Complete Works of Emile Zola (1871 page)

With a weak Government in office, one with a policy of drift, everything may become possible; but, so long as foresight and vigilance are shown, the Republic remains impregnable. If military malcontents become obstreperous it is only necessary to treat them as General Boulanger was treated.

I recollect hearing M. Yves Guyot, who was a member of the Cabinet which put down ‘the brave general on the black horse,’ and who was also one of the few French friends who visited M. Zola during his exile, give a brief account of some of the decisive steps which were taken to stop the Boulangist agitation. The Prefect of Police of that time was summoned to the Ministry of the Interior, where two or three members of the Government awaited his arrival. Amongst other orders given him was one (if I remember rightly) for the dissolution of M. Deroulede’s ‘League of Patriots,’ which then, as more recently, was at the bottom of much of the agitation.

The Prefect hesitated; he was afraid to execute his orders. ‘Very well, then,’ said M. Constans, M. Guyot, and others, ‘you may regard your resignation as accepted; you are not the man for the situation; if you are afraid, there are plenty who are not; and we shall immediately replace you.’

The threat of the loss of office wrought an immediate change in the Prefect. He became as brave as he had been timorous, and with all due energy he proceeded to carry out his instructions. Boulangism was crushed and held up to public opprobrium and ridicule; and but for the culpable weakness and connivance of M. Felix Faure and his favourite Prime Minister, M. Meline, it would never have revived in its varied forms of anti-Semitism, anti-Dreyfusism, etc.

French functionaries, those of the Civil Service, are, as a rule, a docile set; but every now and again a Government finding some laxity among prefects and sub-prefects makes a few examples. Three or four prefects of departments are transferred in disgrace to less important towns; two or three are cashiered, and the same method is followed with some of the sub-prefects. Thereupon, all the others, prefects and ‘subs,’ throughout the eighty and odd departments of France, hasten to show themselves vigilant and, if need be, energetic. Taking one consideration with another, this system of frightening the prefects into obedience and vigilance has, so far as the maintenance of public order is concerned, answered admirably well whenever it has been applied during the last fifty years. It has undoubtedly been adopted at times for the furtherance of purely despotic or arbitrary aims; but if ever it was justified such was the case during the Dreyfus agitation. If the Government had not connived, for purposes of its own, at the proceedings of what the French call the ‘militarist’ party, there would have been no turmoil at all.

But those in power desired to shield culprits of high rank and to defend the effete organisation of the French War-office. And those who thus misused the power they held, who sacrificed the national interests, who trampled truth and justice under foot, and rendered their country an object of amazement, distrust, and ridicule throughout the length and breadth of Europe (Russia not excepted) will be censured and condemned in no uncertain voice by the France of to-morrow.

But I am forgetting the prefects and sub-prefects. I mentioned them partly because M. Zola himself might have been one of them. It is not generally known, I believe, that at the time of the Franco-German war he in some degree assisted one of the sub-prefects in the discharge of his duties, and (had he only so chosen) might even have become a sub-prefect himself. He had been an opposition, a Republican journalist, before the fall of the Empire, and M. Gambetta, during his virtual dictatorship throughout the latter part of the Franco-German war, was very fond of appointing journalists of that description to office, both in the army and the Civil Service. M. Zola, then, might have become a sub-prefect to begin with; and, later, a full-blown prefect. Picture him in a cocked hat and a uniform bedizened with gold lace, and with a slender sword dangling by his side. That, at all events, was how sub-prefects and prefects used to array themselves when ‘in the exercise of their functions.’

I doubt of M. Zola would ever have made a good functionary. His character is too independent, and in all likelihood he would have resigned the very first time that he happened to have ‘a few words’ with his Minister. But politics having caught him in their grasp he would doubtless (like the few functionaries of independent views who throw up their posts in France) have next come forward as a candidate for the Chamber or the Senate. And then — why not? He might have been an Under-Secretary of State, later a Minister, and finally President of the Republic. True, as he himself knows, and readily admits, he is no orator; but then orators are not always the men who get on in France. Thiers was a ready and fluent speaker, but MacMahon could scarcely say (or learn by heart) twenty consecutive words. Grevy, it is true, could be long-winded, prosy, and didactic; but the powers of elocution which Carnot and Felix Faure possessed were infinitesimal. And so the idea of Emile Zola, President of the Republic, may not be so far-fetched after all, particularly when one remembers Zola’s great powers of observation, analysis, and foresight.

