Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer: An Account of His Life & Work. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
amid the foetid stench of that sewer-like stream and the acreous odour of its tanneries; the first visit to the Closerie des Lilas, the disgust inspired there by the sight of all the harlots with their paint, their cracked voices, and their impudent gestures, and then the excursion through the waste lands of Montrouge, the paths and fields of Arcueil and Bourg-la-Reine, to Fontenay-aux-Roses, Sceaux, and the Bois de Verrières. But one need not imagine that this trip was made with such a creature as the callous, shameless, helpless Laurence, for, in recounting the episode elsewhere, Zola expressed himself as follows:
"I thought of my last excursion to Fontenay-aux-Roses with the loved one, the good fairy of my twentieth year. Springtime was budding into birth, the path was bordered by large fields of violets. … She leant on my arm, languishing with love from the sweet odour of the flowers. … Deep silence fell from the heavens, and so faint was the sound of our kisses that not a bird in all the hedges showed sign of fear. … We ascended to the woods of Verrières, and there, in the grass under the soft, fresh foliage, we discovered some tiny violets. … Directly I found a fresh one I carried it to her. She bought it of me, and the price I exacted was a kiss. … And now amid the hubbub of the Paris markets I thought of all those things, of all that happiness. … I remembered my good fairy, now dead and gone, and the little bouquet of dry violets which I still preserve in a drawer. When I returned home I counted their withered stems there were twenty, and over my lips there passed the gentle warmth of my loved one's twenty kisses."[6]
The man who has lived with a Laurence—the creature who robs youth of all its flame and degrades it to the mire—does not afterwards call her his good fairy. But whatever the liaison, whatever its origin and its ending, it was certainly marked by most distressful circumstances. As the winter of 1861 approached, Zola's poverty became terrible. It was then, as he afterwards told Guy de Maupassant,[7] that he lived for days together on a little bread, which, in Provençal fashion, he dipped in oil, that he set himself to catch sparrows from his window, roasting them on a curtain rod; and that he "played the Arab," remaining indoors for a week at a time, draped in a coverlet, because he had no garments to wear. Not only did he himself starve, but the girl who shared his poverty starved with him; and Paul Alexis and Maupassant and "Claude's Confession" relate how, at one moment of desperation, on a bitter winter evening, after an unbroken fast of thirty-six hours, he took off his coat on the Place du Panthéon and bade his tearful companion carry it to the pawnshop.
"It was freezing. I went home at the run, perspiring the while with fear and anguish. Two days later my trousers followed my coat, and I was bare. I wrapped myself in a blanket, covered myself as well as possible, and took such exercise as I could in my room, to prevent my limbs from stiffening. "When anybody came to see me I jumped into bed, pretending that I was indisposed."
Very little money can have been lent him on his few garments. He often used to say in after-life that the only coat he possessed in that year of misery ended by fading from black to a rusty green. Thus, when he went hither and thither soliciting employment, he was very badly received. "I gathered that people thought me too shabby. I was told, too, that my handwriting was very bad; briefly, I was good for nothing. … Good for nothing—that was the answer to my endeavours; good for nothing—unless it were to suffer, to sob, to weep over my youth and my heart. I had grown up dreaming of glory and fortune, I awoke to find myself stranded in the mire."
But it is a long lane that has no turning. At the close of 1861, an eminent medical man, Dr. Boudet of the Academy of Medicine, who had either been connected with the Lycée St. Louis or had acted as one of the examiners when Zola had attempted to secure a bachelor's degree, gave the young man a letter of recommendation to M. Louis Hachette, the founder of the well-known publishing business. Zola called at the firm's offices, but, for the time, he could only obtain a promise of the first suitable vacancy. Meantime, Dr. Boudet, moved by the sight of his pitiable poverty, came to his help in an ingenious manner. On the occasion of a new year the Parisians of the more prosperous classes invariably exchange visiting cards, and the doctor asked Zola to distribute those which he intended for his friends. At the same time the worthy scientist slipped a twenty-franc piece into the young man's hand as remuneration for his trouble. This discreetly veiled charity at least saved Zola from actual starvation during the festive season; but his heart remained heavy, and his feelings were not devoid of envy when he found that several of the doctor's cards were addressed to the prosperous parents of his former school-fellows at St. Louis.
However, a month later, February, 1862, he entered the "Bureau du Matériel" at Hachette's establishment, his salary being fixed at a hundred francs a month, an average of 2s. 8d. per diem;[8] and his duties, during the first few weeks, being confined to packing books for delivery. A little later he was promoted to the advertising department, with a slightly increased salary. He was now at least "assured of daily bread. Naturally painstaking and conscientious, he had done with Bohemia for ever; he had begun life, he was saved."[9]
Yet it was only by force of will that he accustomed himself to a round of comparative drudgery. If Bohemianism implied poverty, it meant liberty also; and, like many of us, Zola found it hard to have to work regularly, at set tasks and set hours. Again, it worried him that he had no opportunity to read all the books that passed through his hands. But necessity compelled obedience to discipline, and he ended by discharging his clerkly duties fairly well, while allowing full rein to his literary bent every evening and every Sunday. He turned, however, from poetry to prose, not, it would seem, because he doubted his poetical faculty, but because after all his sufferings he was impatient for success. Until that success should arrive he felt, rightly enough, that for ten publishers who might be willing to buy a volume of his prose he would not find one inclined to risk money on a volume of his verse. Everything tends to show, indeed, that the dreamer of the belvedere in the Rue St. Étienne du Mont was awaking to full consciousness of the stern and often unjust laws of the modern world, that, enlightened, instructed by his sojourn in Bohemia, he was ripening into a practical man.
In the advertising department of Messrs. Hachette's business the young clerk became acquainted with some of the authors whose works were published by the firm. He only occasionally caught sight of such celebrities as Guizot, Lamartine, Michelet, Littré, and Duruy, the Minister of Public Instruction; but other writers dropped in to inquire what arrangements were being made for launching some forthcoming work, or how the sales of a recent book were progressing, for that also was a matter with which Zola had to deal. Among the men with whom he thus had some intercourse were miscellaneous writers like Francis Wey, travellers like Ferdinand de Lanoye, popular novelists like Amédée Achard, a dozen of whose fifty romances—largely of Dumas' semi-historical pattern—were published by Hachette. Then there was the scholarly Prévost-Paradol, to whom Zola was attracted, for he had been professor of French literature at the faculty of Aix before embracing journalism and becoming a leading exponent of Orleanist doctrines—liberal, though scarcely democratic, views. His chief work, "La France Nouvelle," a classic for all who would study the condition of French society in the middle period of the nineteenth century, was not yet written; but Hachette already issued his "Études sur les Moralistes Français" and his "Essai sur l'Histoire Universelle."
Another visitor, one who called as a reviewer of the provincial press, not as an author, for he published his books elsewhere, was Duranty, a young novelist with an original, strongly marked personal talent, whose first book, "Le Malheur d'Henriette Gérard," had proved fairly successful, but who, in the end, failed to secure public recognition, though Zola became quite an admirer of his work—in a measure, perhaps, because it departed from most of the recognised canons and showed Duranty to be a man who, appreciated or not, followed his own bent and disdained to copy others.
But one of Hachette's leading authors at that time was Edmond About, the "nephew of Voltaire," who a few months before Zola was engaged by the firm had given it his vivid "Lettres d'un bon jeune homme," written au pas de charge, to the music, as it were, of a flourish of trumpets. Then, in 1862, in Zola's time, Hachette published About's