The Disappearance of Émile Zola Page 4

  When Vizetelly read in two of the London papers a day or so later that Zola was staying at the Grosvenor, he was in no doubt that the source of the story was this man. He also figured out how the tale that Zola had been joined by Madame Zola got into the press later: he had arranged for Mrs Vizetelly to pick up mail addressed to ‘M. Pascal’, Zola’s pseudonym, from the Grosvenor reception.

  In the meantime, the Zola party decided that they needed to leave and leave quickly. It was even too dangerous to kill time at the hotel until Wareham reached his home in Wimbledon. They gathered themselves together. Desmoulin had only one small case; Zola had his few belongings with him, including now a small bottle of ink which he refused to part with. Most of these bits and pieces were stuffed into his pockets or in a newspaper parcel, tied up with string. The staff at the hotel smiled on the tattiness of it all, perhaps knowing much more than they let on. Zola, with his gold pince-nez, gold watch-chain, Légion d’Honneur and diamond ring on his little finger, looked remarkably respectable for someone carrying such unrespectable luggage.

  ‘Where to?’ the hotel porter asked.

  ‘Charing Cross Station,’ Vizetelly replied.

  Once they were beyond Buckingham Palace Road, Vizetelly tapped the cab roof with his walking stick. ‘Did I tell you Charing Cross just now, driver? Ah! Well, I made a mistake. I meant Waterloo.’ Vizetelly for one, was still enjoying the novelistic quality of all this.

  At Waterloo, bearing in mind that Wareham would not be at home till half past six, the three men sauntered towards the New Cut and Zola was quick to note the difference between the stylish shops and roads around Buckingham Palace Road and the dingy buildings here. Vizetelly suggested strolling off to Waterloo Bridge. They stood in the middle of the bridge looking down at the Thames reflecting the summer sky. Zola gazed at the scene. He didn’t like Hungerford Bridge, thought it hideous and unworthy of the city. Paris wouldn’t allow such a construction to be built. Yes, it was necessary to build a bridge to take the railway across, but there was no reason for it to be so ugly. ‘It seems evident,’ Zola added, ‘you English are very much in the habit of sacrificing beauty for utility, forgetting that with a little artistic sense, it’s easy to combine the two.’

  They looked the other way, down-stream, where the Victoria Embankment stretches past Temple and Blackfriars. Somerset House, with its colonnades, showed itself rather grandly while beyond that stood the grey dome of St Paul’s. Zola found this much more pleasing. On the bridge was a curved viewing-point with a seat where a pitiful-looking vagrant had spread himself. Zola wasn’t bothered and sat down, drawing Vizetelly and Desmoulin to join him.

  Desmoulin was beginning to enjoy the element of ‘nostalgie de la boue’ (‘yearning for degradation’, or perhaps ‘slumming it’) that was going on here. ‘We are homeless wanderers, stranded on the bridges of London,’ he said.

  Zola tried to locate the Savoy where he had stayed with such acclaim in 1893. Vizetelly pointed it out to him. Zola was astonished. It seemed so small when before it had seemed so big. And what was the huge building next to it? The Hotel Cecil. More evidence for Zola that the English had got it wrong, pretension and giantism dwarfing and spoiling everything else. ‘You had such a site here,’ he said, ‘along the river, and allowed it to be used for hotels and clubs … There was room for a Louvre here, and you need one badly. Your National Gallery, which I well remember from ’93 is a most wretched affair architecturally.’

  Now Zola wanted to find ‘his lion’. In ’93 while staying at the Savoy, he had had what was almost a vision, looking out of the window of his room, noticing the mist parting, one mass of vapour rising while the other hovered over the river. Between the two, he had spotted a lion, poised in mid-air. He recalled how he had called for Madame Zola, ‘Come and see. Here’s the British lion waiting to bid us good-day.’

  The group found it atop the Lion Brewery. Desmoulin suggested that they should walk down the Strand but Vizetelly was worried. It would be ‘the most dangerous thoroughfare in all London for those who wished to escape recognition’. Instead, Zola said that he wanted to send a line to Paris to stop letters going to the Grosvenor. Vizetelly suggested, albeit none too hopefully, the saloon bar of the York Hotel, next door to the then notorious ‘Poverty Corner’, much frequented by the ladies and gentlemen of the music-hall, when they were ‘resting’.

