The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  Between this moment in November 1891 and Zola’s arrival in London in July 1898, Zola, Alexandrine, Jeanne and the children slowly constructed a way of life. No matter what feelings of despair or joy, loss or desire passed between them, by the time Zola left on that train at the Gare du Nord, they had all come to an arrangement. In broad outline, it worked like this: wherever Zola and Alexandrine lived – Paris, Médan or on some of their holidays together – Jeanne, Denise and Jacques were found a place nearby. Zola spent his nights and mornings with Alexandrine, but went almost every afternoon to see Jeanne and the children. None of this was secret. It was understood. However, the really remarkable part came when Alexandrine took control of the situation. Here is daughter Denise’s view of what took place:

  Madame Émile Zola, who had wanted to get to know us, took us on with affection and asked for news of us. Once or twice a month, on a Thursday, Jacques and I would go out for walks with her to the Tuileries, the Palais-Royal, the Champs-Elysées in winter then to the ‘Bois’ [de Boulogne] as soon as the good weather began. We were a bit intimidated by ‘la dame’, as we called her, and she watched us playing with a nice smile and laughed at our childish talk, but our father was there and we felt reassured. An air of mystery floated around us, as our mother wasn’t there, and there was no talk of her and also because we were never warned of these walks in advance. We didn’t go home empty-handed, ‘la dame’ always gave us presents, especially when she came back from her annual stay in Italy.

  Since this time until nearly a hundred years later, the story of Zola’s childless marriage, his transformation into a delighted and devoted lover and then ‘père de famille’, has been pieced together from letters and the reported comments of friends and family. However, in 1997, the biographer Evelyne Bloch-Dano sensationally revealed that in 1859, some five years before she met Zola, Alexandrine had given birth to a girl. She was nearly twenty years old and named the baby after her mother, calling her Caroline. When the baby was four days old, Alexandrine took her to the Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés (literally ‘Hospital for Found Children’), one of many foundling hospitals, and never saw her again. The baby was wet-nursed, baptised and then picked up by another wet-nurse and taken to Brittany. Eleven days later, baby Caroline died. On that same day, Alexandrine celebrated her twentieth birthday. Needless to say, Alexandrine and Caroline were not the only mother and child to experience this sequence of events. The story of widespread urban and rural poverty is riven through with abandonment, wet-nursing and death, drawing into its net tens of thousands of women, babies and children. Bloch-Dano, commenting on Alexandrine’s part in this social disaster, writes, ‘Even Zola wouldn’t have dared to invent it.’

  Alexandrine did not ever put in writing any of her thoughts about what happened to her, and we do not know if Zola knew anything about it. What we are left with is a view of a childless marriage seen now through the prism of a woman who once gave birth. So, whatever pain we might imagine that Alexandrine experienced in relation to Jeanne and Zola’s children, the experience of the foundling hospital and her dead child must have made the affair even harder to bear.

  When trying to envisage how Zola, Jeanne and Alexandrine felt about each other, biographers have combed through the novels for analogous encounters, older man with younger woman, or man and wife in childless marriage. In Doctor Pascal, written and published in 1893, little less than five years after the affair with Jeanne began, there are erotic awakenings by a middle-aged doctor disturbed by a growing passion for his niece, Clotilde, followed by loving accounts of her hair, neck and breasts, leading to passages detailing their nights of loving passion. By casting Clotilde as Dr Pascal’s niece, the novel is shot through with a sense of forbidden love, which the lovers recklessly and delightedly disregard. Pascal himself is cast as a self-obsessed workaholic who imagines that he has made a break-through in the study and curing of inherited disease – inherited defects being a theme that runs through Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels. Pascal’s scientific materialism is contrasted with Clotilde’s religiosity. Part of the erotic charge between them is the ideological confrontation and mutual anger, expressed at one point with violence, but which is overcome through passionate acts of sinful love-making.

