The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  In letters, Jeanne talked of ‘our’ two little darlings, ‘our’ grave (meaning Zola’s) and when she placed a bouquet on the grave, ‘I united the two of you in my thoughts’. Alexandrine accordingly talked of ‘our’ two dear treasures, and ‘my hand is tied to yours, affectionately sharing the worries you feel …’ Zola was ‘our great and adored friend’.

  On 12 July 1906, with all Chambers of the Supreme Court of Appeal sitting jointly, the court revoked the verdict reached by the court martial in Rennes and declared that in reaching the verdict of guilty against Alfred Dreyfus, the court martial was ‘in the wrong’. Denise writes:

  The rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus did not take place until … 12 July 1906, so Zola did not experience the great happiness of being able to assist in writing an epilogue to the Affair, which would have been, at one and the same time, his revenge and his triumph.

  On 13 July 1906 the Chamber of Deputies passed a law reinstating both Dreyfus and Picquart in the army, Dreyfus with the rank of major and Picquart with that of brigadier general. On the same day, the Chamber passed a bill asking that Zola’s ashes be transferred to the Panthéon.

  Major Esterhazy (who wrote the bordereau used to incriminate Dreyfus) benefited from the Amnesty Law. For safety’s sake, though, he moved permanently to England, living with a woman in London, where they were known as Mr and Mrs Fitzgerald. In 1909 they moved to Harpenden, Hertfordshire, successfully posing as Count and Countess de Voilement, while he wrote the occasional anti-semitic article for journals back in France, until his death in 1923 aged seventy-four.

  In November 1906 Alexandrine began the legal process of giving the children the surname ‘Émile-Zola’, all or part of which his descendants have borne ever since. It was a remarkable gesture.

  On 3 June 1908 Zola’s remains were exhumed from the cemetery in Montmartre, with Alexandrine, Denise, Jacques, Bruneau and Desmoulin present amongst others. A huge crowd greeted the cortège on its way to the Panthéon; the atmosphere was noisy and violent, with both sides shouting at each other; 5,000 anti-Dreyfusards tried to block the way. Alexandrine walked towards the Panthéon, followed by Jeanne, Denise and Jacques, then Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus.

  At the ceremony, on the following day, the ‘Marseillaise’ was played followed by the prelude to ‘Messidor’ and Beethoven’s ‘Marche funèbre’ while Alexandrine, Jeanne, Denise and Jacques and a number of Zola’s closest friends grouped themselves around the tomb. At that point two shots rang out; chaos followed as Mathieu Dreyfus wrestled with a journalist, Louis Grégori, who had fired the shots, wounding Dreyfus in the arm. Later, when Zola’s casket was placed next to that of Victor Hugo in the crypt, Alexandrine, Jeanne, Denise and Jacques sat together on their own with the tombs.

  In October 1908 Alexandrine Émile-Zola, as she had become, was present at Denise’s marriage to Maurice Le Blond. Jeanne died in 1914 at the age of forty-seven from an operation that went wrong. Alexandrine lived till 1925. Among the last people to see her alive were Françoise and Jean-Claude Le Blond, Émile and Jeanne’s grand-children.

  * This has religious connotations as the phrase appears in particular in Christian commentaries.

  Postscript

  Zola’s exile, imposed on him by friends, was not, in the overall run of things, a calamity, nor was it anything like the near-death ordeal experienced by Dreyfus. Yet Zola took it extremely badly, suffering what seems from a modern perspective to be two nervous breakdowns. Balancing the three spheres of his life, political, literary and personal, sometimes overcame him.

  In the midst of this, there were delights that he had never experienced before and would never experience again. The summer of 1898 lived on as an idyll, we know, for Zola and Denise and probably for Jeanne and Jacques too. No matter what we might think of the Quatre Évangiles today, writing Fécondité gave him an immense sense of pleasure and achievement. Difficult and stressful though it was, the three adults’ domestic arrangement by the end of the period reached a degree of tranquillity.