  In the bar, there were a dozen or so ‘loudly dressed’ men and women. Zola ordered a drink. However, there was no stamp, no paper, no envelope to be found here. Vizetelly recalled a little stationer’s shop on York Road and went off on his own. By the time he returned, Zola was the object of everyone’s attention. With his prosperous appearance, and the sound of conversation in French with Desmoulin, the artistes in the bar had assumed that Zola was a Parisian music-hall director on the lookout for talent. Vizetelly took Zola over to a corner where he could write his note, but it wasn’t long before a gentleman, a little worse for wear, dressed in a check suit, invited himself to join them.

  ‘I know Paree and the bouleyvards well enough,’ he said. ‘I was on at the Follee Bergey only a few years ago myself. A good place that – pays well, eh? I shouldn’t at all mind taking a trip across the water again …’

  Vizetelly stepped in, ‘You’ve applied to the wrong shop. My friend has all the talent he requires. He’s quite full up.’

  The check-suited chap switched tack, ‘I say, guv’nor, you haven’t got a tanner you could spare, have you?’

  The party then made its way to Waterloo Station and caught the train to Wimbledon. Zola carried on with his close observations of the buildings, at first the humble dwellings of Lambeth, Vauxhall and Queen’s Road, then at Clapham Junction, looking across the sea of roofs stretching away through Battersea, and the wave of houses rising up to Lavender Hill. Zola exploded. ‘It’s awful!’ He was appalled at the sight of the dusty streets, each house with its uniform pattern, each pressed close to the other, one moment a picture of squalor, the next of shabby gentility. Ever the novelist ‘naturaliste’, he plied Vizetelly with questions: Why were the houses so small? Why were they so ugly? Why were they so alike? What classes of people lived in them? Why were the roads so dusty? Why was there so much litter? Were the streets ever watered?

  ‘You see that house,’ Zola said, ‘it looks fairly clean and neat in front. But there! Look at that back-yard – all rubbish and poverty!’

  After Wandsworth Common, Vizetelly told him that, apart from the matter of postal districts, they were out of London proper. There were fields on either side. At Earlsfield, Zola’s attention was caught by a long row of low-lying houses whose yards and gardens extended to the railway line. In some there was a little greenhouse, while in another an attempt at an arbour. But again, litter and rubbish everywhere.

  ‘This, I suppose,’ Zola said,

  is what you call a London slum invading the country? You tell me that only a part of the bourgeoisie cares for flats, and that among the middle class and the working class each family prefers to rent its own little house. Is this for the sake of privacy? If so, I see no privacy here. Leaving out the question of being overlooked from passing trains, observe the four-foot fences which separate one garden or yard from the other. There is no privacy at all! To me the manner in which your poorer classes are housed in the suburbs, packed closely together in flimsy buildings, where every sound can be heard, suggests a form of socialism – communism, or, perhaps rather the phalansterian system.*

  This was food for a novel that Zola was thinking of writing …

  At Wimbledon, Vizetelly ‘spared’ Zola the houses built by the speculative builders of the area north of Merton High Street and Zola found the shops and houses around the Broadway very pleasing. He paid close attention to the displays of fish, fruit and poultry. He looked in the drapers’ and jewellers’ windows, and wondered about public houses that could be called hotels but took in no guests. Banks, furniture shops, stationers, pastry-cooks, hairdressers, ironmonge
rs all fascinated him. These, said Zola, were much superior to the kinds of shops you’d find in a place at a similar distance from Paris. They spent a few moments by the ‘Free Library’ on Hill Road.

  The plan was to avoid falling on the hospitality of the Warehams by dining at Wimbledon’s only restaurant, run by a Mr Genoni, who, Wareham assured them, would be utterly discreet, if by chance he should recognise the writer. After the meal, Vizetelly escorted Zola to the Warehams’, where the conversation turned to where Zola might rent a furnished house. Zola made it very clear that he had taken a fancy to Wimbledon. Vizetelly and Wareham thought this was dangerous, Zola disagreed. Wimbledon it would be. Wareham would hire a landau and arrange to see house agents and drive round to visit suitable places. Then at 11.30, Vizetelly took Desmoulin off to the other house, and hurried off down Lover’s Walk, to his own home a mile off.