  What Alexandrine made of all this is not known – Zola usually read his latest writings to her. If he followed their usual custom, or even if Alexandrine read Doctor Pascal to herself, it would have been an experience full of regret and humiliation. Opposite the title page, the book reads: ‘I dedicate this book, which is the recapitulation and conclusion of all my labours [it was the last novel in his great Rougon-Macquart sequence], to the memory of my mother and to my dear wife.’ It’s hard to imagine that this public display of devotion would have appeased Alexandrine’s feelings. Zola also gave a copy of the book to Jeanne and this copy has survived. On the cover, he wrote:

  To my beloved Jeanne, to my Clotilde, who has given me the royal feast of her youth and taken thirty years off my life, giving me the present of my Denise and my Jacques, the dear children for whom I have written this book, so that they might know, when reading it one day, how much I adored their mother and how tenderly they should repay her the happiness with which she consoled me in my times of great unhappiness.

  Even if it feels dubious when biographers blur fiction with reality, clearly Zola himself had no reservations about merging the two when it came to talking to Jeanne. Queen Clotilde of French history, it should be said, was, like Jeanne, a Burgundian.

  With that dedication in mind, we don’t know what Jeanne made of passages like this:

  They took each other in a mad whirl of happiness. The warm room, with its antique furniture, seemed to be encouraging them and to be filled with light. There was no more fear, no suffering, no scruples; she gave herself, knowingly, willingly, and he accepted the sovereign gift of her body … She, in a daze of delight, surrendered herself to him in silence, except for a soft faint cry as her virginity left her; and he, with a sob of rapture, was crushing her, enveloping her, straining to make her understand his immeasurable gratitude to her for restoring his manhood.

  Meanwhile, Alexandrine would read passages like this:

  Martine … had been in the doctor’s service for more than thirty years and had become the real mistress of the household. She too had retained an air of youthfulness, though she was over sixty. Soft-footed and silent, she was constantly scurrying from task to task. In her eternal black dress and white cap she looked like a nun. The grey eyes in her small face, which was pale and serene, were like the ashes of an extinguished fire.

  Zola cast the doctor in the novel, as having a ‘longing for a child … his eyes were often wet with tears … What he longed for now that he was in his declining years was the continuity, the child who would perpetuate him.’

  To Jeanne, Zola suggests that the book was a kind of prolonged love letter and if, in the future, their children should doubt the depth of Zola’s feelings for her, they could refer to the novel. Zola would be able to speak to them from beyond the grave as if he were saying, ‘This is how I loved your mother, like this, like this and like this.’ Bearing in mind that he was seen by his religious critics as a novelist who had spent years purveying pornography and filth, one can sense in the book Zola’s urge to portray Clotilde-Jeanne as a good, pure and devoted virgin – albeit, as a niece. Because the love between Pascal and Clotilde is full and honest and sincere, the novel pleads for them to be entitled to have that love in all its glorious, passionate wholeness, no matter what others might say or think. The stress lines of fiction and the reality of the past reached forward to Zola’s stay in England. While he signed in to the Grosvenor Hotel as ‘Pascal’, Alexandrine was signing her letters to him as ‘Caroline’.

  But it wasn’t only through his fiction that Zola played out his feelings for the two women. He used the camera. By the time he came to England, he was a proficient and experienced photographer, who liked to capture what looks like a happy socia
l life with Alexandrine; a family life with Jeanne with the children running about and playing; and – much more intimately – Jeanne appearing in studio shots wearing nothing but a shift or dressed up ‘in character’. One picture shows Zola and Jeanne standing on a gravel path staring into each other’s eyes, he dressed in plus fours and flat cap, she in a white full-length dress with puffed shoulders. At times he dressed her like Carmen, at others more like Sarah Bernhardt with fan, feather boa and extravagant flowery hat. In some, he hugs the children to him while looking wistfully straight into the lens. With Alexandrine, they take up amusing poses with a mandolin here, a great carved face there, surrounded by publishers and composers with their wives, inventing, perhaps, new versions of ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’. To look at the pictures is to be invited into a private gallery, telling the story of these people’s decade of pleasure. They are a display of the things and people Zola loves most: his social life with his wife, his lover’s face and body, and his thoughtful children. They are of course the filtered-out good bits of life, betraying only occasionally looks of sadness, worry and regret. We get glimpses of meetings and departures, a daily feature of all their lives, shown in the photos as people caught in the middle distance on long roads, or underneath sign-posts. In the published sources, there is no picture of Alexandrine with the children. If we assumed that Zola never took a photo of this particular combination of people, we might speculate that this extraordinary arrangement was acknowledged by all parties as inappropriate to be recorded so permanently. In England, Zola’s camera would have more work to do.