  We shall never know what Zola would have written or done had he stayed alive for another ten or twenty years. He seemed intent on withdrawing from the political sphere. His writing had taken a utopian turn: it might have carried on, or it might have turned back to its mix of naturalism, social realism and symbolism. What would he have made of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914?

  What we do know is that, at a crucial moment in 1897, he made a brave, unpopular, self-sacrificing decision to support a wrongly convicted man. This decision drew on Zola’s awareness of injustice and his sense of the need for truth in governing our affairs. Finding himself in conflict with Left and Right over the matter of anti-semitism, he established a line of argument from outside Judaism, outside the Jewish communities, as to why prejudice, discrimination and persecution were wrong. I don’t think that the importance of this can be overestimated. When you trace the statements of French and British socialists leading up to and through the Dreyfus case, it is only when Zola had convinced Jaurès and Jaurès had convinced the French socialists and the French socialists had convinced the British ones that anti-antisemitism became a point of principle.

  No matter how egotistical or irritating Zola may appear to us now, as he moans about English boiled potatoes or, we might say, leads what is in effect a bigamous existence, his stand and the sacrifices he made make him a hero in my eyes.

  Not that this moment marks a point in which these matters were resolved. Forty years later, events in wartime France were a tragic re-run of the battles that Zola took part in, when the anti-Dreyfus camp and its inheritors found that they had four years or so to show what they could do if they had some real power. The meticulous lists of foreign-born Jews that were handed to Nazi administrators were compiled by the public servants of the Vichy regime. On a personal note, my father’s uncles were added to these lists and with some 76,000 others were seized, put on trains and deported to Auschwitz, where they died. One of them, Oscar ‘Jeschie’ Rosen, was on the same ‘convoy’, Convoi 62, as Dreyfus’s granddaughter Madeleine Dreyfus Lévy. Zola’s and Jaurès’s words and actions speak to events that have occurred since the 1890s.

  In 2014, my wife, Emma-Louise Williams, made a programme for BBC Radio 3 called ‘Zola in Norwood’, which I presented. We visited Zola’s house in Médan, which is now a museum, the Maison Zola. We had an appointment to talk to Madame Martine Le Blond-Zola, the great-granddaughter of Émile Zola. She is the vice-chair of the Association for the Maison Zola–Musée Dreyfus and is responsible for the everyday running of the house, as well as overseeing the building work while the house is being restored. We didn’t know that a Dreyfus Museum was being included in the restoration plans, and Madame Le Blond-Zola explained that it will not only be dedicated to the Dreyfus Affair but will also be a place for fighting discrimination: against racism, anti-semitism, homophobia – against all forms of discrimination – and the Dreyfus Affair will be an illustration of that.

  We sat in the garden with our two children who were then about the same age as Zola’s children in the time frame of this book – not that Zola ever brought them to the house at Médan. You can see the Seine from the house, but between the two runs the railway to Paris. The suburban grandeur of the house and garden was and still is bisected by modernity. In Zola’s day, the sight and sound of steam trains chuffing through his garden would have mingled with the lawns and trees. Verneuil, where Jeanne and the children lived when Zola and Alexandrine were in Médan, is nearby but that’s in private hands.

  We sat on a bench and talked. Madame Le Blond-Zola didn’t ever meet her grandmother, Denise, as Denise died before Madame Le Blond-Zola was born. She told us how Denise was remembered through family oral tradition, especially from Madame’s father who talked a great deal about Denise, his mother. Denise is also known in the family and beyond for her children’s books. In Les Années Heureuses (‘The Happy Years’) she wrote what is in effect a disguised memoir of her childhood. One passage talks o
f ‘a good and kind father, older than his wife by some few years, big and strong, greying, very affable, who was adored by his children’.

  We see him standing on the steps of a terrace overlooking the garden, listening to the children playing. He creeps up on them, to surprise them.

  ‘That’s three times I’ve been calling for you. What game were you playing that you were so absorbed in? Ah yes, Mummy told me. Come on, come in and have something to eat.’

