The Disappearance of Émile Zola Read online

  Zola took a liking to what he thought of as a small house, with its bright paint, quirky furniture, funny little ornaments and its airy windows, though all this reminded him of how far he was from France. One of Vizetelly’s photos shows Zola, pen in hand, sitting in one of the back rooms with piles of papers and books neatly stacked in front of him. This was the dossier of materials that Zola had asked Desmoulin to bring from Paris, a collection for a great new writing project that he had been preparing since the end of December 1897. The Dreyfus case and Zola’s trials had interrupted the flow of what he saw as his real writing but now he was ready to pick up from where he had left off. Not that he was in a good state of mind to do so. He felt waves of anxiety washing over him and, after several hours of calm, he would be overcome with despair. He could hardly believe he was hiding away in this backwater. ‘So this is where forty years of work have led me, with a whole wretched country at my back, shouting me down and threatening me.’

  His country, he thought, had been taken over by a gang of despicable rogues, and he was paying the price for having taken a stand against the anti-semites, the government and the army high command. Not that he regretted it. He declared to his friends and to Jeanne and Alexandrine that, if necessary, he would take up the struggle for truth and justice again. He might be just a dull, plodding, deskbound writer, but he could and would again wage battle with the pen. It was taking its toll, though. He feared that he would slide into deep hypochondria. Relief came in work. He spent the afternoon of 3 August re-reading his notes and he urged himself to get back to his schedule of never letting a day go by without writing at least a line: ‘nulla dies sine linea’ as he would say to himself over and over again. After an eleven-month gap of not writing any fiction, on Thursday 4 August he picked up his pen to write the first page of the novel Fécondité, which would be translated later, by Vizetelly, as Fruitfulness.

  There is an incongruity between Zola sitting in the back room of a suburban house in Weybridge, writing a novel that was minutely concerned with the intimate – shockingly intimate – lives of the French. The fruitfulness at the heart of the novel was to be children, well-being and material comfort, but this was only the first part of the grand project. As Zola wrote in his notes for the novel, his intention was to write Three Gospels (‘Évangiles’) – Fruitfulness, Work and Justice. This would match the trilogy he had finished eleven months earlier, Les Trois Villes (Three Cities) – Lourdes, Rome and Paris. With Fécondité, he would cover a subject which had haunted him first under the provisional title Le Déchet (Waste). On one side, there would be a fecund woman who would breast-feed her many children, but whose life would be contrasted with virginity and the ‘religion of death’. The book would take a stand for the country as a whole to be more fecund, as it would call for an increased birth-rate in France, an idea which would then be spread to the whole of the rest of humanity.

  The second novel, Travail (Work), would take up the ideas of the eighteenth-century utopian thinker Charles Fourier. Zola’s heroes would create the city of the future, made up of Fourier’s ‘phalansteries’ – work–life communes. The book would show the dignity of labour, how work was necessary for health, how happiness would flow from the ‘human hive’. The third, Justice, would show a humanity existing over and above national borders, an alliance of all nations. He would tackle the question of human races and show the great joy of peace.

  The hero-narrator in the trilogy would be Jean Froment, the son of characters who had appeared in previous novels. In Fruitfulness, Jean and his wife would make babies through making love in a loving way, while others would be shown using ‘trickery’ to avoid conception, sperm lost – voluntarily or not. Then, as Jean and his wife have many babies, others like the egotistical bourgeois couples of French society would be shown trying to restrict the size of their families. Other women would be shown having abortions, killing babies just before and after they were born, along with surgeons performing hysterectomies or handing babies over to foundling hospitals. While Jean’s wife breast-fed her children, he would show others farming out their babies to wet-nurses. By the end of the book, Jean and his wife would sit in a prosperous heaven-on-earth surrounded by their adoring children and grand-children. ‘I see “Fécondité” set in a house with a garden,’ he wrote in these preparatory notes. The purpose of the trilogy would be to save France from the dangers of it becoming a monarchist, Catholic, war-mongering state. Instead he would show that it should be Republican, free-thinking and war-hating; he would instate a new kind of chivalry, one that stood in defence of the Rights of Man, law and liberty. This was the real role for France, her greatness shared with the peoples of the world, her mission and her victory in the future.