  No matter how isolated and rejected Zola may have felt, on these first two days at least, Bernard-Lazare, Desmoulin, Vizetelly, Mrs Vizetelly, Wareham, Mrs Wareham and various house servants had all found themselves preoccupied with the fate of Émile Zola.

  Had Zola looked closely at The Times of that day (21 July) – and perhaps Vizetelly did point it out to him – the paper followed the latest events in yet another legal case that had been distracting Zola since May. One of his foes, one Ernest Judet, had ferreted around in army history from sixty-six years earlier and accused Zola’s long dead father of desertion. The Zola family narrative, according to the anti-Dreyfus camp, now ran that Zola was not only ‘a fool, a peacock, a vice-monger’ and ‘smut-fancier’ but that there was some deep blemish, a hitherto undetected flaw and corrupting shame that had ‘sway over his infamous life and impure work’. Straight away, the dishonoured and outraged Zola had served Judet with a writ for defamation of character. Now, three months later, on this particular morning in July, The Times reported that the prosecution was postponed. Not that Zola could follow this properly from London. News of this case as it unfolded would have to filter through to him slowly, care of friends bringing French newspapers, letters taking several days to arrive, or Zola’s own lengthy struggles with the English language in the London papers – another reason for him to feel detached from the core concerns of his life. Even on the morning of his flight, there had been developments in the case, which, had he known of them, would have given him strength to insist on staying in France. This was certainly Zola’s daughter’s theory and it added to her view that Zola, by fleeing, was a ‘victim of his friends’ who back at Charpentier’s had worked so hard on convincing him of the need to disappear.

  And in the back of Zola’s mind was the desperately complicated matter of his two chères femmes.

  * A form of communal living and working proposed by Charles Fourier (1772–1837).

  3

  ‘Other affections’

  From the moment Zola arrived in London, he started firing off letters to Alexandrine and Jeanne. What he didn’t know, though, was which of the two would come to England, or if both were to come, in what order they should arrive, nor indeed how any of this would be negotiated. In his first letter to Jeanne from London, written on the Tuesday, the same day that he arrived at Victoria and the Grosvenor, he says that ‘one’ is going to join him in two or three days’ time, bringing Zola’s books and papers. Perhaps Jeanne could interpret that ‘one’ as referring to Zola’s friends. Perhaps not. In which case it was a discreet signal to her that he was talking about his wife. More directly, he said that he didn’t know whether he and Jeanne would be alone or not alone. But, he continues, ‘I know that you love me, that you are very good and very reasonable and that you will accept what destiny imposes on me. I’ve had to disappear in order to remain master of the Affair.’

  The following day, Wednesday, he pleaded that he couldn’t say anything ‘decisive’ yet. On the next, he informed Jeanne that it was becoming ‘certain’ that he would not be able to bring her to England, without them all being ‘tormented’. He conjured up the picture of Jeanne arriving with the children and being forced to go off who knows where, and followed this with his concerns about being captured: ‘… for anyone in the world wanting to know, you don’t know where I am. When you come, I will give you instructions so that no one can follow you. One indiscretion on your part would be disastrous.’

  But he was optimistic too: ‘I’m hoping that we’re going to spend two happy months together, when all the annoying details have been sorted out. I kiss my two darlings and you, dear wife, with all my heart.’

  Hitherto, Jeanne’s letters in reply have not come to light, so the full sense of what kind of person she was and how she thought are hard to discern. Through the curtain of silence, a picture emerges of Zola talking to her as if she was a teenager.

  Meanwhile, he and Alexandrine were also writing to each other. On the Thursday, in reply to a letter that hasn’t survived, she wrote that she had received two ‘dear’ letters from Zola: ‘I’m much calmer, I’m even excessively calm, as I have a sense that everything’s going well.’

  The following day, she wrote with a passion that regularly boils up in the midst of a correspondence that was, needless to say, full of arrangements and references to the ongoing legal situations:

  You tell me to come. How do you expect me to move from here? I can’t take a step – either in Paris or in the country, without everyone knowing what I’m doing minute by minute. The secret police and reporters are at our door. Yesterday, your lawyer told me not to move. I am caught sadly between your appeals and the advice of others to stay. All the stations are guarded and under surveillance and you think I should flee …

  We can deduce, then, that Zola was asking both ‘wives’ to come to England. This raises the question of how the relationship stood between the three of them.