Had he taken to politics in his younger days he would at least have made his mark in the career thus chosen. And it may be that, in some respects, French public life might then have been healthier than it has proved during the last quarter of a century. Perchance, too, on the other hand, many old maids and young persons, not to mention ecclesiastics and vigilance societies, would have been spared manifold pious ejaculations and gasps of horror. Again, my poor father — imprisoned, ruined, and hounded to his death — might still have been alive.

Unless some other courageous man had arisen to tear the veil away from before human life, such as it is in so-called civilised communities, and show society its own self in all its rottenness, foulness, and hypocrisy — so that on more than one occasion, shrinking guiltily from its own image, it has denounced the plain unvarnished truth as libel — there would have been no ‘Nana’ and no ‘Pot Bouille,’ no ‘Assommoir,’ and no ‘Germinal.’ And no ‘La Terre.’ ‘La Debacle,’ and ‘Lourdes,’ and ‘Rome,’ ‘Paris,’ and ‘Fecondite,’ and all the other books that have flowed from Emile Zola’s busy pen would have remained unwritten. But for my own part I would rather that the world should possess those books than that Zola when tempted, as he was, should have cast literature aside to plunge into the abominable and degrading vortex of politics.

Like all men of intellect he certainly has his views on important political questions, and again and again he has enunciated them in the face of fierce opposition. In the Dreyfus case, however, he has been no politician, but simply the indignant champion of an innocent man. And his task over, truth and justice vindicated, he asks no reward, no office; he simply desires to take up his pen once more and revert to his life work: — The delineation and exposure of the crimes, follies, and short-comings of society as now constituted, in order that those who
are
in politics, who control human affairs, may, in full knowledge of existing evils, do their utmost to remedy them and prepare the way for a better and a happier world.

XIV

‘WAITING FOR THE VERDICT’

I can still see before me the sitting-room on the second floor of the Queen’s Hotel, in which M. Zola spent so much of his time and wrote so many pages of ‘Fecondite’ during the last six months or so of his exile. A spacious room it was, if a rather low one, with three windows overlooking the road which passes the hotel.

A very large looking-glass in a gilt frame surmounted the mantelpiece, on which stood two or three little blue vases. Paper of a light colour and a large flowing arabesque pattern with a broad frieze covered the walls. There was not a single picture of any kind in the room, neither steel engraving, nor lithograph, nor chromo; and remembering what pictures usually are, even in the best of hotels, it was perhaps just as well that there should have been none in that room at the Queen’s. Yet during the many hours I spent there the bareness of the walls often worried me.

Against the one that faced the fireplace stood a small sideboard. Then on another side was a sofa, and here and there were half a dozen chairs. The room was rich in tables, it counted no fewer than five. On a folding card-table in one corner M. Zola’s stock of letter and ‘copy’ paper, his weighing scales for letters, his envelopes, pens, and pencils, were duly set out. Then in front of the central window was the table at which he worked every morning. It was of mahogany, little more than three feet long and barely two feet wide. Whenever he raised his eyes from his writing, he could see the road below him, and the houses across the way. On a similar table at another of the windows he usually kept such books and reviews as reached him from France.

In the centre of the room, under the electric lights — which, however, were only fitted towards the end of M. Zola’s sojourn at the hotel, so that throughout the winter a paraffin lamp supplied the necessary illumination — stood the table at which one lunched and dined. It was round and would just accommodate four persons. Finally, beside M. Zola’s favourite arm-chair, near the fireplace, was a little gipsy table, on which he usually kept the day’s newspapers, and perchance the volume he was reading at the time.

A doorway on the same side as the fireplace gave ingress to the bedchamber, which was smaller than the sitting-room, and adequately, but by no means luxuriously furnished.

