis of humanity on the march towards beauty and goodness. All in all, a great poem.’

  What after that? the journalist asked. Perhaps he would go to live on the Balearic Islands. There he would be far from his struggles, his defeats and his victories. He would spend his last years contemplating nature with great peace of mind.

  In her memoir of her father, Denise described Zola writing Travail:

  Hardly had he returned from exile, when he got down to bringing together the materials he needed for Travail in June 1899. He had accumulated more notes than ever, lingering for a long time over works which dealt with the social question or with industrial technique, anarchism, metallurgy, large furnaces and electricity. He was drawn to the works of Charles Fourier and his followers; he
dreamt of creating a city in the image of the socialist phalanstery.

  Having started on the book, Zola wanted to spend some time at the house of M. Ménard-Dorian, and at the factories of Unieux, in the Loire. He had thought of a glassworks for the setting of his novel, but he chose a steelworks instead. And that explained his attraction to the Gallery of Machines in the Champ de Mars at the Exhibition of 1900, Denise wrote:

  We spent hours there. My father watched, listened, clearly fascinated; as for myself, I admit that this mass of fire, of wheels, turning in an indescribable racket wasn’t at all enjoyable for me, while Jacques followed our father every step of the way, showering him with questions.

  Denise noted that Zola’s theory that work could be made attractive excited a number of young intellectuals. They jumped on the idea that science could be linked to co-operative action, a marriage of science and communism that seemed revolutionary. A sense of what he was thinking about in terms of literary intention and theory emerges in a letter. On 1 December 1900 he wrote to Maurice Le Blond, saying that novelists can’t lock themselves up in an ivory tower, they can’t isolate themselves in a pure dream world, and remain indifferent to the dramas of everyday life.

  Everyone must take action, everyone understands that it’s a social crime not to act in times as grave as these, when evil forces of the past battle against the energies of tomorrow. It’s necessary to decide if humanity is not going to take one step backwards, not going to fall once again into error, into slavery, perhaps for another century.

  Zola saw in Le Blond’s work that he and his colleagues were giving affirmation to ‘the necessity of life, of human truth and social usefulness’.

  In an interview with Amédée Boyer he said that he thought that the literature of the twentieth century would be ‘social’. The great movement for democracy that he had contributed to would influence literary taste, tendencies and the feelings of writers. More and more, books would paint an exact picture of the habits and aspirations of the people. Workers with their unions and committees would enjoy novels as much as the theatre. He thought that literature would tend more and more in the future towards being a great philosophical and social inquiry. ‘In politics and literature, we can see a great movement amongst young people that gives me hope that the powers of reaction won’t win in any long-lasting way.’

  Far from not writing about Dreyfus, as Zola had promised, in actual fact the third novel in the Quatre Évangiles series, Vérité (Truth) was very much a reflection on the Dreyfus case. It tells the story of a Jew who is wrongly accused and unjustly found guilty of a crime. He is taken away from his family and sent to a prison camp for many years while his supporters fight for justice for him! After their campaigning, he is finally recalled for a re-trial where his supporters are able to produce new facts proving that the original verdict was wrong. The novel also follows the shape of the Dreyfus case in that it tells of the accused man being freed but then found guilty again in a new trial (as happened to Dreyfus at Rennes). He is finally pardoned. When Vizetelly put it in front of English-speaking readers he made it quite clear – in great detail, actually! – that Vérité was a reworking of the Dreyfus case. I suspect that by doing so, he thought it would help make the book more popular.

  As always with Zola, even as he was finishing off Truth, he started to make plans for the fourth Évangile, Justice. The hero was going to be a soldier who was a pacifist, convinced of the need for world disarmament. Peace and happiness for all would come from the setting-up of a universal republic, which would defeat militarism and the nationalisms of separate countries. He envisaged France at the head of this project ‘but for science, not armaments’, he scribbled on one of his papers. One bête-noire of the book would have been Rudyard Kipling, whom he described in his notes as religious, egotistical, militaristic, colonialist and monarchist, with Kipling seen as an embodiment of Britishness at the time. The anti-colonialist stance that Zola seems to have been adopting here was in direct contrast to the pro-colonialist viewpoint he celebrated at the end of Fécondité where the fruitful Mathieu Froment fertilises and civilises a ‘savage’ Africa.

  It could be said that one of the contradictions that Zola struggled with throughout the period of the Dreyfus case, his exile and the last months of his life was that the France he wanted (republican, humanist, secular, democratic and evolving towards socialism) was not the France he had written about in ‘J’Accuse’, faced in his own trials, or fulminated against in his most miserable moments in exile. So when, in his literary mind, he placed France at the head of a movement to humanise the world, this was a France that he knew didn’t exist yet. What’s more, by identifying imperialism as an evil that other powers were guilty of, he had either to efface the imperialism of France itself or claim that whatever France did, could do or should do outside of its own borders was as a humane, civilising force.