  In time, with the addition of Vérité (Truth), this grand utopian schema would turn into Les Quatre Évangiles (Four Gospels) and envisaging this major project drove Zola to his writing-table almost every day of his stay in England. While he sat cooped up in hotels and rented houses in south London, in his mind’s eye he was saving France from itself. At the outset, on that day in August, in front of him sat his prime sources: recent sociological and socio-medical texts about the declining birth-rate and depopulation of France, contraceptive methods, sterilisation of women and investigations into foundling hospitals and baby-farming. For the last section of Fruitfulness, Zola had ferreted out books such as Timbuctoo, The Mysterious and Four Years in the Congo, as he was planning on having his hero take the ideology of fruitfulness to the colonies.

  It’s possible to trace several strands in Zola’s thinking at this time: a nationalist worry in France as a whole that its declining birth-rate was in stark contrast to the rising birthrate of its rival, Germany. Great Britain had conquered the world while crazy France (in Zola’s eyes) was – with the Dreyfus case – giving up on the one virtue that it had, its love of freedom and justice. France should be an enlightened coloniser, spreading this virtue to all parts of the globe and she should lead the way in enlightened work practices, a kind of guild socialism organised in co-operative communes. By defying Malthusian ideas of ending poverty through depopulation, France could find a new wealth through fecundity – having many babies. That was the theory. There’s an irony here in that just a suburban train-ride from where Zola was reading, thinking and writing about such matters, his equivalents, amongst them many British Fabians and enlightened intellectuals, were envisaging a future in which poverty would be eradicated through a mix of socialism, birth control and sterilisation.

  From a literary point of view, at first glance there doesn’t seem to be much of a correspondence between the Zola of Thérèse Raquin and Germinal, and this new Zola. The old Zola didn’t try to right the wrongs of the world in his novels: he exposed the plight of the poor and downtrodden. His method had been ‘Naturalisme’ – not in the sense that he wrote in a realistic way, but that the subject-matter of the novels came out of lengthy immersion in empirical research. The food, the clothes, the buildings and rooms would all be accurate; the language and expressions of the speakers would be observed correctly; the sex, births and deaths would appear as noted down – if not by Zola, then by the many scientific studies that he acquired and devoured. In Zola’s hands, though this did indeed produce scenes and images of stark realism, we can see that they were manipulated symbolically. It’s not a coincidence that Germinal, for all its minute accuracy in depicting a coal-mining community, shows a working-class hacking out survival below ground, in the dark. But now, in this new way of writing, these Gospels would include scenes and ideas of the future, moments that would not be typical, or accurate as Naturalisme would have it, scenes that would not happen unless France woke up and took the right path. As Zola himself put it: ‘All this is quite utopian, but what do you want? I’ve been dissecting for forty years; let me dream a little in my old age.’

  In fact, as can be seen from the list of documentary texts sitting in front of Zola in the back room at ‘Penn’, the negative side of Fécondité, t
he ‘religion of death’ as he called it, would inform Zola’s writing in his old Naturalist way. In the summer of 1898 from Weybridge, Zola was planning on giving the fiction-reading public graphic depictions of abortion, sterilisation, contraception, baby-abandonment, baby-farming, wet-nursing and infanticide, the like of which, outside of academic circles, had never been read before. If people had found his L’Assommoir and Nana shocking, Fécondité would, he hoped, create an outcry and the outrage would help transform France. But whatever Zola’s grand utopian intentions, it’s not difficult to see, lying behind this project, the outlines of something more personal. The pen he used to write that first page of the Four Gospels, on 4 August, was the same pen that was writing urgent, anxious letters to Jeanne the fertile mother and Alexandrine, the mother who had given her baby to a foundling hospital and who hadn’t produced a baby since. The sources taken from real life to write Doctor Pascal were helping to provide ideas for this novel too.

