Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer: An Account of His Life & Work

by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

When the monthly "Diner des Auteurs Sifflés" was resumed in March, 1882, the two stock subjects of conversation, says Goncourt, were death and love. And the hypochondriasis from which Zola was suffering, which had declared itself at the time of his mother's death and had recently compelled him to put "La Joie de Vivre" aside, now became painfully manifest. An unreasoning fear of death, and, it would seem, even of suffering pursued him. Somewhat later (in 1885) and apropos of the terrible, lingering death of Jules Vallès, who in the midst of a friendly conversation would suddenly blanch with dread as if he could see death approaching him, Zola said to Goncourt: "Ah! to be struck down suddenly, as Flaubert was, that is the death one should desire."[44] This wish, we know, was ultimately granted. But in 1882, according to Goncourt, Zola, who believed that he had a complaint of the heart, was tortured by the idea of "a sudden and violent death which would fall upon him before he had finished his work." Again, we know that such a fate did ultimately befall him; but Goncourt tells us that, at the period we have now reached, the thought of it haunted him to such a degree that "since the death of his mother, whose coffin it had been necessary to bring down by way of the window (there being only a narrow, winding staircase at Médan, in spite of all its embellishments), he had never since been able to set eyes on that window without wondering who would soon be lowered from it, himself or his wife. 'Yes,' he said, 'since that day the thought of death is always lurking in our minds. We now invariably keep a light burning in our bedroom, and very often, when I look at my wife before she falls asleep, I feel that she is thinking of it even as I am. And we remain like that, a certain feeling of delicacy preventing us from making any allusion to what we are both thinking of. Oh! the thought is terrible! There are nights when I suddenly spring out of bed on both feet, and remain for a moment in a state of indescribable fright.'"[45]

And this, it will be observed, was the leading French novelist of the time, a man in the prime of life, whose name was already known all over the world, who had risen from poverty to affluence, and who, if attacked by some, was also envied by thousands!

A few days after telling his friends how he suffered at the thought of death, Zola gave a diner fin at his Paris residence. There was great display, and Goncourt tells us that the menu included potage au blé vert, reindeers' tongues, mullet à la Provençale, and truffled guineafowl.[46] But Zola was still out of sorts. Success had no charms for him, he said, and, in his estimation, literature was a mere dog's trade. Less than a month afterwards, on April 6, the day when "Pot-Bouille" was published, and when the first orders seemed to indicate a large demand for the book, Goncourt met Zola again and found him as morose as ever. The truth would appear to be that he resented some of the criticisms already levelled at his work. He kept on growling, and finally exclaimed that it was not so necessary to have had actual experience of things as some folk imagined; and as for incessant reading, well, he had not the time for it. "Society?" he added, "why, what does a drawing-room reveal of life? It shows one nothing at all! I have five and twenty men now working at Médan who teach me a hundred times more than any drawing-room would teach me."

Again on April 18, when lunching with Madame Zola at Goncourt's, he was full of spleen, complaining of a score of worries, and notably of some plot, engineered by sundry members of the French Academy, to stop the circulation of "Pot-Bouille." He had now already begun to write the next instalment of the Rougon-Macquarts, that is, "Au Bonheur des Dames," but according to his statements to Goncourt, this story really had no great attraction for him. He dreamt of undertaking some work which he would never be able to finish, he said, something which would give him occupation, and at the same time enable him to retire from the every-day battle without saying so—for instance, some colossal and endless history of French literature. In July that same year—1882—when Goncourt, Daudet, and Charpentier were at Médan, Zola reiterated his dissatisfaction with "Au Bonheur des Dames." His previous success had spoilt his life, he declared; he would never again be able to write a book which would make as much stir as "L'Assommoir" or command such a multitude of readers as "Nana."[47]

Writing to a friend a fortnight previously, he had evinced less pessimism. Indeed, though he referred to "Au Bonheur des Dames" as a tour de force which would end by disgusting people "with the complicated state of French literature," he had expressed himself as being generally satisfied, and as enjoying the solitude in which he found himself at Médan, for it lent him great lucidity of mind. But it is certain that his nerves were overstrained, and that Goncourt's opinion of his condition was accurate; for a little later, in August, he collapsed and had to cease work entirely. His friends were very much alarmed, for his weakness became extreme and a fatal issue seemed possible. But his constitution slowly triumphed over that nervous prostration, and at the end of October, one finds him writing to a friend: "I am a little better. I have been able to get back to work. Nevertheless I am not at all strong. I fancy that something very grave brushed past me but spared me.... How heavy is the pen! For the next two or three years I ought to lead the life of an idiot [i. e. a purely animal life without mental exertion] in order to recover my strength. I have become such a coward that the prospect of having to finish my book terrifies me."[48]