  So, in Wimbledon, with Zola looking for somewhere to live, we can see from the urgent letters that his mind was not only full of how to evade the police, and of how the Dreyfus Affair was proceeding, but also of how he could manage his complex network of relationships.

  Wareham the lawyer was well equipped to find places for Zola to stay, and suggested that, until a house could be found, it would be a good idea to stay in a nearby country hotel. The Oatlands Park Hotel fitted the bill, so Vizetelly, Desmoulin and Zola headed off to Walton Station and from there to Oatlands Park. It’s still there, on the site of the grand Tudor palace which Henry VIII had built for Anne of Cleves and which was also occupied by Anne’s lady-in-waiting and Henry’s next queen, Catherine Howard. It burnt down in 1794 and was rebuilt several times since. By the time Zola arrived, signing in as M. Beauchamp, it had grown into a slightly bizarre mix of Palladian, Gothic and Byzantine but still surrounded by lavish landscaped grounds, including an aristocratic dog and monkey cemetery which Zola found very pleasing. Zola was after all the owner of a tiny island on the Seine below his house at Médan where he buried his own pets. Zola’s room was up in the hotel’s tower and he was glad now to have bought some more shirts, but not without complaining to Vizetelly that English shirts were too short.

  The chilly receptionist and the indifference of the hotel guests suited the need to be incognito. There was a mix of honeymoon couples, Fritz the German who spoke French, families and a few old folks. Desmoulin had brought Zola one of his cameras and he was soon out snapping views of the Thames and the long tree-lined roads near the hotel. Vizetelly supplied them with English newspapers and they amused themselves with the ‘news’ of where Zola was supposed to have fled.

  On the Saturday (23 July), Zola went out house-hunting in Weybridge and was pleased to find ‘Penn’, ‘a charming house surrounded by trees. Five guineas a week.’ The following day, he went with Vizetelly and his wife to take a second look. Desmoulin agreed to go back to Paris. It was decided that he would ‘organise things’ with Alexandrine. It was becoming clear that Alexandrine would have to run Zola’s affairs by herself from Paris.

  On the Monday, Vizetelly brought Zola some books to read: Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, and in the evening he had a brief chat with Fritz the German, and sat out in the gardens under a giant elm tree. On Tuesday, came the alarming news that Zola had been spotted in London and Vizetelly showed Zola one or two of the papers carrying the story. Zola fretted that the huissier would find him out and serve notice on him. ‘I’m told that my picture is in a number of shop windows in London,’ he wrote but he fraternised with the hotel manager and did some dogspotting, pondering on the fact that English dogs in the main were muzzled. By Wednesday, it was agreed he would take ‘Penn’. That left a few more days to get through at Oatlands Park, reading his novels, sitting in a rustic cabin overlooking the hotel grounds, noting down the difference between French and English windows and watching a strange game called cricket.

  By Friday, Desmoulin was back, bringing some of Zola’s treasured nick-nacks, manuscripts, notes, books, newspaper cuttings, underwear and news of his loved ones. The books, notes and cuttings made up the essential research material for Zola’s great new writing project that he was desperate to start work on. Desmoulin reassured Zola that the Dreyfus case was proceeding well and that there was an ‘ever-faster movement towards the truth’. Even so, there were worries about his mail being opened and impatience about getting in to ‘Penn’. Desmoulin was sent off to London to buy some photographic plates and everyone became agitated that it took him so long to get back. By the Sunday, there was some good news from the French papers that the evidence that had been used to defame Zola’s father now looked like being a forgery. Monday was the day Zola could move into ‘Penn’.