On the little writing-table near the middle window were first a small inkstand belonging to the hotel, then a few paper-weights covering memoranda jotted down on little square pieces of paper, about three inches long either way, together with an old yellowish newspaper which did duty as a blotting pad; and a pen with a ‘j’ nib and a very heavy ivory handle, so heavy, indeed, that though the master often offered it to me I could never write with it. With this pen, however, he himself did all his work. That work he generally cleared away before lunch, and locked up in his bedroom wardrobe, so that by the time a visitor arrived there was never any litter in the sitting-room.

The road, viewed from the writing-table window, was at times fairly lively. Nursemaids and children, bicyclists and others passed constantly to and fro. Stylish carriages also rolled by during the afternoon, and at intervals a little green omnibus went its way at a slow jog-trot. The detached villa residences on the other side of the road were, however, singularly lifeless. One day M. Zola remarked to me: ‘I have never seen a soul in those houses during all the months I have been here. They are occupied certainly, for the window blinds are pulled up every morning and lowered every evening, but I can never detect who does this; and I have never seen anybody leave the houses or enter them.’

At last one afternoon he told me that one of these villas had woke up, for on the previous day he had espied a lady in the garden watering some flowers.

Rather lower down the road there was a livelier house, one which had a balconied window, which was almost invariably open, and here servants and children were often to be seen. ‘That,’ said M. Zola, ‘is the one little corner of life and gaiety, amidst all the other silence and lack of life. Whenever I feel dull or worried I look over there.’

As a rule the Queen’s Hotel itself is, as I have already mentioned, a very quiet place; but now and again a wedding breakfast was given there. Broughams and landaus would then roll over the gravel sweep, and M. Zola and I would at times lean out of the windows and exchange opinions with respect to the bridal pair and the guests. What surprised and amused him, on one occasion when a wedding party came to the hotel, was to notice that all the coachmen of the carriages wore yellow flowers and favours; for in France yellow is not only associated with jealousy, but also with conjugal faithlessness.

‘If those flowers ware to be taken as an omen,’ said M. Zola to me, ‘that happy pair will soon be in the Divorce Court.’

During the latter part of his stay at Norwood, when the door between his bedroom and sitting-room remained open, one could see on a chest of drawers in the former apartment a pair of life-size porcelain cats, coloured a purplish maroon, with sparkling yellow glass eyes, and an abundance of fantastic yellow spots. These cats had been bought by him as a souvenir of England and English art, for he was much struck by their oddity. He had been offered others — for instance, white ones with little coloured landscapes printed all over their backs and sides — surely as idiotic an embellishment as any insane potter could devise — but although these had sorely tempted him he had finally decided in favour of the maroon and yellow abominations.

A little girl of mine, who found herself face to face with these cats one day in his room, was quite startled by them, and has since expressed the opinion that Sir John Tenniel ought to have seen them before he drew the Cheshire cat for ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ For my own part I can imagine the laughter and the jeers of M. Zola’s artistic friends when those choice specimens of British art are shown to them in Paris.

At intervals during his long sojourn at the Queen’s Hotel M. Zola received a few brief visits from French friends, chiefly literary men and politicians, whose names need not be mentioned, but who have identified themselves with the cause of Revision. At times these gentlemen found themselves in London on other matters, and profited by the opportunity to run down to Norwood. On other occasions they made the journey from France for the especial purpose of quieting M. Zola’s impatience, and telling him that he must not yet think of returning home. Again, M. Fasquelle, the French publisher, came over four or five times, now on business and now in a friendly way.

I think that during the seven or eight months that M. Zola stayed at the
Queen’s Hotel, he received altogether some ten visits from compatriots,
which visits were often of only an hour or two’s duration. Thus, Mme.
Zola having returned to France, he was frequently very much alone.

During the last months of his exile my wife fell seriously ill, and I could not then go so often to Norwood. Afterwards ague caught me in its grip, and my visits ceased for two or three successive weeks. All I could do in an emergency was to place my eldest daughter or my son at M. Zola’s disposal.