The Attack on the Mill, and Other Sketches of War

by Émile Zola

Of these tiny stories—there are twelve of them within one hundred pages—not all are quite worthy of his genius. He grimaces a little too much in “Les Epaules de la Marquise,” and M. Bourget has since analysed the little self-indulgent dévote of quality more successfully than M. Zola did in “Le Jeûne.” But most of them are very charming. Here is “Le Grand Michu,” a study of gallant, stupid boyhood; here “Les Paradis des Chats,” one of the author’s rare escapes into humour. In “Le Forgeron,” with its story of the jaded and cynical town-man, who finds health and happiness by retiring to a lodging within the very thunders of a village blacksmith, we have a profound criticism of life. “Le Petit Village” is interesting to us here, because, with its pathetic picture of Woerth in Alsace, it is the earliest of M. Zola’s studies of war. In other of these stories the spirit of Watteau seems to inspire the sooty Vulcan of Naturalism. He prattles of moss-grown fountains, of alleys of wild strawberries, of rendezvous under the wings of the larks, of moonlight strolls in the bosquets of a château. In every one, without exception, is absent that tone of brutality which we associate with the notion of M. Zola’s genius. All is gentle irony and pastoral sweetness, or else downright pathetic sentiment.

The volume of Nouveaux Contes à Ninon closes with a story which is much longer and considerably more important than the rest. “Les Quatre Journées de Jean Gourdon” deserves to rank among the very best things to which M. Zola has signed his name. It is a study of four typical days in the life of a Provençal peasant of the better sort, told by the man himself. In the first of these it is spring: Jean Gourdon is eighteen years of age, and he steals away from the house of his uncle Lazare, a country priest, that he may meet his coy sweetheart Babet by the waters of the broad Durance. His uncle follows and captures him, but the threatened sermon turns into a benediction, the priestly malediction into an impassioned song to the blossoming springtide. Babet and Jean receive the old man’s blessing on their betrothal.

Next follows a day in summer, five years later; Jean, as a soldier in the Italian war, goes through the horrors of a battle and is wounded, but not dangerously, in the shoulder. Just as he marches into action he receives a letter from Uncle Lazare and Babet, full of tender fears and tremors; he reads it when he recovers consciousness after the battle. Presently he creeps off to help his excellent colonel, and they support one another till both are carried off to hospital. This episode, which has something in common with the “Sevastopol” of Tolstoi, is exceedingly ingenious in its observation of the sentiments of a common man under fire.

The third part of the story occurs fifteen years later. Jean and Babet have now long been married, and Uncle Lazare, in extreme old age, has given up his cure, and lives with them in their farm by the river. All things have prospered with them save one. They are rich, healthy, devoted to one another, respected by all their neighbours; but there is a single happiness lacking—they have no child. And now, in the high autumn splendour—when the corn and the grapes are ripe, and the lovely Durance winds like a riband of white satin through the gold and purple of the landscape—this gift also is to be theirs. A little son is born to them in the midst of the vintage weather, and the old uncle, to whom life has now no further good thing to offer, drops painlessly from life, shaken down like a blown leaf by his access of joy, on the evening of the birthday of the child.

The optimistic tone has hitherto been so consistently preserved, that we must almost resent the tragedy of the fourth day. This is eighteen years later, and Jean is now an elderly man. His son Jacques is in early manhood. In the midst of their felicity, on a winter’s night, the Durance rises in spate, and all are swept away. It is impossible, in a brief sketch, to give an impression of the charm and romantic sweetness of this little masterpiece, a veritable hymn to the Ninon of Provence; but it raises many curious reflections to consider that this exquisitely pathetic pastoral, with all its gracious and tender personages, should have been written by the master of Naturalism, the author of Germinal and of Pot-Bouille.

III.

In 1878, M. Zola, who had long been wishing for a place whither to escape from the roar of Paris, bought a little property on the right bank of the Seine, between Poissy and Meulan, where he built himself the house which he still inhabits, and which he has made so famous. Médan, the village in which this property is placed, is a very quiet hamlet of less than two hundred inhabitants, absolutely unillustrious, save that, according to tradition, Charles the Bold was baptised in the font of its parish church. The river lies before it, with its rich meadows, its poplars, its willow groves; a delicious and somnolent air of peace hangs over it, though so close to Paris. Thither the master’s particular friends and disciples soon began to gather: that enthusiastic Boswell, M. Paul Aléxis; M. Guy de Maupassant, a stalwart oarsman, in his skiff, from Rouen; others, whose names were soon to come prominently forward in connection with that naturalistic school of which M. Zola was the leader.

It was in 1880 that the little hamlet on the Poissy Road awoke to find itself made famous by the publication of a volume which marks an epoch in French literature, and still more in the history of the short story. Les Soirées de Médan was a manifesto by the naturalists, the most definite and the most defiant which had up to that time been made. It consisted of six short stories, several of which were of remarkable excellence, and all of which awakened an amount of discussion almost unprecedented. M. Zola came first with “L’Attaque du Moulin,” of which a translation is here offered to the English public. The next story was “Boule de Suif,” a veritable masterpiece in a new vein, by an entirely new writer, a certain M. Guy de Maupassant, thirty years of age, who had been presented to M. Zola, with warm recommendations, by Gustave Flaubert. The other contributors were M. Henri Céard, who also had as yet published nothing, a man who seems to have greatly impressed all his associates, but who has done little or nothing to justify their hopes. M. Joris Karel Huysmans, older than the rest, and already somewhat distinguished for picturesque, malodorous novels; M. Léon Hennique, a youth from Guadeloupe, who had attracted attention by a very odd and powerful novel, La Dévouée, the story of an inventor who murders his daughter that he may employ her fortune on perfecting his machine; and finally, the faithful Paul Aléxis, a native, like M. Zola himself, of Aix in Provence, and full of the perfervid extravagance of the South. The thread on which the whole book is hung is the supposition that these stories are brought to Médan to be read of an evening to M. Zola, and that he leads off by telling a tale of his own.

Nothing need be said here, however, of the works of those disciples who placed themselves under the flag of Médan, and little of that story in which, with his accustomed bonhomie of a good giant, M. Zola accepted their comradeship and consented to march with them. “The Attack on the Windmill” is here offered to those who have not already met with it in the original, and it is for our readers to estimate its force and truth. Whenever M. Zola writes of war, he writes seriously and well. Like the Julien of his late reminiscences, he has never loved war for its own sake. He has little of the mad and pompous chivalry of the typical Frenchman in his nature. He sees war as the disturber, the annihilator; he recognises in it mainly a destructive, stupid, unintelligible force, set in motion by those in power for the discomfort of ordinary beings, of workers like himself. But in the course of three European wars—those of his childhood, of his youth, of his maturity—he has come to see beneath the surface, and in his latest novel, La Débâcle, he almost agrees with our young Jacobin poets of one hundred years ago, that Slaughter is God’s daughter.