  So Zola established a routine: he would write all morning; in the afternoons, which he described as ‘difficult’, he might walk round the garden. He was amused to see that this one at ‘Penn’ was like a French potager with squares of cabbages, potatoes and peas. The robins hopped about right up close to him, as if he were their friend. But thinking that reminded him of his own dear pet dog, Pinpin. He deluded himself that he was brushing past his legs, only to discover, sadly, that he wasn’t. He figured out why England was so green – the mild wet weather. The haze over the fields produced a dream of never-ending gentleness and melancholy.

  Another addition to Zola’s life was a bike, and soon he was off cycling round the roads which, he found, weren’t as good as French ones. On either side were parks and thick, shiny holly-bushes, so thick that even a skinny cat couldn’t get through them. If only the holly at Médan would grow like that. These bike rides took him as far off as Walton, which was so perfectly neat that Zola wondered where the English hid their poor people. He snapped away on the camera that Alexandrine had been so kind as to give to Desmoulin to bring over to England. Out in the garden, amongst the cabbages and robins, he wondered what was going on in France. He would suddenly lift up his head, as if to catch what people were saying over there. Where had they got to in the frightful Dreyfus case? Would truth and justice prevail? Then it was back to the cabbages and robins. Some French newspapers were getting through to him, thanks to his friends, and he was appalled to see that Esterhazy, whom Zola had accused of having written the document which had incriminated Dreyfus, had been set free, while the good Colonel Picquart, who had done so much to prove Dreyfus’s innocence, was still behind bars.

  The matter of whether it would be Alexandrine or Jeanne who would come out to join him was confirmed when he received a letter from Desmoulin, dated 5 August, telling him that Alexandrine had decided to stay in Paris to deal with the many letters and with household affairs. Apart from anything else, there were the court fines to pay. Desmoulin revealed that Zola’s ‘poor wife’ had given him, Desmoulin, the job of asking Zola to call for the children to come and stay with him in London. In this one tortuous sentence, Desmoulin was passing on the news that the shape of the relationships between Zola, Alexandrine and Jeanne was about to take a new turn. Madame Zola understood very well, Desmoulin reported, that Zola wouldn’t be able to stand being alone for very long. Alexandrine was in effect administering Jeanne and the children as prophylaxis.

  In his reply, Zola modified his delight by sharing with Desmoulin his thoughts of not wanting to cause his ‘poor wife’ pain, adding that he couldn’t be happy unless he knew that she was happy. As for himself, he was suffering from being in a state of ‘total moral distress’. Maybe, when the children came, he would calm down a little.

  On consecutive days, he ran off brusque instructions to Jeanne: bring warm clothes, bring me my cycling outfit, don’t bring culottes for yourself, bring a skirt. (Zola used his powers of observation to scrutinise young women cyclists in England and was very interested to see that they wore skirts not culottes as they cycled past, looking, he thought, very gracious and sure of themselves, not at all like the big-hipped French women he had seen on bikes in the Bois de Boulogne.) Detail was important to Zola. He had already mislaid his umbrella and walking-cane. The umbrella he could cope with, but the loss of the cane, which had been his companion for ten years, pierced his heart. But then it turned up. Vizetelly spotted it sitting in the corner a few feet away from Zola’s work-table. Perhaps, Zola wondered, objects deliberately hide from us in order to test us. He gave Jeanne a list of instructions on how to negotiate the Gare du Nord and Victoria Station and how to take precautions to avoid being followed. ‘Disappear,’ he urged.

  In the subsequent note, he carried on: ‘… bring some music, there’s a piano. Don’t trust the servants. Don’t forget to take food for the journey. After Dover, they don’t take French money, only get off the train after it stops at the end of the line in London.’

  This fatherly tone breaks through Zola’s letters to Jeanne but he also wrote to her with a sense of their destiny within the epoch they were living through. Just prior to hearing that Jeanne and the children would be able to join him, he tried to reassure her:

  It’s only an awful moment in time that we’re going through, I am more and more convinced that we will come out of the struggle triumphant, as it seems to me that things are moving very quickly in Paris. Later, I will be so happy that our dear children will be proud of their father and that my beloved Jeanne will tell them one day of all that we will have suffered for truth and justice … We are doing something very beautiful, for which history will hold us to account … Be hopeful, confident and strong, my beloved Jeanne.