  He took each of them by the hand and laughing and chatting, all three of them went into the dining-room.

  Madame Le Blond-Zola talked around the relationships between Alexandrine, Jeanne and the children:

  Denise very much respected Madame Zola [Alexandrine] and must have known that Madame Zola had lost a little girl when she was 19. And she was very respectful towards her. Though there were the outings with Madame Zola to the Tuileries gardens on Thursdays, Denise only really got to know Madame Zola after Zola’s death. Eventually, the two had a great deal of affection for each other. Madame Zola found in Denise the little girl she had lost and who could have been like Denise. At the same time, Denise was fond of her, thinking that she reminded Madame Zola of her own little girl she had lost.

  We talked about Zola’s ‘engagement’ in the Dreyfus case, and Madame pointed out that at the time, there were very few ‘intellectuels engagés’ (politically committed intellectuals).

  So Zola was an example of courage, citizenship and bravery. That’s the reputation he has now, but in his own lifetime, he was hated and people threatened him. People wrote him insulting letters and he was called a ‘métèque’ [a racist term for immigrants from the Mediterranean]. He was badly treated in his lifetime but now he’s been rehabilitated and that’s very impressive, very moving and it feels very good to say so. He is an example of someone who sought justice and truth through a fight against intolerance.

  On another level altogether, we talked about Zola’s photographs, and Madame said that her father told her that Denise and Jacques would complain about the amount of time their father took making them pose for photos.

  That’s why we hardly ever see them smiling in the pictures. Back then, you weren’t supposed to smile, you had to be very serious, otherwise the photo might end up being blurry, though there’s one where Zola put Denise on his bicycle and she was afraid of falling off. She looks very tense, very stressed.

  Personally, Madame said, she finds them a bit sad:

  The time all four of them were in England was a precious moment for them. Zola was suffering but it was a solace for him and it was the only time when all four of them lived together as a family, night and day. If you think about it, they had about six weeks in all living together out of a lifetime. It’s not a lot.

  I said that it was as a result of an extraordinary act of generosity on Alexandrine’s part. Madame thought so too:

  all the more so since she had said to Jeanne, you go and see Zola first. She gave priority to Jeanne. Perhaps it was partly due to the fact that it was the children’s holiday, though. If Zola had gone into exile in the autumn, perhaps Madame Zola might have joined him first.

  I asked her how she felt about Jeanne, her great-grandmother.

  She said she led a life almost as a recluse, rather isolated, under the rule of Madame Zola, who was a very authoritarian figure:

  Let’s just say that she wasn’t very happy. She was a very gentle woman, doubtless very authoritarian in her own way and we can see that by the way she held herself [‘sa stature’]. But she was unhappy because she was under Madame Zola’s rule [‘soumise à Madame Zola’] We shouldn’t forget that when Madame Zola received the anonymous letter claiming that Zola had a second family, Madame Zola turned up at Jeanne’s house, pushed open the door and broke everything.

  Jeanne was very afraid of Alexandrine, very afraid indeed. And you can understand why. So my greatgrandmother was unhappy at being ruled in this way.

  I said that it was very hard to ‘find’ Jeanne Rozerot, as her letters don’t survive.

  Madame said that Jeanne was ‘in her’:

  I feel her. I know her life, and I can imagine it at an intimate level, viscerally, how she could have been. And I think she was a woman who wasn’t happy. That’s what I’m saying to you. I really feel how she could have been.

  Madame confirmed that they didn’t have the letters from Jeanne. ‘Madame Zola must have destroyed them. She must have sent letters to London but they’ve disappeared. She kept the letters sent in the other direction, but perhaps Madame Zola ripped up Jeanne’s letters.’ Then we came to ‘J’Accuse’.

  Madame said that she was proud of Zola, but was also someone who admired him for this act of courage, and that she was his descendant:

  He was prepared to sacrifice all the comfort that he had enjoyed up till then. That kind of commitment is magnificent. That’s why the whole world admires him and he has such a great reputation. It was an exceptional event looked at from that time, no other person would have dared to do it.

