With Zola in England: A Story of Exile

by Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

It was M. Zola himself who, after some stay at Oatlands, discovered, in the course of his excursions with M. Desmoulin, a retreat to his liking. It was a house in that part of Surrey belonging to a city merchant, who was willing to let it furnished for a limited period. The owner met M. Zola on various occasions and showed himself both courteous and discreet.

The details of the 'letting' were arranged between him and Mr. Wareham; and my wife hastily procured servants for the new establishment. These servants, however, did not speak French, and I settled with M. Zola that my eldest daughter, Violette, should stay with him to act in some measure as his housekeeper and interpreter. This was thrusting a young girl, not quite sixteen, into a position of considerable responsibility, but I thought that Violette would be equal to the task, provided she followed the instructions and advice of her mother; and as she was then at home for the summer holidays she was sent down to M. Zola's without more ado.

I shall have occasion to speak of her hereafter in some detail, in connection with a very curious incident which marked M. Zola's exile. Here I will merely mention that a Parisienne by birth and speaking French from her infancy, it was easy for her to understand and explain the master's requirements.

Like M. Zola, she was provided with a bicycle, and the pair of them occasionally spent an afternoon speeding along leafy Surrey lanes and visiting quaint old villages. The mornings, however, were devoted to work, for it was now that M. Zola started on his novel, 'Fecondite,' the first of a series of four volumes, which will be, he considers, his literary testament.

These books, indeed, are to embody what he regards as the four cardinal principles of human life. First Fruitfulness, as opposed to neo-Malthusianism, which he holds to be the most pernicious of all doctrines; next Work, as opposed to the idleness of the drones, whom he would sweep away from the human community; then Truth, as opposed to falsehood, hypocrisy, and convention; and, finally, Justice to one and all, in lieu of charity to some, oppression to others, and favours for the privileged few.

All four books—'Fruitfulness,' 'Work,' 'Truth,' and 'Justice'—are to be stories; for years ago M. Zola arrived at the conclusion that mere essays on sociology, though they may work good in time among people of culture, fail to reach and impress the masses in the same way as a story may do. It is, I take it, largely on this account that Emile Zola has become a novelist. He has certainly written essays, but he knows how inconsiderable have been their sales in comparison with those of his works embodying precisely the same principles, but placed before the world in the form of novels. To criticise him as a mere story-teller is arrant absurdity.

He himself put the whole case in a nutshell when he remarked, 'My novels have always been written with a higher aim than merely to amuse. I have so high an opinion of the novel as a means of expression that I have chosen it as the form in which to present to the world what I wish to say on the social, scientific, and psychological problems that occupy the minds of thinking men. I might have said what I wanted to say to the world in another form. But the novel has to-day risen from the place which it held in the last century at the banquet of letters. It was then the idle pastime of the hour, and sat low down between the fable and the idyll. To-day it contains, or may be made to contain, everything; and it is because that is my creed that I am a novelist. I have, to my thinking, certain contributions to make to the thought of the world on certain subjects, and I have chosen the novel as the best means of communicating these contributions to the world.'

If critics in reviewing one or another of M. Zola's books would only bear these declarations of the author in mind, the reading public would often be spared many irrelevant and foolish remarks.

M. Zola's device is Nulla dies sine linea, and even before the materials for 'Fecondite' were brought to him from France he had given an hour or two each day to the penning of notes and impressions for subsequent use. With the arrival of his books and memoranda, work began in a more systematic way. At half-past eight every morning he partook of a cup of coffee and a roll and butter, no more, and shortly after nine he was at his table in a small room overlooking the garden of the house he had rented. And there he remained regularly, hard at work, until the luncheon hour, covering sheet after sheet of quarto paper with serried lines of his firm, characteristic handwriting.

M. Zola has retained possession of the MSS. of almost every work written by him, and I know that these MSS. often differ largely from the books actually given to the world. The 'copy' is not only extremely clear, but remarkably free from erasures and interpolations. But when his first proofs reach him M. Zola revises them with the greatest care. He will strike out whole passages in the most drastic manner, and alter others until they are almost unrecognisable.