  Zola was born in Paris on 2 April 1840 but at the age of three went with his French mother and Venetian father to live in Aix-en-Provence. Four years later, at his moment of glory, Zola’s father died. He had masterminded the fresh water supply for Aix. Zola and his mother moved permanently to Paris in 1858 and he lived with her or very nearby till the day she died in 1880. Zola met Gabrielle Alexandrine Meley in 1864 and they lived a full bohemian – and poverty-stricken – life together in Paris, fraternising with the painters who one day would become the Impressionists.

  Alexandrine, as she was known, was a year older than Zola. At the time of her birth, her father was eighteen and her mother seventeen. They weren’t married. He was a hatter and she was a florist. When Alexandrine was eight or nine, her father married another woman while her mother had previously set up house with a riding instructor. Within months, her mother died of cholera, the riding instructor found someone else, and young Alexandrine found herself bereft of close and loving care. Yet, she was a survivor and managed to train to be a ‘lingère’, someone who knew how to make, repair and maintain household linen and a woman’s under-garments, the kind of seamstress who could, if asked, be a chambermaid to a ‘femme bourgeoise’.

  Through the 1870s, Zola’s novels became massively popular both in France and abroad and the couple prospered. They bought a house in Médan to the west of Paris and renovated and expanded it extravagantly, whilst keeping on an apartment in the centre of Paris. Zola and Alexandrine had no children by this point nor would they ever.

  In May 1888, Alexandrine hired Jeanne Rozerot to be her lingère. Jeanne was born in 1867, so she was twenty-seven years younger than the 48-year-old Zola. She came from Burgundy, where her father was a miller. Her mother died when she was three, so she was brought up by her mother’s parents who put her through convent school where she trained to take on the very same job that Alexandrine had trained for, seamstress chambermaid.

  In October 1888, the Zolas and Jeanne went on holiday to Royan. One aspect of Jeanne’s job was to attend to the femme bourgeoise that Alexandrine had become, sewing and repairing her most intimate clothing and, when asked, helping her mistress dress, particularly in the
elaborate matter of getting in and out of nineteenth-century corsets. Though Alexandrine was pleased with her new servant, on their return from the holiday in Royan, Jeanne resigned her post. Zola and Jeanne had exchanged thoughts, feelings and intentions and the bourgeois stability of the marriage was on the verge of falling apart. The question now was whether this rupture would fit into the conventional bourgeois pattern of married-man-plus-mistress, or take on some other shape? This was answered at first by the fact that, straight after Jeanne resigned her post, Zola arranged for her to have an apartment not far from the marital home. By December, the relationship reached a new level of intimacy: a daughter, Denise, was born in September 1889, a son, Jacques, in September 1891 and, unusually for the time, Jeanne kept the children. They were not given to nuns or handed over to the Parisian version of the foundling hospital. This was not the customary mistress situation. Then, in November 1891, Alexandrine was tipped off in an anonymous letter that Jeanne and Zola were lovers and had children. What took place next is described in all sources as ‘violent’. With a telegram to his old friend Paul Céard saying, ‘My wife is behaving like a lunatic’, Zola was able to warn Jeanne to vacate the flat. It’s possible that if she had stayed, Jeanne might have been in physical danger. When Alexandrine gained access to Jeanne’s home, she smashed up the furniture and grabbed Zola’s letters to Jeanne from a bureau. Everything was revealed.

  For Alexandrine, there was not only a terrible sense of betrayal and loss, she also had to bear the public shame of knowing that the couple’s intimate friends would have known everything, acting at times as witnesses and deceivers. And there were children, something that Zola and Alexandrine had not – for reasons we do not know – been able to produce. The set-up with Jeanne, then, was like a parallel marriage with the added potency and authenticity that had come with the birth of the two children. Where Zola and Alexandrine were a couple, Zola, Jeanne and the children were a family. Only someone who had become utterly indifferent to her partner would find any of this bearable, and it’s clear from all that comes before and after that Alexandrine was in no way emotionally detached from her husband. Quite the contrary. This was a bitter and painful crisis for her – a trauma. All the more reason to say that what unfolded over the next few years is quite remarkable.