  These ten days in limbo in an English country hotel gave Zola plenty of time to write to Alexandrine and Jeanne simultaneously, even if the letters, for safety’s sake, had to be delivered by hand by the long-suffering Desmoulin. Zola told Jeanne and the children that he adored them, but he was devastated that their ‘beautiful projects were for the moment, par terre’ (literally, ‘grounded’). To Alexandrine, he said that he was in a state of ‘extreme anxiety’ and that he was making her the ‘absolute mistress of the situation’ in Paris. He invoked their thirty years together, in which her happiness had been his sole concern, as if he himself did not exist. Alexandrine, we might suppose, could be forgiven for not seeing it that way. Zola closed, embracing her with all his ‘ulcerated’ heart. Jeanne, meanwhile, was telling Zola that she was very sad and in despair so Zola reassured her that these were just sorrows of the moment. ‘Be as gay as you can,’ he wrote, ‘lead your usual life, laugh, sing, play the piano as if nothing sad has happened to the three of you… Tell the two darlings that their father hasn’t forgotten them and that if they come here, he will apply himself to amusing them as much as possible.’

  So how was the matter of who would or would not come to be settled? Unsurprisingly, it was Alexandrine who managed the whole thing. She sent Zola a letter that included a phrase which defines the situation they were all in, conjuring up a picture of coming to England while Jeanne was there, but then having to return soon after, in order to fix legal and household matters. ‘I would be with you very little, on account of other affections that you would want to have, and which seem to me quite natural …’ A few days later she wrote, ‘To stay with you … would be to deprive you of other affections which are useless here’, and a day or so later, ‘I very much feel that after eight days of my presence with you, if I did not agree to leave until your return [to France], I would see in you a sadness, remorse perhaps, that my stay was too long, depriving you of affections that are more consoling and gayer than mine.’ (All italics mine.)

  No doubt other messages were sent to and fro care of Desmoulin, but through these letters we can make out the heartfelt mixture of empathy and self-sacrifice that Alexandrine put herself through, stepping aside to enable Jeanne to come to England with the children without her being there too. Not that she didn’t also give full vent to her own feelings:

  You say that you would like to see me happy. Alas, my poor friend, you who know me better than anyone, still don’t know me very well, if even now you can still keep on hoping to see me happy, with all the sadness and bitterness that has overwhelmed me for nearly ten years. I told you, two ye
ars after, that I was finished, that I had little more to do with my sad existence than to do good things for those I love. I am trying to do that and I will carry on doing so, as much as I can.

  As Zola settled in to his home in England, surrounded by his books and papers, on the verge of starting a new sequence of novels, with the glorious prospect of living with Jeanne and his children for the first time, his ears were ringing with what his wife, legal representative, and manager in all things really thought. Without mentioning any names, Madame Zola had even managed matters so that Jeanne and the children could join him.

  4

  ‘I don’t bloody care!’

  ‘Penn’ was – and still is – a detached, double-fronted, two-storey house set back from a long, straight road. The front gable was half-timbered in suburban, neo-Elizabethan style and, at the back, two rooms on either side of the back door overlooked the garden. Monday 1 August, the day of moving in, was a Bank Holiday, ‘Isn’t it a good omen that I have moved in on the day of a holiday?’ Zola asked himself. This was the Zola who had a good few superstitious beliefs, which, according to his daughter, derived from his Italian background. He wouldn’t start anything new on the 17th of any month, as this was the day his mother died; he counted the numbers on vehicles, added them up, and only took a taxi if he was happy with the number, while the number 7 seemed to him to be a lucky one.