  I asked her how she thought intellectuals and thinkers had inherited Zola’s ideas and what he did.

  ‘J’Accuse’ became a kind of leitmotif for intellectuals. On the other hand there were those who were against. When he died it was difficult – and frightening. In his declaration to the jury, Zola said, ‘One day, France will be grateful to me.’ Well, he was moved to the Panthéon in 1908. But he did what he did to save the Republic, to save France and to get an innocent man back from the penal colony. He couldn’t understand why he was condemned to a year in prison and a fine of 3,000 francs … and he had to escape, something he didn’t want to do. He wanted to go to prison but his lawyer and Clemenceau told him no, you have to leave …

  Indeed. He had to leave.

  Appendix I

  Angeline*

  Nearly two years ago I was spinning on my bicycle over a deserted road towards Orgeval, above Poissy, when the sudden sight of a wayside house caused me such surprise that I sprang from my machine to take a better look at it. It was a brick-built house, with no marked characteristics, and it stood under the grey November sky, amid the cold wind which was sweeping away the dead leaves, in the centre of spacious grounds planted with old trees. That which rendered it remarkable, which lent it an aspect of fierce, wild, savage strangeness of a nature to oppress the heart, was the frightful abandonment into which it had fallen. And as part of the iron gate was torn away, and a huge notice-board, with lettering half-effaced by the rain, announced that the place was for sale, I entered the garden, yielding to curiosity mingled with uneasiness and anguish.

  The house must have been unoccupied for thirty or perhaps forty years. The bricks of the cornices and facings had been disjointed by past winters, and were overgrown with moss and lichen. Cracks, suggestive of precocious wrinkles, scarred the frontage of the building, which looked strong, though no care whatever was now taken of it. The steps below, split by frost, and shut off by nettles and brambles, formed, as it were, a threshold of desolation and death. But the frightful mournfulness of the place came more particularly from its bare, curtainless, glaucous windows, whose panes had been broken by stone-throwing urchins, and which, one and all, revealed the desolate emptiness of the rooms, like dim eyes that had remained wide open in some soulless corpse. Then, too, the spacious garden all around was a scene of devastation; the old flower-beds could scarce be discerned beneath the growth of rank weeds; the paths had disappeared, devoured by hungry plants; the shrubberies had grown to virgin forests; there was all the wild vegetation of some abandoned cemetery in the damp gloom beneath the huge and ancient trees, whose last leaves were that day being swept off by the autumn wind, which ever shrieked its doleful plaint.

  Long did I linger there amidst that despairing wail of Nature, for though my heart was oppressed by covert fear, by growing anguish, I was detained by a feeling of ardent pity, a longing to know and to sympathise with all the woe and grief that I felt around me. And when at last I had lef
t the spot and perceived across the road, at a point where the latter forked, a kind of tavern, a hovel where drink was sold, I entered it, fully resolved to question the folks of the neighbourhood.

  But I only found there an old woman who sighed and whimpered as she served me a glass of beer. She complained of living on that out-of-the-way road, along which not even a couple of cyclists passed each day. And she talked on interminably, telling me her story, relating that she was called Mother Toussaint, that she and her man had come from Vernon to take that tavern, that things had turned out fairly well at first, but that all had been going from bad to worse since she had become a widow. When, after her rush of words, I began to question her respecting the neighbouring house, she suddenly became circumspect, and glanced at me suspiciously as if she thought that I wished to tear some dread secret from her.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said she, ‘La Sauvagiere, the haunted house, as people say hereabouts … For my part, I know nothing, monsieur, it doesn’t date from my time. I shall have only been here thirty years come next Easter, and those things go back to well-nigh forty years now. When we came here the house was already much as you see it. The summers pass, the winters pass, and nothing stirs unless it be the stones that fall.’

  ‘But why,’ I asked – ‘why is the place not sold, since it is for sale?’