  Returning to personal affairs: between 1901 and 1902, Denise says that Zola went out more often with them. Every autumn, Alexandrine went for the ‘cure’ in Salsomaggiore in Italy so Denise and her brother looked forward to October when Zola would be with them more than usual. Zola wanted them to get to know Paris. He took them to the theatre. Sometimes he took them out to a top restaurant and once, after dining out in the one on the Eiffel Tower (very ‘top’), they were there when the lights came on and they watched illuminated fountains of the ‘Château d’Eau’. They went to hear Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon – Zola thought she wouldn’t be acting for much longer; they sat in the box at the Opéra Comique. But all this peace and pleasure came to an end on 29 September 1902.

  At this point, Denise’s account makes painful reading. In September, she says, he always had nightmares. He didn’t like going back to the city from Médan. On 22 September he went out on the Seine in his new boat, L’Enfant-roi. They had all been out on their bikes and waited from him by the bridge at Triel. Then they all went out on the boat till it reached the islands at Médan.

  I thought it was easy to jump on to the bank and tie the chain to a tree, but my foot slipped and I sank into the soft mud. I called out for help from my father. He quickly came and helped me and didn’t have too much trouble pulling me out of the water with all his strength. However, my mother hadn’t realised the danger as I was running and laughing about it. The outing was spoiled thanks to me, as I had to stay in the sun in order to get dry. This was one of our last outings with my father.

  On 27 September, he came to give us a hug at Verneuil and we all had to go back the following day to Paris … We stood at the door watching him going into the distance, turning his head towards us for a last time, before disappearing round the corner of the road. We wouldn’t see him again till we saw him on his deathbed a few days later.

  It was, says Denise, a ‘frightful catastrophe’ for Jeanne and her two children.

  What happened was that Zola and Alexandrine made a fire in their bedroom. They noticed that the coal briquettes (‘boulets’) weren’t ‘taking’, the ‘valet’ came and opened the flue. Later he came back again, saw that the fire was going well and closed the flue. In the night, Alexandrine got up to go to the toilet. No doubt she saved her life by breathing in some fresh air there. Zola was feeling ill but wouldn’t call a servant at this time of night because it would have disturbed the servant’s sleep. According to Denise, he wanted to get up, open the window to get rid of the awful sickness he had; Alexandrine had passed out on the bed and was unable to fetch help when he fell onto the carpet.

  Oh! my mother’s cry when she learned what had happened but imagined that someone had killed Zola! Her gesture, her arms outstretched, closing around us, her sorrow and ours! I don’t know how we lived in that week …

  Perhaps Jeanne’s first thoughts were nearer to the mark than Denise thought. Zola died of carbon monoxide poisoning. On 14 October, two architects dismantled the flue but didn’t find enough to suggest that it was blocked. However, in 1953, the newspaper Libération received a letter from one M.
Hacquin, claiming that he knew that Zola had been murdered. A friend of his was a stove-fitter and an anti-Dreyfusard. In 1927, this friend had made a confession to him:

  I’ll tell you how Zola died … Zola was deliberately suffocated. I and my men blocked his chimney while doing the repairs on the roof next door. There was a lot of coming and going and we took advantage of the hubbub to locate Zola’s chimney and stop it. We unstopped it the next day, very early. No one noticed us.

  It seems possible, if not probable, that Zola paid for his courage with his life, just as Jeanne suspected.

  On 5 October at Zola’s funeral at Montmartre cemetery, Anatole France said: ‘Let us envy him. His destiny and his heart reserved for him the most superb of fates: he was a moment in the conscience of mankind’.

  At the point when they closed the coffin, someone asked Alexandrine if they ought to put in pictures of his children. ‘And one of their mother,’ she replied.

  Less than two months after Zola’s death, she invited the children to come over for a meal. Denise who used to call her ‘Bonne Amie’, replied ‘Chère Amie’ (‘Dear Friend’), they would be a little late, on account of Jacques being out learning his catechism. Letters passed between Jeanne and Alexandrine for the rest of Jeanne’s life – she died before Alexandrine. The letters talked of Dreyfus and, for three years, Jacques’s serious illness, osseous tuberculosis.

  On the financial side, Alexandrine made sure that Jeanne and the children received 6,000 francs every three months. Given the decline in popularity of Zola’s novels post-‘J’Accuse’, added to the fact that he wasn’t alive to write any more, this was some sacrifice on Alexandrine’s part. She paid for Denise’s private education with Madame Dieterlen. None of this was legally required of her. In the eyes of society at the time, a woman paying for the upkeep of her late husband’s mistress and her children was, says Bloch-Dano ‘a little unconventional’. After the formal session which discussed the children’s livelihoods, Zola’s musical collaborator Alfred Bruneau noticed the two women going off down the street side by side.