  No matter how self-important this may read to a modern reader, Zola was right. The point is he had had no need to take sides in the Dreyfus Affair, and prior to that, he had had no need to produce two highly partisan articles decrying anti-semitism. He was a novelist and cultural critic, not a politician. He continued: ‘Our life will pick up again and be greater and more magnificent. Have hope, be confident and brave, my beloved Jeanne. I kiss you with all my heart, my three darlings, love me well.’

  Love, destiny and the fight for truth and justice had become intermingled in his mind. Seen from some other people’s perspective though, they were intermingled in an undesirable way: Vizetelly and Desmoulin confronted Zola with their view that he was taking unnecessary and dangerous risks by bringing Jeanne and the children to stay with him. Vizetelly had no reservations about warning him that if the French spooks (‘mouchards’) were to spot Zola with Jeanne in ‘Penn’, they wouldn’t hesitate in telling the world that he was accompanied by a lady who was not his wife. In which case a huge scandal and an explosion in the British press would follow. Desmoulin admitted to being perplexed. He asked Zola, wasn’t he fearful that, what with the house being peopled with restless, noisy little beings, it would attract more attention? Didn’t he think that in this country of ‘cant’, France, he would attract antipathy and hate? Their friends, the Protestants, who represented a great regiment of support for the Dreyfus cause, would change their attitude towards Zola, all because of the ‘irregularity’ of his situation. It would, quite clearly, be very, very bad, Desmoulin said.

  Zola must have felt even more isolated. The two companions who were making his exile possible had turned on him. Zola’s reply to Desmoulin was furious:

  … for some time now, everything you’ve said to yourself, I’ve been saying to myself too. And yet you don’t know why I am carrying on regardless! Because I don’t bloody care! [je m’en fous] I’ve had enough, I’ve had enough, I’ve had enough! I’ve done my duty and all I ask for is to be left in peace. And this peace, I know very well how to get it myself. I don’t care what people will say, what people will think. When I’ve done what’s necessary for me and my loved ones, we will be as happy as is possible and the world can come tumbling down without me turning my head to notice. Rest assured, I’m not coming back
to France till justice has been done …

  I have thought of others, my good friend, and I’m telling you again, I regard my public role to be over and I’ve made up my mind to think only of my family and me. There you go. Even so, I will take all possible precautions, but without tormenting myself about it any more, as I have come to the end of all the struggle and sorrow.

  The anger is palpable. Yet in the midst of batting to one side those who would disapprove of his family arrangements, is an announcement, from Weybridge, that the public face of Zola, the fighter for justice in France, was no more. With Jeanne and the children coming to live with him for the first time in their lives, the exile in England was proving to be a moment in which three corners were being turned simultaneously: in his personal relationships, in the nature of his literary output and in his political profile. To look at the suburban solidity and quiet of ‘Penn’ today – and indeed as it was then – it is hard to imagine the emotional, cultural and historical turmoil taking place inside.

  But there was joy to come too.

  In Verneuil, in the house not far from Médan that Zola had acquired for Jeanne and the children, conspiratorial whispers signalled to Denise that something was afoot with her mother’s plans. Why wasn’t the family guest his usual playful self? Why were they, the children, being instructed to be good and say nothing? Why were they being told to sleep a little on the divan in preparation for a journey? Tension was already high, as only a day or two earlier, Denise had been sent a bar of Félix Potin chocolate, opened it, took out the little celebrity photograph only to find a picture of Papa. How nice! She rushed to show Jeanne, who, on seeing it, screamed, ‘They’ve ripped out his eyes! Those awful people, doing that to a child!’ At the same time, a neighbour had lent a ladder to journalists so that they could peep over the garden wall to spy on Jeanne and the children.