But he compelled himself to resume it, for as is well known he regarded work as the panacea for all evils, physical as well as mental. Thus, by the middle of November, he was able to announce that he had taken up his task again with a sufficiency of courage and intellectual health. It was about this time that M. Charpentier published a volume of his short stories, previously contributed to various periodicals.[49] Moreover "Au Bonheur des Dames" was now appearing serially in the "Gil Blas," which paid twenty thousand francs for the right of publication, or two-thirds of the amount which it had given for "Pot-Bouille." "Au Bonheur des Dames" had naturally necessitated considerable preliminary study and investigation in order that a truthful picture might be presented of the trade of a great city, as exemplified by one of those huge drapery establishments,—the Louvre, the Bon Marché, and the Printemps. Some such leviathan, devouring all the small fry around it and teeming with restless life, was depicted in Zola's pages, which introduced the reader to a world of counter-jumpers beneath whose superficial gloss lay much rank brutishness. And the subject also embraced the hard, the often cruel lot of the girls employed in such places, the ambition and commercial daring of the master, and the ways of all the customers, not forgetting the kleptomaniacs. But though the book was full of interest of a particular kind and deserved the attention of all thinking people, it was perhaps scarcely one to fascinate the great majority of readers. Zola finished it at the end of January, 1883, and in March it was published by M. Charpentier.[50] Most of the newspapers dealt with it sharply; and Schérer, the Protestant critic of "Le Temps," still smarting from the attacks which Zola had made upon the French Protestants, their alleged self-righteousness and narrow bigotry, during his "Figaro" campaign, revengefully described the book as "the attempt of an illiterate individual to lower literature to his own level."[51] The general public did not take very kindly to the work. With "Pot-Bouille" there had at least been a moment when a very large sale had seemed probable, but the demand for "Au Bonheur des Dames" was distinctly moderate, and the wiseacres of the bookselling world opined that Zola, after going up like a rocket, might presently come down like a stick. It is true that the sudden and melodramatic death of Gambetta a short time previously (December 31, 1882) had left the French political world in some confusion; and it is known that the bookselling trade invariably suffers when there is any political unrest. Yet the conditions of the time did not sufficiently explain the drop in the demand for Zola's writings.

Goncourt, who met him a short time after the publication of "Au Bonheur des Dames," found him lugubrious. "The big sales are all over," said he, in much the same tone as a Trappist might have ejaculated the customary greeting, "Brother, one must die." Nevertheless, though he had several excellent subjects in his mind,—books which under favourable circumstances might well have compelled a renewal of public attention,—he deliberately postponed them, and turned to a work which he must have known would appeal to only a small audience, that study of suffering, egotism, and sacrifice which he called satirically "La Joie de Vivre," and which he had put aside in 1881.

After all, in his estimation apparently, it mattered little what book he took in hand, for as he remarked to Goncourt at the Comédie Française on the night of the revival of Victor Hugo's "Le Roi s'amuse" (November 23, 1882), novels were always the same thing over and over again; and it would only be possible to take an interest in the writing of them if one could invent a new form. Personally his great desire was an opportunity to produce a play, one really all his own. In a word he was as stage-struck as ever, and it seemed unlikely that he would feel content until he had given the world an acknowledged dramatic masterpiece. That comparative disregard for the work for which one is best fitted, that craving to excel in something else, and to be praised for it, has appeared in many men, in various degrees and ways. There was Thackeray, who always longed to see his drawings commended; there was Ingres, who courted more applause for his proficiency as a violinist than for his gifts as a painter.

At the opening of the Salon of 1883, Zola lunched with Daudet and Goncourt, and Daudet unbosoming himself, as was often his wont, solicited the advice of his friends as to whether he should offer himself as a candidate for the French Academy. Both Zola and Goncourt urged him to do so, and there was no reason why they should have acted otherwise, for he had many chances in his favour. He occupied a high position as a novelist, and though nowadays no thinking critic can place him in the same rank as Zola, he was at that time far more popular, for if, here and there, he had lampooned one or another individual in his books, he had never given anything like the offence which Zola had given in many directions.